What Makes a Jazz Singer?

WHAT MAKES A JAZZ SINGER?
by Marshall Bowden

Jazz singer. It's a term one would think easy enough to understand and define, but unleash it on a group of jazz fans and you're likely to start quite a discussion. Among jazz devotees, critics, and to a lesser extent the singers themselves, the criteria by which a singer is judged can be incredibly restrictive. There are those who restrict the term 'jazz singer' to Billie Holiday, perhaps allowing a select few others into her august company. The recording industry doesn't make it any easier, using whatever terms they deem necessary to market a singer to the public.

Many singers work in what could be called a jazz setting, playing live dates and recording with instrumentalists who are generally considered jazz musicians, often utilizing charts written by bona fide jazz arrangers. During the Swing Era it was completely de rigueur for a band, jazz or otherwise, to travel and record with at least one featured vocalist. Much of the music recorded then, such as the Benny Goodman/Peggy Lee hit "Why Don't You Do Right?" or Ella Fitzgerald's "A Tisket, A Tasket" were aimed at a pop music audience. Regardless of whether they were jazz or pop, singers definitely benefited from the chance to work with a big band and the demise of these organizations took away an important path for a singer to grow and develop an individual style. As Lee pointed out, the arrangements were often not what the singer would have picked herself and there was sometimes less freedom for self-expression than one might have wished. Still, singers like Peggy Lee and Rosemary Clooney were clearly jazz-influenced and jazz elements started to become clearer as their work continued beyond the big band days, right into the 1990s. Furthermore, a few singers of this era—notably Anita O'Day and June Christy—began to see that what they were doing was significantly different than what the more pop-oriented singers of the day were doing. They were clearly providing a deeper reading of the songs than their pop counterparts, sometimes through improvisation, at others merely through the use of their vocal instrument or phrasing.

There are certain parallels between the development of popular music in the 1940s and the 1980s. The pop music scene during the '40s, as commercial swing reached its apex, became increasingly synthetic as bands with ever more intricate arrangements left little room for improvisation and individual creativity. The recording industry focused increasingly on delivering the dance music that the public wanted. In the 1980s and early '90s pop and rock music became increasingly oriented toward the pre-teen and teen market (unlike the 1960s and '70s), and, interestingly there has been something of a renaissance of jazz-influenced singers over the past decade, despite the lack of monetary reward inherent in the genre.

The template for jazz singing came from Louis Armstrong and from Billie Holiday, on whom Armstrong exerted a great deal of influence. Armstrong pioneered jazz as a soloist's music; his trumpet technique was dazzling and he had a very developed sense of rhythm. He put this sense of spontaneity and rhythm to use in his singing as well. He sang exactly the way he played trumpet, and his phrasing and ability to improvise were no less impressive as a vocalist than as an instrumentalist. He pioneered the use of scat on his recording "Heebie Jeebies", a device which he used to supplement the melody and lyric of the song, to express something musical with his voice that could not be expressed with words. Scat was not an end in itself, but it did provide the vocalist with an opportunity to improvise as the instrumentalist did.

Billie Holiday was influenced by Armstrong as well as by the work of two of her finest instrumental accompanists, Teddy Wilson and Lester Young. Young, often credited with influencing Charlie Parker and other bop and post-bop musicians, was able to break free of the bar lines in his phrasing, often using long, winding phrases that overlapped bars or ended in the middle of a bar. Prior to this, soloists had generally been constrained in their solo phrasing by the bar line. This style gave Young a relaxed sound and allowed him to play with the rhythm, sometimes seeming to lag slightly behind the beat, yet always ending up at the right place. In addition, Young said that he didn't presume to perform a ballad until he had learned and spent some time absorbing its lyrics (a good piece of advice for some of today's instrumentalists, but that's another column.) Holiday, who already had her own style when she began working with Lester, picked up on this as well and found his phrasing totally complementary to hers. In a Metronome 1948 blindfold test she told Leonard Feather "the only ones who can take a solo while I'm singing and not interfere with me are Lester Young and Teddy (Wilson)."

Basically, these two performers gave us everything we need to understand jazz singing. First, the singer is working in a jazz setting. Next, their conception and phrasing should be the same as an instrumentalist's. If they were to pick up a horn and play, it would be as if the horn were an extension of their singing voice. Next, they should have a very finely developed sense of rhythm and be able to phrase in such a way as to swing, whether they are improvising or singing the song itself as it was written. Swing is a nearly indefinable concept, but nearly everyone would agree that it involves rhythmic sophistication, syncopation, and timing. Add to this a couple of elements implicit in the models provided by Armstrong and Holiday. First of these would be an ability to understand and deeply read the lyrics and meaning of a song and to use all of one's musicality to convey that meaning to the audience. Notice that this alone does not really make one a jazz singer—there are plenty of cabaret and popular singers who can do this as well. The final element would be the ability to take risks as the instrumentalist does, whether through improvisation, one's general approach to the song, or in some other way. This leaves quite a bit of room for each artist's individuality—it is not necessary that the artist improvise or use scat or vocalese, but there must be something that puts the stamp of individuality on the song, gets its meaning and feeling across, and swings. Notice too that nowhere is it said that one's choice of material defines whether one is a jazz singer. Jazz vocalists have performed popular songs since Louis Armstrong, and it would be difficult to find a jazz singer whose repertoire did not include some pop music.

This question of what makes a jazz singer recently came to a head (again) in Nat Hentoff's "Final Chorus" column in this past December's issue of Jazz Times entitled "Are Krall and Monheit Jazz Singers?" Hentoff's answer, in a word, is no. His definition of what makes a singer a jazz singer is a tad less rigorous than what I've described above in many respects, but I think he gets it right when he quotes Pee Wee Russell as saying that some folks, regardless of where they come from "have a heart feeling and a rhythm in their systems that you couldn't take away from them, even if they were in a symphony organization." Hentoff later says that "to merit being called a jazz singer you have to have something to say—your own story—as it moves you then and there. Arrangements tailored just for you…won't help if you don't known when and how to let yourself go."

It's true that Jane Monheit is very young, and certainly it isn't fair to compare her to singers like Holiday, Anita O'Day, Sarah Vaughn, Blossom Dearie, or Sinatra. Speaking of Ol' Blue Eyes, the difference in phrasing maturity between his early work with Tommy Dorsey and his later Capitol sides demonstrates clearly that experience and immersion in singing have the edge over youth. Still, Sinatra had talent and could swing, even in his early years. Though Monheit has a good vocal instrument, her interpretations seem overly thought out and rehearsed, and she never relaxes enough to let herself go or really swing. The clearest example is her rendition of Jobim's "Waters of March" on her Come Dream With Me, where her stiffness is completely at odds with both the bossa rhythms and the point of the lyrics. In contrast, singer Karrin Allyson's renditions of Brazilian bossa songs like "O Pato" on her From Paris to Rio album make the songs hers, full of both rhythm and humor, and her work on the phenomenal Ballads: Remembering John Coltrane give a pretty good definition of what jazz singing is all about. Monheit's cover of Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You" is mystifying, demonstrating that Monheit can't really turn a pop song into her own vehicle either.

So, who are the jazz singers I would recommend? Well, there are those that can't be ignored, like Holiday, Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Abbey Lincoln, Anita O'Day, Carmen McRae, June Christy, Blossom Dearie, Dinah Washington, and Dakota Staton. I've always enjoyed Ernestine Anderson, especially her early recordings from the '50s and '60s. Among the newer singers I think Karrin Allyson, Kurt Elling, Ian Shaw, and Cassandra Wilson have clearly separated themselves from the pack. But the fact is, there are a lot of singers that are currently satisfying the definition of jazz singer who are recording and performing, some holdovers from the swing era, some new. By listening seriously to Armstrong and Holiday as well as some of those who followed and have been acknowledged by everyone to be solid jazz singers, the listener can learn to discern those who have "something to say" from those merely being marketed as jazz singers.