At 12:36 PM -0400 4/30/07, Andrew Stiller wrote:
On Apr 30, 2007, at 6:19 AM, dhbailey wrote:
Darcy James Argue wrote:
I compared the Frank Sinatra and Keith Jarrett recordings of "In
The Wee Small Hours of the Morning." I admit that I was stunned
at how closely Keith's phrasing of the melody resembled Frank's
-- I don't think most people would ever think of Frank Sinatra
as an influence on Keith Jarrett.
That's an interesting statement -- I would think just the
opposite: That there would be very few jazz musicians of the
later half of the 20th century who *weren't* influenced by
Sinatra.
Heh, heh, now we're into interesting territory. I have heard many
jazz musicians (particularly black American jazz musicians)
criticise a phrasing of a melody by saying it was too "Frank
Sinatra." I suppose avoiding sounding like something is being
influenced by it, so you may be very right.
To me, Frank Sinatra was not a jazz musician at all: he was a
tin-pan-alley crooner, one of the last of them. It's true that
people used to use "jazz" to refer to any type of modern American
popular music--but that hasn't been the case for fifty or more years
now!
Andrew's point is a good one. "Jazz" itself lacks a rigorous
definition aside from, "I know it when I hear it"!
Is it a STYLE, or is it a PRACTICE. Does a vocalist have to do scat
to qualify as a jazz vocalist? Is a big band chart in perfect jazz
style but with no provision for improv solos a "real" jazz chart?
I'm asking, not arguing. But just to be clear, to me it is a style.
I got quite a shock when, at the end of one semester (when we still
had an active and growing instrumental and vocal jazz program that
subsequently disappeared overnight in a round of budget cuts), I
asked our vocal jazz person to speak to my Choral Lit class about the
history of vocal jazz in America. Wow! She not only invoked
everyone from Sinatra and Bing Crosby and the Mills Brothers and
Andrews Sisters as "jazz" vocalists, but also invoked singers about
whom I had never heard, never read, and never even heard of. Bessie
Smith and Billie Holiday I know about, but not the people she was
naming. Yes, in her mind (which means in the minds of the professors
at Miami where she got her Jazz degree), ALL of American popular
music was and is a subset of jazz!!
Well, I'm old enough to have lived through quite a bit of the
developmental years, and that certainly wasn't the way *I* saw
things! To me the opposite is true, and jazz is an important but
rather small subset (on a par with classical music, to judge by the
Grammy categories) of American popular music. I was singing "vocal
jazz" back in the late '50s before anybody had come up with the term
"vocal jazz," but as just one style that fit certain kinds of songs
while other styles fit others. And we never did a lick of scat, just
sang "in the style." As did the Four Freshmen and (sometimes) the
Hi-Los. Seems to me that nowadays vocal jazz is so tightly
circumscribed by its own rules and regulations that if you don't do
it in the One True and Pure Way you'll get put down. So much for an
art form that's supposed to leave the performer free of artificial
restrictions!!!
Got to go give a Quiz. Talk to you later.
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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