Category: jazz

There’s no business like jazz business

show-business-jazz
Jazz singer Ethel Merman Wikipedia CC

Given that a lot of my Facebook friends are musicians (and jazz musicians at that), you could get into an endless debate about who is or was the best. Moreover, one could have a lengthy dialogue about what is jazz and is it the same as blues?

It’s not hard to find lists of the top jazz singers of the 20th century. Pundits frequently put Louise Armstrong on top of the list, closely followed by Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole. Female jazz singer lists are usually topped by Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone (Ed: what about Joni, eh?)

I cannot go past Nina Simone. Ironically, Nina was a precocious piano player who was told by the owner of the club where she was engaged that she had to sing as well. Whoever that person was (he wanted two for the price of one), unwittingly gave the world one of the best song interpreters of modern times.

A few of the songs Simone made famous (I Put a Spell on you, God bless the Child, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood) were rocked up and recycled in the 1960s and 1970s by bands like The Animals, the Alan Price Set, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Blood Sweat and Tears.

Technically speaking, you’d say Simone was a blues singer, much as you could argue the same for Billie Holiday (who wrote God Bless the Child) and Bessie Smith. Yet you will frequently find them lumped in with the jazz genre.

What brought this topic to mind was a gig our versatile choir has this morning at Warwick’s Jumpers and Jazz festival, a two-week extravaganza featuring live music, yarn-bombed trees, art exhibitions, car rallies and more.

Jazz bands and performers who sign up for Jumpers and Jazz cover a wide gamut of the genre. In the main street, where residents are offered free entertainment, the standard is always high. In 2021, we hosted Brisbane’s hot young gypsy jazz band, Cigany  Weaver, most of them Conservatorium graduates and stunningly talented. I feel fortunate to know a few of these young musicians, but compared with their vast musical knowledge and technical expertise I am but a mere strummer.

The brand of original jazz Cigany Weaver play arguable belongs the Manouche genre. Each year there is an Oz Manouche festival in Brisbane. Gypsy jazz is of the style made famous by Django Reinhardt. (Ed: ex-Shadows guitarist and WA resident Hank B Marvin is a devotee of gypsy jazz and often attends this festival,)

A Manouche band typically sets up a solid tempo while the virtuoso instrumentalists in the band take solo turns. Improvisation is the key to this sometimes wild music. The soloists often take the song and its melody far away from its core and somehow (I don’t know how), the band eventually manages to pick up the tune again and play out the refrain.

For our part, East Street Singers, the acapella group we rehearse with on Thursday nights, are doing an eclectic mix – from Bill Bailey and Chattanooga Choo Choo to the Jerome Kern/Dorothy Fields ballad, The Way You Look Tonight.

The song comes from a 1936 movie, Jazz Time, but in this innovative version from 1991, Steve Tyrell and orchestra interpreted the song as a soundtrack to a compilation video featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (singing) and dancing.

The Way you Look Tonight was originally performed by Astaire, someone I always knew of as a dancer, but he could also sing and play piano at the same time (although there is no record of him doing all three simultaneously).

Breaking this song down to four vocal parts is another exercise altogether. I do so admire the arrangers who took on these classic compositions by the old pros and re-invent them for an unaccompanied choir. In this case, William C Stickles arranged it for SATB (choir shorthand for Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass).

Stickles, a pianist, composer, arranger and teacher, died in 1971, aged 89. If you think about that for a moment, he’d have been in his 50s when The Way You Look Tonight was first published. US-educated, Stickles studied in Europe for seven years and worked with Isadore Braggiotti, a voice teacher in Florence, for five years. I gleaned this much from a 1971 obituary in the New York Times. Stickles was prolific and left a vast library of choral arrangements. He is best known for the choral arrangement of the Lord’s Prayer. In his twilight years he arranged many of the songs from West Side Story.

This of course is information of interest only to (a) those who are required to learn the arrangements and (b) people who like to trace things back to source. There is also giving credit where it is due.

You could say with some surety that many of today’s jazz singers, including Sinatra-influenced crooners Michael Buble, Harry Connick Jnr and Mark Tremonti, steeped themselves in the aural history of jazz. You can hear a lot of Frank’s phrasing in their voices and (if watching video), see it in the way they move. Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. When we were rehearsing jazz songs at choir a few weeks back, the name Ethel Merman came up. We were rehearsing Gershwin’s I got Rhythm, the song which made Ethel Merman a star. The alto to my right and I immediately began trying to imitate Ethel’s brassy, emphatic way of singing.

Ethel was known for her distinctive, powerful voice, and leading roles in musical comedy stage performances. So far as I know, no-one has managed to carve a career out of trying to sound like Ethel. She had a loud voice and excellent enunciation. You will hear it in your head if you think about Anything Goes, Hello Dolly and There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954). An old school singer from Queens, New Jersey, Ethel forged a career on the stage, in an era where in musical comedy you had to be heard at the back of the theatre. Ethel tried to imitate vocal styles of stars of the times (Sophie Tucker, Fanny Bryce), but found it hard to disguise her inimitable voice.

If you didn’t know, TNBLSB was in the musical Annie Get Your Gun and was a massive hit, primarily because it is reprised four times during the show (“let’s go on with the show”). In the songwriting world, we call this kind of song an ‘earworm’. Sorry about that.

Further reading: Just as I formed the idea for today’s blog I found one from two years ago which delved into the history of the 5/4 time signature (‘Try not to get worried, try not to turn on to
Problems that upset you, oh’).* Despite the esoteric topic, it is quite entertaining!

*Andrew Lloyd Webber

Take five and all that jazz

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Photo of sax player by Konstantin Aal www.unsplash.com

Warwick’s annual Jumpers and Jazz festival took me back to a day at the dentist in Maleny. I was lying prone, mouth jammed with all sorts of stuff. Soft, melodic saxophone music drifted down from the ceiling (with the poster of the Blue Mountains).
“Than Gltz?” I garbled.
Roger removed the suction hose “What’s that now?”
“Is that Stan Getz?”
“No, but good guess,” he said, replacing the suction hose.
“What’s your best guess?”
“Chrli Prker,” I choked out.
“No, not Charlie Parker – it’s Paul Desmond.”
“Ach, Dve bubck!” I replied and the conversation went on like that.

People who know I write songs often take a stab at my influences – is it Paul Kelly, Loudon Wainwright, Joni? Well, yes, but my first musical interest as a teenager (15) was jazz. Somewhere (probably in a box in the garage), are six Dave Brubeck quartet LPs. I have promised to will all such albums to my jazz-mad niece.

After I emerged from a childhood of listening to my parents’ records (classical, Scottish, opera) I discovered jazz.
First was pianist Phineas Newborn Jnr, who was famous for playing entire pieces with just the left hand. Then came the Modern Jazz Quartet, Brubeck, Oscar Peterson and so on. Then I discovered blues. But before I could truly get immersed in waking up one morning (with an awful aching head..Ed), along came the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Dave Brubeck and alto saxophonist Paul Desmond pioneered jazz in unconventional timings, headlined of course by the remarkable Take Five (1959). Despite the dire misgivings of his record company’s sales force at the time, Brubeck insisted it be released and was rewarded with an unlikely No 1 hit. In 1961, singer Carmen McRae also sang a version of Paul Desmond’s composition on the album Take Five Live. Ah, you didn’t know it had words, did you?

Take Five is a nod to the unconventional tempo of 5/4 (five beats to the measure), which means your drummer has to be masterful). Brubeck was interviewed in 1995 by Paul Zollo in his 730-page book, Songwriters on Songwriting. My well-thumbed copy reveals Brubeck telling Zollo how the record company’s sales people tried to cut Take Five off at the knees. They said it would not work because it wasn’t in 4/4 and people couldn’t dance to it. Moreover, they baulked at Brubeck’s album Time Out because it was all original tunes in odd time signatures.
“So I was breaking a whole bunch of rules. And then the album turned out to be the strongest selling album in years. So they were wrong!” he told Zollo.
“It’s still the most played jazz tune, maybe in the world.”
A few film makers agreed.Take Five was also used in movies including Mighty Aphrodite and Pleasantville.

Brubeck and Desmond may have pioneered 5/4 in popular music, but others picked up on it, namely film composer Lalo Schifrin. His thematic introduction to Mission Impossible is impossible, once heard, to remove from the ear. There are many others. Musician Dylan Ryche curated a Spotify playist of 48 songs in 5/4 dubbed – ‘Why not?’
Here you will find songs by Taylor Swift, Sting, Glenn Hansard, Jethro Tull, Radiohead, Sky, Blind Faith, Primus and that Andrew Lloyd Webber earworm from Jesus Christ Superstar, ‘Everything’s Alright’.
I’m not convinced that listening to multiple songs in 5/4 counts as entertainment, but the playlist shows that imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery.

My personal favourite 5/4 composition is multi instrumentalist and beatboxer Mal Webb’s re-creation of Geoff Mack’s Australian country standard, ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’. This required him to find 67 Australian place names with five syllables, in itself a giant task. You may have bumped in to Mal leading workshops or impromptu brass bands when we used to have big music festivals.

So last week when I was out walking along Warwick’s main street, I could hear Blue Rondo a la Turk (Brubeck), streaming out of speakers attached to street light poles.
Warwick’s Jumper and Jazz festival kicked off last Wednesday with volunteers dressing street trees in the ‘yarn bombing’ style. The statue of one-time Queensland Premier T.J Byrnes in the town’s main intersection was dressed in a multi-coloured shawl and beanie. A stage was erected in front of the town hall and jazz performers started doing their soundchecks. Jazz, as you’d know, don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
But musicians should never really be boxed in to any one genre. Just as rock bands relish the solos (lead guitar, drums, bass), so too jazz musicians will cheerfully improvise for 20 minutes or more.
If you have never heard of Miles Davis, have a listen on Spotify – you will be astonished. I have two Miles Davis albums, the 1959 album Kind of Blue, which contained the aforementioned So What – a classic modal jazz tune. In 1970 or so I bought the double LP, Bitches Brew which runs for 94 minutes but contains only six tracks. It is not easy listening (but it’s yours eventually, dear niece!)

Meanwhile, close to the wood stove
I’ve been trying to avoid using the word ‘meanwhile’ when I want to move on to something else. So this time I will say, in due course, we (the acapella choir, East Street Singers), contributed to the jazz festival. Jumpers and Jazz was not held in 2020 so this year it’s been a case of blowing the dust off the songbooks which contain tunes you’d all know – Bill Bailey, Chatanooga Choo Choo, Five Foot Two and so on. There are some pretty melodies in there by real composers (as opposed to self-taught songwriters). They include The Way You Look Tonight, Moon River and Blue Moon. Some of us have been on a steep learning curve for today’s shopping centre gig, but we have a really good teacher, Jill Hulme, who also arranged some of the songs.
The various Jumpers and Jazz activities, including live music, art exhibitions, tree jumpers tours, sheep dog trials, car rallies and steam train excursions, have drawn a lot of visitors to the town. Because we are outside the Greater Brisbane Covid zone we feel less constrained in crowds, although quite a few people are wearing masks.

While spending this week committing jazz songs to memory, I realised how seldom I use unconventional timing in my own songs.
Most are in 4/4, some in 3/4 (waltz time), 2/4 (think bluegrass) and occasionally 6/8 which is like a speeded up waltz.
Our bush band occasionally required me to to play jigs in 9/8 (Rocky Road to Dublin, Blue Rondo a la Turk), but in the main I avoid tricky timings.
I should have said it is not a new concept – classical composers like Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky and Mr Bach have been confounding conductors since the 19th century with various tempo changes. Celtic and eastern European musicians also relish dance tunes in odd time signatures.
So here’s one you all know – Pink Floyd’s Money (from Dark Side of the Moon). Now you can impress your friends by saying (learnedly) “that’s in 7/4, you know?”
Which reminds me of the time a musician friend posted a meme on Facebook, as a response to people complaining about the (Covid) times we live in.
“These are not difficult times”, it said “ 5/4,5/8 6/8,7/8 9/8,11/8 and 13/8…these are difficult times.”