This is my second attempt at writing this blog entry, and you can bet that I'll be saving as I go. I write a tome a few days ago and lost it to an app crash on my iPad. It's always such a drag to rewrite something from scratch, especially right away. The disgust sort of prevents you from getting right to work. But I'm on a plane towards a brief vacation destination right now, and things are going pretty well. For now, some notes on my own experience at the 2nd annual Jazz Education Network conference held in New Orleans on Jan 5-8, not in chronological order, nor, really in order of importance. This is stream of consciousness at work, baby...in fact...this first posting will be entirely dedicated to one topic, on which I'm happy to expound and hold court.
Vertical Voices LIVE performed in the Blue Room on Saturday at 3:30 - So much of the existence of the new vocal quartet consisting of myself, Julia Dollison, Jennifer Barnes and Greg Jasperse has been about this particular gig. It's been a very good thing that's resulted in a bunch of other gigs popping up for the spring; we're with Peter Eldridge and Geoffrey Keezer on January 25th at Vitello's in LA, at the Folsom and Santa Cruz Jazz Festivals, doing a couple gigs in Canada, a set at the JazzSchool in Berkeley, and we're working on something in Reno now. It's giving us a great chance to flesh out what we're about, sonically and conceptually, and the results are pleasing.
We performed at JEN with the Sacramento-based rhythm section of Joe Gilman (piano), Matt Robinson (bass) and Rick Lotter (drums). The guys played brilliantly, especially considering the seriously small amount of rehearsal time we were afforded. Our set was 1. Dandaya (Jasperse), 2. The "Pretty" Road (Maria Schneider), 3. The Cry and the Smile (Nando Lauria, arr. Jasperse/Barnes), 4. Sky Blue (Schneider) and 5. Hang Gliding (Schneider), which was performed, as always, with backing tracks from our album, to provide the fullness of all the multitracking.
Our audience was large enough to fill the room, thankfully (about 150 people) and this brought a great energy to the performance, I think. Many of our closest friends and colleagues in the vocal jazz world made it out, and we were humbled and honored. The reception of the all-wordless-vocal set was moving beyond all expectation; there were tears and big smiles throughout the room, and a warm standing ovation greeted us at the end of "Hang Gliding". Speaking only for myself, I'll honestly say that one of my senses at the end of the set was a feeling of acceptance and appreciation for our abstract vocal approach with the lyric-free repertoire. I think this has been a generally growing phenomenon in the vocal jazz community, especially in the past ten years. However, this feeling stands in stark contrast to what I understand (and what I've experienced first-hand) as an essentialist attitude in our genre, espousing the idea that singing without using lyrics and telling an explicit story is a waste of an opportunity. Some have expressed in both words and actions that it's a better idea to add a poor and often embarrassing lyric to a tune than to allow the music to stand on its own. My strong opinion here is that the wasted opportunity comes from allowing an inane and simplistic lyric to distract from the original hipness of a composer's work.
I'll grant that it's a bold step to program an entire set of wordless vocal jazz music, and it's a concept that works much better for a professional group like Vertical Voices LIVE than it would for most school groups. But I'm a big advocate for school groups at all levels of experience occasionally using wordless vocal to grant their audience members the opportunity to conjure their own stories from the emotional content of the notes, rhythms, dynamics, articulations and all-around musicality. It's a big challenge that is quite separate from the experience of artfully delivering a lyric, a challenge that I find hugely important in our art.
Think for a moment about the history of wordless vocal jazz (sometimes referred to, inappropriately for our genre, as "vocalese"). Off the top of my head, I quickly recall the Hi-Los' recording of "Some Minor Blues", a kind of darkly swinging tune consisting of only syllables and featuring some great dynamic contrasts. The tune has a clear cool jazz sound, and Gene Puerling, the composer and arranger, pairs the singers with horns, highlighting the clear connection between the two categories of musicians.
Puerling used wordless vocal a few times with The Singers Unlimited, including the innovative and lush charts "Strong Ground Seven" and "One More Time, Chuck Corea." There's a clear influence here on our Vertical Voices concept, with the singers stacking their voices, with and without rhythm section backing, to create a quickly moving soundscape impossible to create by any other means.
The Real Group sings wordlessly on several of their recordings over the years, including "Flight of the Foo Birds," on which they emulate the Count Basie Orchestra, and one version of "A Child is Born," which they present very simply using few different vowel sounds, to great effect.
The great and highly influential New York Voices are no stranger to wordless vocal techniques, and they've performed at least one no-lyric chart over the years in "Baroque Samba". The most informative element of wordless vocal that NYV contributes in their discography, though, is their stylistic nuance and under-pronounced approach to the syllables. This technique is put to good use by educational and professional vocal jazz groups across the globe.
Pat Metheny's use of vocalists over the years has been an incalculable influence on Julia and me. Similar to how Maria Schneider began using female voices after Julia sang under her direction at The University of Miami and later with her orchestra in New York, Pat's concept for voice in his compositions has been about the organic emotional quality supplied by singers at just right moments, even though the main features are, of course, the guitar and piano, for the most part. In bringing Richard Bona into the Pat Metheny Group starting with the album "Speaking of Now," Pat allowed the vocal element to play a slightly larger role, including the use of Bona's layered vocals on one track, and having him sing undoubled in large portions of a couple other tracks. Pat has also used two male vocalists to great effect, notably on the big buildup portions of "First Circle", "Minuano" and the climax of "The Way Up." One of Metheny's collaborators, the Brazilian Nando Lauria, employed wordless vocal multitracking in the beautiful "Episode: Prelude", a short piece that serves to introduce "Episode", an instrumental piece.
Not to be forgotten, of course, are the educational vocal jazz writers who have gone the abstract route in both advanced and beginning-level charts. One of the first writers to whom I was exposed was Dan Gailey at the University of Kansas. He hasn't written a wealth of vocal jazz charts, but because of his mostly instrumental background, his taste preferences lean toward the wordless in vocal jazz. Since he was my first vocal jazz ensemble director in 1996, and because I immediately loved his writing and his taste in music, my own interest in the art form was seeded deeply and thoroughly. Dan was really my first arranging teacher, and my second was Paris Rutherford of the University of North Texas. Paris' vast catalog of vocal jazz charts (many hundreds, surely) includes, I would guess, more than thirty wordless vocal arrangements. He's favored this technique particularly in bebop charts, but has used it well in more contemporary styles occasionally. It's important to note about Paris that his interest in and dedication to great lyric, notwithstanding his use of wordless vocal at times, is notable. He believes in using lyrics with integrity as much as possible, avoiding the banal and easy choices, and in rehearsal, a large percentage of his instruction deals with the proper and effective delivery of the lyric, or as he often refers to it, the "story".
Roger Treece (most recently notably in his work with Bobby McFerrin in the landmark album "Vocabularies", but also going back more then twenty years) and my good friend Greg Jasperse have been two hugely influential forces behind this movement towards the acceptance and wider use of wordless vocal writing techniques. Treece's "Yatra Ta" chart (a Tania Maria original) is engaging and exciting, and "Border to Beyond," although an actual chart is tough or impossible to locate, is one of my favorite vocal jazz charts of all time. All time, people. Jasperse, not to be outdone, though, has capitalized on this device perhaps more than anyone else in our field through his franchise of beautiful, soaring, polyphonic, lush and surprisingly singable "VoiceDance" compositions, which, I believe, may have seven in the series. They've been picked up broadly by jazz choirs, traditional choirs and show choirs around the world, and they've influenced other writers like Kirby Shaw (unapologetically copping the style in his "Joy Sounds" chart), Jeremy Fox (who evokes much of the same spirit and even cops a few syllable combinations from Greg in his "Wings to Fly") and, of course...yours truly.
I did the math somewhat recently and discovered that ten percent of my catalog is wordless. That's surely far more than average for people in my profession, but it's no strong statement that I refuse to use lyrics, or that I have some kind of aversion to them. I simply prefer to take musical content that comes from a more instrumental basis and set it in the vocal jazz realm without superimposing an explicit story on the music, forcing the audience into one way of thinking about it (depending on the depth of the would-be lyric, I suppose). There are exceptions in my catalog..."Midnight Voyage" is a Brecker tune to which I added a lyric and vocalese on Brecker's solo. At the time I was writing it, I hadn't written a vocalese before, and I just felt the device would work well on the solo, and I had a story in mind that I wanted to write about. I also had Christine Guter hanging out with me at the time, offering to help me come up with the words. I'll happily admit that we didn't come up with the best poetry in history for that tune, and that's part of why I'm uneasy about performing it or hearing it performed. There are also originals that I've written that do have original lyric of mine, and these come from real inspiration about their topics at the moment. "Strange New World" tells of a close family member's struggle with depression and illness, and "In This Time" was written during a period of searching for my worldview and coming out of a religious part of my life into a more scientifically-minded part, which, I'd like to think, continues today. My lyrics on "The Seekers" are pretty corny, and they're kind of about the same thing as "In This Time"...the lyrics don't flow very well, and I'm not too proud of them, but some have liked them.
Julia has written what I think are beautiful and moving lyrics on a few of my charts. "Widow's Walk" tells a heavy story of a woman living alone after her husband of many years passes away. "Radiance" is inspired by the struggle of a young girl against brain cancer, and it makes me tear up or fully weep every time I hear it. Since Julia takes careful time to write her lyrics, and because she has developed her craft through practice over the years, she's able to communicate deep and evocative ideas. I respect that greatly, not just in her, but in anyone (like Ben Folds, for example) who can dedicate themselves to it. But when people just quickly throw together lyrics because they're afraid of writing a wordless vocal chart (or because they think it breaks some essential "rule"), the result is often clumsy, corny, awkward and difficult to cope with as a listener. I'd rather hear doo day any day.
Coming next... Part 2: A non-controversial panel discussion with a controversial name, some amazing vocal jazz performances, and a great hang.
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