More than words

Robert G. O'Meally's The Jazz Singers is a winner

by Jon Garelick

When is a boxed set a fun listen and when is it an academic exercise? On the simplest, most unpretentious level, a boxed set is a deluxe greatest-hits package. This is especially true when you're talking about single-artist sets, whether it's B.B. King or Miles Davis, the Byrds or the Velvet Underground. But when you get into multi-artist surveys of a given genre, more is at stake. What belongs on "The Ultimate Blues Box"? Where do you start, or end, "The History of the Big Band"?

In putting together The Jazz Singers for the Smithsonian, Robert G. O'Meally faced the usual challenges of the boxed set, whether the topic is jump blues or the Velvets. Plus he had the bugaboo that's dogged the genre almost since the beginning. If we can never quite answer the question what is jazz, things don't get any better when we ask what is jazz singing?

O'Meally doesn't come up with any definitive answers, but that's okay, no one else has either. Instead, he's put together a five-CD set that's more enjoyable as a whole, and more enlightening from track to track, than you'd have any reason to expect. He announces his intentions to work like an extremely hip radio programmer, and that's one goal he clearly achieves. Jazzheads could argue all afternoon about what he's included (Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Al Green) and what he's left out (Fred Astaire, Chet Baker, Tony Bennett, Blossom Dearie, Sheila Jordan, etc.). He ignores chronology (the earliest track, Noble Sissle's "Jazzola," doesn't show up until disc five). And he indulges himself left and right. He includes a previously unreleased take of Lester Young singing a bawdy novelty tune, Jelly Roll Morton improvising and explaining scat for interviewer Alan Lomax, Ben Webster rehearsing a Danish big band. Clearly, none of these is an essential example of the jazz singer's art. But they work toward O'Meally's purposes. Listening to The Jazz Singers, you're constantly aware of how vocal and instrumental jazz affect each other, of how different styles "draw upon and feed the jazz tradition," as O'Meally puts it, and how those styles can produce different emotional effects.

A professor of African-American studies at Columbia, O'Meally co-edited The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and his accompanying 118-page booklet to The Jazz Singers is an engaging mix of Norton Anthology-style pedagogy and show-biz breeziness. His capsule artist biographies are clear and succinct. His commentary is as often literary as musical. And his high lit-crit mode can be appealing. His explication on the racial/musical interplay between Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden on "Rockin' Chair" concludes, "Here's jazz not only to dance to but to enact and see enacted: jazz in a complex comic mask."

But just as important as O'Meally's heady erudition are his ears, his ability to hear across genres and styles. In his Jazz Singing, Will Friedwald makes the point that jazz and blues and pop are constantly overlapping, so that it's often difficult to tell the difference. O'Meally organizes more than 100 selections into eight very loose, overlapping categories. There's blues, church music, "Rhythm Singers" (which skirts R&B), "Swinging the Songbook" (mostly Broadway and Tin Pan Alley adaptations), ballads, "Jazz Compositions" (written for, or adapted to, vocals), "Scat & Vocalese," and "Novelties and Take-Offs." These arbitrary categories nonetheless reinforce O'Meally's scheme: every song and style helps you hear every other song and style.

The first disc is dedicated to blues and bluesy church music, and it lays the foundation for the rest of the box, including those O'Meally considers jazz singing's seminal influences: Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Billie Holiday. Here is where O'Meally comes closest to defining the essential ingredients of jazz singing: improvisation, a floating rhythmic feel that swings, combined with a bluesy, expressive sense of vocal coloration and pitch. Just as important, in his definition, is the use of call-and-response patterns, something that you don't necessarily hear in every jazz composition, but that you do hear throughout The Jazz Singers.

Sometimes the call-and-response is a clear rhythmic pattern, as in the various Kansas City-style sides here, where a riffing chorus of horns answers the call of a Jimmy Rushing or Helen Humes or Billie Holiday. But a more subtle way in which call-and-response patterns manifest themselves is in the conversational interplay that's apparent throughout the set. On one level, this is a constant of jazz, vocal or instrumental pieces. In the 1945 Kansas City date "Lotus Blossom," by Julia Lee (one of several obscurities rescued by O'Meally), the singer's eroticized musings are backed by Clarence Davis's insistent muted-trumpet chatter. The mute was one of the methods jazzmen used to approximate the human voice. Throughout The Jazz Singers you can hear voices impersonating instrumental sounds, instruments mimicking voices. It's the yearning of "abstract" sound for words, of the human voice for a meaning beyond words. Sometimes it's merely the juxtaposition of voice and instrument that makes the difference: J.J. Johnson's broad consoling trombone solo following up Billie Holiday's lament on "You've Changed," Coleman Hawkins's impassioned response to Abbey Lincoln's "Left Alone," Nina Simone following up her own extended Baroque piano solo "Love Me or Leave Me" with renewed confidence, defiance, even.

Juxtaposition is everything here, whether it's that of instrument against voice or that of one voice against another. And O'Meally is a master of segues. They're ear candy with soft pedagogical compare-and-contrast center. Some-times it's merely a matter of contrasting tempo and texture, as a jazz DJ might. An album full of Cassandra Wilson's contempo-misterioso stylings can cancel itself out for me -- individual songs fade into an indistinguishing fog. But on The Jazz Singers, the rumble and clack of Wilson's version of Robert Johnson's "Come On in My Kitchen" (with its moaning electric bass, impressionistic acoustic guitar, drums, and accordion) fades in after the smooth bebop scat groove of Lorez Alexandria's piano trio take on Lester Young's "D.B. Blues." The differences make you hear each piece more clearly, each an effective retelling of the blues.

Most impressive here are O'Meally's settings of Billie Holiday. She's given seven selections, more than any other singer in the set. And when she's placed strategically among a group of other singers, Holiday's growth as an artist becomes clearer than ever. From the very beginning there's her improvisational skill with melody, harmony, and rhythm, and her use of them to, among other things, undercut sentimentality. Holiday has never sounded more modern than when she follows Ethel Waters's "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" with her own, and then with "These Foolish Things" and "Me, Myself and I" (all from the '30s).

In the "After Hours" set, O'Meally gives us Holiday's "Yesterdays," "Strange Fruit," and "You've Changed," from 1939, '45, and '58 respectively. You can hear Holiday's voice grow heavier, less flexible with age, and yet her sense of color and rhythm is as sure as ever. By the end of that emotionally overpowering sequence, you need Ella Fitzgerald's "Someone To Watch over Me," a light melodrama by comparison, with Ella's tripping declamation: "Although he may not be the man some/Girls think of as handsome/To my heart he carries the key." Ella's frankly sentimental "Until the Real Thing Comes Along" is then followed by Fats Waller's bawdy, parodistic version of the same. And so on.

There are all kinds of ways to sing words. There are the coded, expressionistic slurs and slides of the blues, full of mangled syllables and slang. There's the "proper" English of the Broadway show tune and Ella's perfect diction. When music and text fit, each helps you hear the other. There's Cab Calloway's "rap" of "The Man from Harlem," as he whips his band into a jivy frenzy, like a proto-James Brown. King Pleasure's words to the solo of Charley Parker's "Parker's Mood" are mawkish (and Bird hated them), but Pleasure knows how to sing, and his choice of vowels, consonants, and the colors of each gets you to hear the "composition" of Parker's solo. Dizzy Gillespie's nonsense bebop syllables on "Ool Ya Koo," as O'Meally points out, suddenly have meaning when Dizzy stops singing them and starts playing.

There are only a couple of duds on the set, by my count, George Benson's "Breezin' " (I've heard it too often) and Betty Carter's "Frenesi" (Betty's brilliant, but it's still a corny tune). And then there are those gems that, in O'Meally's careful placement, seem to come out of nowhere. Such is Chris Connor's "Angel Eyes." The former Stan Kenton band singer lays into Matt Dennis's lyrics with such cool aplomb, it makes no difference that she's surrounded by strings. There's the smoky restraint in her voice, and the timing. She sings the opening lines with long held notes over a ballad tempo: "I try to think that love's not around/Still it's uncomfortably near/My old heart ain't gaining no ground." And then against these wistful lines she sets the last phrase with a little dip in the melody, a slight rush in the beat: "Because my angel eyes ain't near." Nothing sentimental there, just the adult lover able to stand outside herself, not merely knowing her feelings, but understanding them. Thank the song, but thank the singer, too.