Lending Substance to Sound
COOK, BRUCE
On Music LENDING SUBSTANCE TO SOUND BY BRUCE COOK Back when I was growing up, things were different—kids wanted to be adults. And listening to music gave you a view into the adult mating game. It...
...When it was happy, it presented a wry smile to the world, as if aware that tomorrow might bring a turn for the worse...
...These days it is fashionable to put Lena Horne down...
...Perhaps three or four more are scattered throughout the rest of the country...
...So that's what it's all about...
...Beautifully paced, it alternates mood and tempo with such ease that the first cut, Legrand's own "I Will Wait for You," seems to flow right into "Loneliness, the last...
...A kind of information, or at least an attitude, can be imparted by notes and chords, by melodic inventions and harmonic settings, and those easy, jazz-based songs managed to express a feeling about life...
...Three of the songs are her own...
...As sometimes happens, all the best numbers are on a single side...
...That experience is reflected in the tough title of her LP, Who is This Bitch, Anyway...
...You Know Who You Are," evidently expected to get us up and marching around the phonograph, is so overproduced, with a full chorus and a hammering gospel piano, that you can't really tell what the tune is like or what McRae originally intended to do with it...
...Maybe the reason we don't hear sophisticated pop much any more is simply that such spots have become economically obsolete...
...The lyrics weren't the only important thing...
...No contemporary performer has sung so well for so long, and if anything, she sounds better now than when she first appeared in 1941 on an RCA album, with Henry Levine and the Chamber Society of Lower Basin Street...
...And where are the performers...
...If her latest LP, I Am Music (Blue Note BN-LA462-G), is far from her best work, it is very listenable nonetheless...
...is a happy collaboration between singer and songwriter...
...The nicest, certainly the most moving, cut on the album?Who Gave You Permission,' from the television film The Queen of the Stardust Ballroom—is done as a recitative, and it demonstrates what we should have recognized a while ago: that Carmen McRae is, besides everything else, a fine actress...
...Billy Taylor was impossibly urbane...
...Over the years, she has maintained her following—and may even have built it up a little—by diligently searching out the best of the new songs that suit her distinctive, often ironic voice...
...Her manner bespeaks at least a decade of experience hard-won in those rooms supposed to provide a "showcase" for emerging stars...
...The club singers, jazz trios, pianists, and guitarists who seemed to have such poise, such certainty, such a sure sense of who they were and what they were about, the ones who lent substance to the sound...
...It is an LP that improves with repeated listenings...
...On the other hand, this suggests an environmental theory of art I'm not fully prepared to accept...
...There are a couple left in New York, and one that I know of in Los Angeles...
...One can perceive all this now, at a distance of a few decades, because the songs that have supplanted the old numbers have so little of those qualities...
...I Ain't Here,' for example, is the sort of broad comedy song Pearl Bailey does all too often...
...The other numbers are about the old mating game again...
...It shows—as do the records by Carmen McRae and Lena Home —that some people are still making music for adults...
...It taught you the rules, provided a vague idea of the glorious prizes offered, and even a little advice on how to win...
...McRae has a strong style that, once heard, is never forgotten, a style that can be parodied but never actually copied...
...Then, as you got older and a bit more sophisticated, you might gravitate to the lyrics of Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart, thinking, "Ah-hah...
...Jackie Cain and Roy Kral, husband and wife, were living proof that even marriage could be hip...
...Along the way, you hear several top-flight selections, including "I Got a Name,' sung funky and with feeling, and a bizarre Hal David conceit, "Let Me Be Your Mirror...
...The music might be sad, yet it was never desperate...
...Through a natural progression, you graduated from Cole Porter to F. Scott Fitzgerald...
...Of course, the performers and the places it was played in had a lot to do with the music's effect...
...His "Davy," written to a kid brother, has been performed by others, but no one gets the poignancy into it, the sister-sweetness, that Shaw does here...
...McRae strikes a kind of bargain on it between what she alone can do and what everyone else is doing these days...
...Jeri Southern was the girl who warmly whispered all the things any man would want a woman to whisper...
...She is, I imagine, paying the price for all those years as MGM's token Negro...
...Lena and Michel may not be her best recording in recent years (it is topped, I think, by the one she did with Hungarian jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo), but it is worth listening to, and worth owning...
...Lena horne has been an actress for so long we may tend to forget that she is first, foremost and best of all, a singer...
...Like Carmen McRae...
...That wasn't what it was all about, but the words suggested something real—enough, anyway, to encourage further research in novels...
...For instance, you could learn a great deal about basics from the blues...
...She sounds almost weary with worldly wisdom, yet, through her delicate turning of a phrase or her skill at sustaining a note at pianissimo, she reveals a capacity for pleasure in small things...
...Shaw's voice has a subtlety, intensity and emotional range that are indisputably arresting, but these attributes wouldn't be there if they weren't in the songs as well...
...Some lovely reminders of that talent are provided on Lena and Michel (RCA BGL1-1026), her latest album-produced, arranged and conducted by the French composer Michel Legrand...
...In a sense, therefore, this record is a debut for her, and it is an auspicious one...
...Most of the material has been chosen with her usual care, although one or two of the numbers don't quite fit her and may have been thrust upon the singer to fill out the record...
...Who Is This Bitch, Anyway...
...After all, if they were to go on singing the same material, as Bobby Short and some others do, they would run the risk of becoming museum pieces, knickknacks—or worse, dropping out of sight completely...
...The small, quiet clubs where you went to listen and not to talk have practically disappeared...
...Yet what her detractors ignore is her sheer ability...
...It isn't her first, though it might just as well be, since there are probably less than a dozen people in the world who remember the one named, if I'm not mistaken, Woman of the Ghetto, on a label now defunct...
...This is an excellent collection, marred only occasionally by overproduction...
...Many of the old entertainers are still around, and they have adopted various strategems in their efforts to keep up and stay in style...
...most of the rest are by Bernard Ighner, a Los Angeles trumpet player, arranger and general man-about-music who has been doing some outstanding composing lately...
...For the most part, however, everything is kept simple—just a performer and her music, some wispy strings, electronic punctuation here and there, and that quality of dramatic, direct communication at which McRae excels...
...Frank D'Rone projected the kind of quick wit and ready charm we all aspired to...
...So they make their meek adjustments...
...It's all over before you realize it, but turn the record over and you'll find things to like on that side, too...
...It had grace, style and dignity...
...Blue Note BN-LA 397-G...
...Then there's Marlena Shaw...
...With her sensuous voice, she is a new and unmistakably genuine talent, and she has chosen her material with a true notion of quality, mood and suitability...
Vol. 58 • September 1954 • No. 17
