I thought this was an interesting read and our Joan is briefly mentioned.
Passing the flame
With a new generation of female singers getting tired
of touring with rock 'n' roll bands, the sultry
sophistication of the torch song is back in vogueLI ROBBINS
Special to The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, April 10, 2001TORONTO -- On a rainy Wednesday night at the Montreal
Bistro and Jazz Club in downtown Toronto recently, you would have had to
bribe some devotee just to get a seat at the bar, so popular was the reigning
chanteuse, Molly Johnson. "Instrumentalists don't pull them in like this,"
the doorman confided.A sea of rapt faces, from barely legal girls
lip-synching, to fortyish men bearing a fair resemblance to lesser characters
in the TV series The Sopranos, were trained on Johnson. Although she did sing
originals, it was the jazz standards, treated with Billie Holiday-esque
tristesse, that held them mesmerized.The world-weary languor of the torch
singer is hot these days. Johnson and Laura Hubert hold court at Toronto's
Palais Royale on May 11. A whole series simply called Torch ran last winter
at Toronto's Top O' the Senator jazz club.And there's a new crowd slithering
into those slinky gowns. We've got Joni Mitchell seeing "gloom and misery
everywhere" since, as she sings on her jazz CD, Both Sides Now, "my man and I
ain't together." Former metal queen Lee Aaron asks the object of her desire
to "teach me tonight, starting with the ABC of it," on her jazz and blues
recording, Slick Chick. Both CDs, released last year, are part of a ripple of
recordings featuring jazz songs first popularized by the middle of the last
century, if not earlier, and now recorded by performers better known as pop
artists -- predominantly female pop artists.Not everyone is a chanteuse come
lately, of course. At the top of the heap of jazz-standard purveyors are
performers such as Canada's hugely successful Diana Krall, and the new
contender for the retro-jazz-queen throne, 23-year-old Ella Fitzgerald
sound-alike Jane Monheit. Monheit is a girl from the burbs of Long Island who
sings jazz standards so convincingly both the world's most legendary jazz
clubs -- New York's Village Vanguard and The Blue Note -- have invited and
applauded her charms.David Hajdu, (author of Lush Life: A Biography of Billy
Strayhorn), writing in the New York Times Magazine in December, was less
impressed; he quipped scornfully that Monheit's is "a jazz world George W.
Bush would understand," saying she "seems to embody mainstream jazz's
wholesale submission to nostalgia." He cited innovative singers such as
Dominique Eade, Judi Silvano and Nora York as big talents shunted to the
sidelines by the jazz recording industry precisely because those vocalists
want to focus on original material. Haven't heard of them? Likely you won't,
but you will see Monheit this summer when she's expected to play some of
Canada's jazz festivals and you'll hear her this fall when her second
recording of standards is released with distribution in Canada (the first,
Never Never Land, was, until recently, available here only as an import).At
the Montreal Bistro, the audience is definitely on retro's side. "I love
torch singing," one patron gushed. "Molly's one of the best torch singers in
the world." Johnson prefers to call herself, whimsically, a saloon singer. No
wonder. That "torch" moniker is a little hot to handle, given song-lyric
sentiments running decidedly toward the politically incorrect. Take the torch
classic, My Man, for example, sung in some versions like this: "Two or three
girls has he, that he likes as well as me. But I love him. I don't know why I
should, he isn't good, he isn't true, he beats me too. What can I do?" Not a
thing, apparently. After all, the essence of torch singing is obsessive love
in one guise or another.The expression "torch," shorthand for "carrying a
torch," derives from the 19th century, when dedicated political followers
showed support for a candidate by carrying lit torches in campaign parades.
That spawned the phrase "carrying a torch," which later came to signify
clinging to unrequited or lost love. By the jazz era, those smouldering women
in off-the-shoulder dresses had taken up residence in the nightclubs of the
world. (Claudette Colbert's movie Torch Singer was made in 1933.)But for the
Canadian singers now travelling this well-lit promenade, jazz singing is
scarcely just about love-gone-wrong songs. Johnson says for her the lure of
the jazz standard, whether in the "let-me-rip-my-heart-out" style of a torch
song or not, is in the complex melodies of jazz. "All through my years
singing in rock bands, the melodies weren't strong enough. And I always sang
jazz at the same time as doing rock stuff -- I could sing quietly, work on
improvising and songwriting. I used to say I'd retire and only sing jazz --
now I have." She says, jokingly, she decided to record "a sophisticated
record, for my sophisticated friends" and her jazz-oriented album came out
last fall, to enamoured reviews.With Johnson, as with other singers moving
into mid-life, the focus on jazz is part of an accommodation to life changes
as much as anything. With two kids she's relieved not to have to "travel with
a bunch of guys in a bus any more." Instead, it's about "the old dead guys,"
as she describes the composers of jazz standards to her audience at the
Montreal Bistro, getting a big laugh. She doesn't entertain the notion that
there's something potentially moribund about that. "In general, people hunger
for melody. You listen to computerized, formulaic stuff, and the human heart
and ear will seek melodies -- kids hear this music now, and to them, it's new
and fresh."Montreal-based Ranee Lee, who's been singing jazz for 38 years,
and recording it for 20, isn't surprised that both jazz singers and pop
singers are falling in love with standards and torch songs again. She also
doesn't concur with the notion that it's a conservative trend. "When you go
to an art gallery and see Picasso, you won't say, 'I can't enjoy this because
it's not contemporary.' If a person is open-minded, they will have the
capacity to appreciate it all -- the same is true with music." Lee thinks
this embrace of the older repertoire is in part because there was a period,
pre-Krall, where the material was not frequently recorded by singers. "When
these songs are brought back, it's natural people will pay attention to them
-- they're tried and true and tested."Some singers, drawn to the music but
wanting to revise those test results, are analyzing them in less expected
ways. Toronto-based Phe Cullen, a glam rocker who previously worked in
Britain, has recently released an eponymous recording of standards of a
different colour, rock classics like Purple Haze and Ruby Tuesday, but done
up as jazz. Chicago's Patricia Barber tried the same sort of thing on her
first two, critically lauded CDs, including interpretations of Sonny Bono's
The Beat Goes On and Peter Green's Black Magic Woman. Tellingly, her last
album, released last year, was a collection of standards and, perhaps not
surprisingly, it has been her biggest seller to date.Then there's the case of
Laura Hubert, former lead singer with the Juno-award-winning roots rockers,
Leslie Spit Treeo. Her new release, My Girlish Ways, sees Hubert sporting
feather boas, long gloves, high heels, and a vintage dress. But she's also
swathed in a sort of babushka in one shot, and wears a toy teddy bear as a
brooch. Its a bit of a send-up, and Hubert's attitude toward performing jazz
and blues material is anything but reverent."It's not 'Oh shut up, I'm
singing,' " she says. "You've got to have the cash register going, people
having a good time. It's gotta have some action." There was plenty of action
at one of Hubert's recent Saturday afternoon gigs at The Rex jazz bar in
downtown Toronto. Jazz fans and passing Saturday afternoon shoppers alike
yacked, laughed and ordered pints, listening to Hubert "having a little fun
with torch," as she puts it. For Hubert, the move to jazz wasn't a jump on
the Krall bandwagon -- back in pre-Leslie Spit days, she sang jazz with
friends, planning some day to "get a dress and an attitude and sing those
songs."It's a story echoed by Lee Aaron. Granted, her jazz and blues release,
Slick Chick, was bit of a shocker for those who didn't know of the singer's
childhood days in musical theatre, nor of the regular jazz gigs she's been
playing in Vancouver since 1997. (When Slick Chick came out, Billboard
magazine said, "If Britney Spears did a guest stint with the Royal
Shakespeare Company, it wouldn't be any more surprising than the latest album
by Canada's Lee Aaron.")Aaron, from her home base in Vancouver, isn't
apologetic. "I can't allow people's perceptions, or fear of their perceptions
about me, to direct my musical path or my life. The industry, to some degree,
still wants to define me by that 'rock chick/metal queen' persona. But I'm 38
now, and I've lived through fame, fortune, exploitation, divorce, parenthood
and financial devastation."That image of me is really quite narrow and
oppressive. Some elitists may never get their head around the idea of a
former rocker doing jazz. Others think it's a brave move. I just think it's
music and there are no rules."Of course for singers, pop-based or not,
focusing on jazz has distinct lifestyle advantages. As Lee Aaron puts it,
"Jazz fans in general usually don't get loaded and throw up at the show."Jazz
is, after all, nice work and it seems you can get it, if you want to "roast
that chestnut," as jazz musicians jokingly put it, one more time.
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