Indigenous Music

...She became a convert to nonviolence, wholly agreeing with King on that route...

...Accordingly, the resultant textures are sharper and clearer...

...It was almost all surface-skimming, and even the most adroit surfer gets boring after a while...

...Recorded between 1961 and 1963, when Joan had not only caught but illuminated the imagination of several generations simultaneously, the set has two duets with Pete Seeger and a couple of Baez's affectionately wicked rock-'n'-roll parodies...

...Baez had done a lot of studying and listening and reading and searching...

...But when Baez, who had gone to North Vietnam during the war and had been bombed by her country's Air Force, pointed an outraged finger at the revolutionary postwar "re-education camps" there, that was too much...

...Since she couldn't be drafted, she got herself arrested twice for helping block induction centers...

...Baez also said she would not sing with anyone else in her portion of the program...

...Martin-in-the-Fields, with Neville Marriner conducting (Philips 6514 114...

...Most of the time, her sound on the phone is one of amusement because, like A.J...

...Until recently, it was her musicianship that made her performances distinctive: Her ear, her time, her seeming inability to hit even a fractionally wrong note...

...Muste, I asked Joan the most difficult questions I could think of about soul-force...

...The Biograph label, by the way, specializes in rare sonic finds of the past...

...It's a swift way to get a natural high...

...The maturation can be heard on The Best Is Yet to Come (Pablo Today 2312-138), which features personal probes of such nonpareils as "God Bless the Child," "Good-Bye," and "Deep Purple...

...No credit, alas, has been given the recording engineer for Handel's 6 Concerti Grossi, Op...

...In the past couple of years, however, Ella Fitzgerald is actually getting inside the lyrics, sounding as if she were connecting them with her own memories and desires...

...Missing, however, was any real story-telling—any compelling reflections on the human condition in the traditions, say, of Billie Holiday or Lee Wiley...

...Bach always swings, but in this set, he moves to an even more lithe and lively beat...

...The same right, Joan answered, we have to help anyone anywhere who is a prisoner of conscience...

...So she decided to sing...

...Ultimately, Baez will succeed because that penetrating voice, deeper now, has lost none of its evocative power...

...In 1960, the year after she became a soaring phenomenon to the young because of her startling debut at the Newport Folk Festival, I brought Joan Baez to a CBS producer who had an ear as well as an eye...

...Glowering, Herridge left the studio, went into the control room, and turned on me: "The bitch is only nineteen years old and she thinks she's Thomas Mann...

...U Choice Cuts Although they have been slighted in the jazz histories, the Boswell Sisters were one of the more intriguing jazz-colored vocal groups of the 1930s...

...What right—after what our country did to those people...

...And then she decided that the person she most wanted to sing like was Connee Boswell...

...There was also time—for she has always subordinated her professional singing career to more compelling pro bono demands—to sing and demonstrate for civil rights...

...In addition, Very Early Joan (VSD 79446/7) includes "Lady Gay," "Streets of Laredo," and "Pilgrim of Sorrow"—the latter being one of Joan's a cappella flights in which so strong and hugely seizing a voice amazingly comes from so slight a body...

...20&12, all the more so in a characteristically authoritative, deeply ardent performance by Rudolf Serkin with Claudio Abbado conducting the London Symphony (Deutsche Gram-mophon 2532 053...

...3, as interpreted by the Academy of St...

...None of them phased her...

...Ella herself has come into a remarkable new stage in her long recording career...

...The music is played on Eighteenth Century instruments and instead of the modern custom of alternating the vocal parts between chorus and soloists, the soloists alone have the entire responsibility for the buoyantly demanding vocal music...

...Tempos shifted suddenly but unerringly, lyrical idylls exploded into swift and hot scat singing, and occasionally a solo voice, sounding very much like a jazz horn, would dance its way out of the ensemble...

...I hear from Baez on occasion, usually about the political infighting among the various fishers for souls in human-rights organizations...

...In the early 1970s, she outraged many of our indigenous revolutionaries by saying, "Tolstoy was right: 'The difference between establishment violence and revolutionary violence is the difference between dog shit and chicken shit.'" She kept on making enemies later in the decade among those who had grown up listening to her sing "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" as she called for human rights in, of all places, Vietnam...

...King, pleased that one of the fruits of the civil-rights revolution had been the emergence of black-owned banks, was telling her one day that "the black keys and the white keys on the piano are out of tune...

...Boswell Sisters, Volume 2 (Biograph BLP-C-16, Biograph Records, P.O...

...Originally from New Orleans, Connee, Martha, and Helvetia Boswell focused primarily on harmony-singing, but Connee's arrangements were exceptionally resourceful...

...Joshua Rifkin directs the Bach Ensemble...

...Muste, she has never learned to take herself as seriously as she takes her work in the wide, violent world...

...Since all the rest of her technical skills are intact, the result is the late-blooming ascension of a full-scale jazz singer...

...This crisply scored music—variously high-spirited, stately, contemplative, but always wondrously precise—has never sounded so fresh, so alive, as on this album...

...Ella Fitzgerald tells of how, just before going on stage at a Harlem Opera House amateur contest in 1934, she was so nervous she knew she just would not be able to dance...

...We have to get them in tune, and having black banks is one way...

...In the 1960s, Baez spent more and more of her passion, and her not inconsiderable wit, singing and speaking for tax and draft resistance...

...If your living arrangements allow, I'd suggest the volume be just about all the way up for this album...

...In recent years, her singing career has faltered, though she tries to regenerate it from time to time...

...The Boswell Sisters are not thought upon much these days, even though they were popular and influential during the 1930s...

...She told him that she alone would select the songs she would sing, and she would have veto power over what sets were thrown up behind her...

...What right, Baez was lectured, do Americans have to criticize the government of Vietnam for anything...

...Meanwhile, Vanguard has released an unexpected two-volume set of Baez recordings that have never been issued before...

...Baez shook her head, and said to the King, "But if the whole damn orchestra is shot, what good are black banks...

...The same edge can be said, with regard to the resonant clarity and clean-edged definition of all the elements in the performance, of a remarkable new release of Bach's Mass in B Minor (Nonesuch 70936-IX...

...Nobody minded her calling passionate attention to what was happening in Chile and Argentina...

...Joan was as smilingly intractable with Martin Luther King Jr...

...It was not a facile devotion...

...But he did what Joan asked because once Herridge had heard that soprano—so clear and so luminously sensuous that it reminded him and everyone else of their first loves—he could not let her go...

...The songs are standards—"It Don't Mean a Thing," "42nd Street," "If I Had a Million Dollars"—but no other singing group ever roamed inside them with quite the verve and grace of the Boswell team...

...A catalogue costs $1.25...

...Box 109, Canaan, NY 12029) reveals how undated these deft, witty, and sometimes quite affecting performances are...

...as with everyone else...

...Credit ought to be given Klaus Hiemann, too...

...Over a long interview once, after I had done my own research into the minefields of nonviolence while writing a biography of A.J...

...Bob Herridge justly prided himself on having more integrity than anyone even thought of having in television, but Baez was more than his match...

...She's still busy around the world as head of the Humanitas International Human Rights Committee, which causes nonviolent trouble whenever it can for those exercising illegitimate power...

...Nonpareil in another tradition are Mozart's Piano Concertos Nos...

...No, he's not a member of the orchestra: Hiemann was the recording engineer, and the session is a classic illustration of how to mike and balance a soloist and orchestra...