Jimmy Scott, who got his start singing with Lionel Hampton’s band in the 1940s and 1950s, may be the only countertenor in the history of vocal jazz. After Scott’s initial success with Hampton, his career was hamstrung for decades, the casualty of legal wrangling over album releases. What a sorry loss for jazz listeners. Eden River Records and producer Ralf Kemper go a long way to remedy this loss with I Go Back Home—A Story about Hoping and Dreaming, Scott’s final album, recorded in 2009, five years before Scott’s death in 2014 at age 88. View post to read more.
In her book Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture (Duke University Press), author Allison McCracken posits that white male singers in the Jazz Age turned the social order of the day on its head by covertly challenging the existing hyper-masculine norms of guy behavior. Male crooners wouldn’t have been a problem were they just a passing phase in American popular culture. But the rapid rise of home radios from 1920 onward allowed for private listening to these seductive male voices—and women loved them. To distraction. Hence the problem. View post to read more.
Bebop pianist Horace Silver first released “Peace” on his 1959 record for Blue Note, Blowin’ the Blues Away. The message of the tune holds relevance for all times, but perhaps especially so when social conflict fills the headlines. View post to read more.
Most of the tunes on singer-pianist Amina Claudine Myers’ latest release, Sama Rou (Amina C Records), are African-American spirituals that Myers’ arranged. The spirituals are uplifting, with their drawn-out tempos, a cappella sections, and heavenly invocations. But the truly transporting moments on the disc are in Myers’ original composition, “Intro: Crossings Part I, II & III.” View post to read more.
With Harlem on My Mind (Jazz Village/Harmonia Mundi) vocalist Catherine Russell has produced a sleek, winning album that exalts the works of composers like Clarence Williams, Ray Noble, and Fats Waller—tunes from the “blue heart of the great African American songbook,” the back cover says. These early jazz tunes never sounded better. View post to read more.
Jen Shyu ranked second in the Rising Female Vocalist category of the Downbeat Critics Poll this year, and her 2015 release, Sounds and Cries of the World (Pi), placed thirteenth in the Beyond Album category. Downbeat’s “Beyond” categories are reserved for artists whose work owes a musical debt to jazz or blues but that doesn’t fit neatly into either of these buckets. To be sure, any bucket big enough to hold Shyu’s work would have to be very big indeed. View post to read more.
When UK singer Julie Tippetts first became involved with the experimental music movement in the 1970s, she had something of an epiphany. "I realized that you're allowed to do whatever you want" in music, she explained. Post epiphany, Tippetts went on to make a name for herself in the avant garde jazz world, most recently with like-minded composer/multi-instrumentalist Martin Archer. The duo has released several recordings of their abstract, intuitively composed pieces, but they’d never performed any of their recorded work live until FIMAV invited them to. View post to read more.
Women don't receive the NEA Jazz Masters Award very often. But when a woman does win, she is most likely a singer. Singers both male and female are pretty well represented in the Awards: More than 10% of all award-winners have been vocal artists. Do what you will with these numbers, but the story they tell isn’t a bad one for singers. (It’s another matter for female instrumentalists, however.) View post to read more.
NYC-based Harbinger Records specializes in recording artists who interpret the Songbook, though typically their singers have tended to be Broadway stars rather than jazz stylists. In 1985, co-founders Ken Bloom and Bill Rudman saw an opportunity in the release of the Francis Ford Coppola film, The Cotton Club, and set out to make a recording with Maxine Sullivan, one of the few remaining Cotton Club singers still actively performing at the time. The result, Maxine Sullivan: Great Songs from the Cotton Club, now stands as a historical record of one of the most influential singers from the formative years of jazz history. View post to read more.
On May 11-16, 1976, sax player Stan Getz and singer/guitarist João Gilberto met up to play at a then-new jazz club in San Francisco, Keystone Korner, continuing the brilliant confabulation they’d begun on their seminal Brazilian jazz recording, Getz/Gilberto (Verve). In February of this year, Resonance Records launched the live recording from that week of performances— Getz/Gilberto ’76, a stunning snapshot of several exceptional musicians at the peak of their careers. View post to read more.
Even though vocal jazz standards derive from the U.S. musical theater tradition of the early 20th century, very few stage musicals have featured a score for jazz singers. Two recent jazz musicals, both conceived and written by prominent jazz instrumentalists, chart fresh territory in this regard. View post to read more.
Musical ideas travel across global cultures these days as quickly as fire. Through any number of tech-dependent cultural exchanges, a musician can share an idea within seconds of its conception. Of all musicians, though, singers alone face a hurdle that limits their ability to participate in this rapid-fire sharing across cultures: barring singers who rely solely on vocal improvisation, all singers must make themselves understood verbally. Thus jazz singers are often limited by the languages they speak—or more accurately, by the ones they don’t. View post to read more.
