Remembering Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald by Carl Van Vechten. Source: Beinecke Library, Yale University

Ella Fitzgerald died twenty years ago today. She was the most versatile singer of the 20th century, a vocal virtuoso with perfect pitch. Her band reportedly tuned up their instruments to the sound of her voice. Ella Fitzgerald expressed the pantheon of human emotion with a clarity so acute she became the voice of postwar America and "the First Lady of Song." She was a flawless vocal tactician with the range of an orchestra. Fitzgerald could make her voice sound like the blaring of a trumpet, the plinking of piano keys, or the tsk of the high hat.

Every song she sang became an absolute truth. In Summertime, when she sang "your father is rich and your mother is good looking," that lyric became a statement of fact.

Her contemporaries had immense strengths as singers, but Fitzgerald was able to combine all their best traits and create magic. She had Dinah Washington's emotional heft and smoothness, Carmen McRae's gift of interpretation, and Nancy Wilson's light touch with a lyric. Ms. Fitzgerald sang with an enchanting confidence and easy manner. Tony Bennett still works in her style, sauntering through the world of Pop deploying a charm out of time with the unearned hauteur required of contemporary singers. 

Ella Fitzgerald was always the coolest person on stage. When she performed duets with Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, men known for their easy banter and confidence, they had to work up to her level of nonchalance.

Ms. Fitzgerald has been gone for twenty years, but her legendary voice is still here, a mesmerizing delight. 

Links for the Voracious

Some things old and some things new from across the Internet


Music

"A young jazz audience is such a rarity, in fact, that it's become a kind of holy grail for presenters. So how does Jarasum do it?"

How a Korean Jazz Festival Found a Huge Young Audience

Source: Bailey Rebecca Roberts via inthesetimes.com

"I'm creating hip-hop songs from a Lakota perspective and looking at the way my ancestors framed our songs, whether that be a pow wow or ceremony song. They're short, powerful phrases repeated. Something I love about Lakota music that's very important to me is the drums; you just hear it and know you're home."

Native American Rapper Frank Waln Talks Decolonization and "Dirty Sprite 2"

Mariachi Flor de Toloache- NPR Tiny Desk Concert

Source: newyorker.com

"How does a Berklee hotshot halfway to an EGOT end up playing keyboards on a tribute to a melting pot, spend half a decade working to eliminate its weak spots, and find himself sitting at the right hand of a juggernaut?"

Nerding Out with Hamilton Musical Director, Alex Lacamoire

“As I progressed from being a student to a professor who teaches and writes about popular music culture, I’m always after some recreation of my own experiences as a listener. Making selections for a course syllabus isn’t all that different from DJing; in both cases, you’re thinking about the mix."

Personal History: Riot Grrrl Radio

“Influenced by Kraftwerk, electro, Bambaataa, Italo disco, George Clinton, new wave, and post-disco boogie (essentially everything they heard the Electrifying Mojo play on his radio show), Detroit techno soon became way more popular overseas than it ever was at home."

10 Classic Techno Records for People Who Don't Know Shit About Techno

"We need a better conception of Americana, one that is polyglot and profoundly more varied than the dueling banjos of country and blues."

The South Stole Americana

“What I want to do is explore what songwriting means to me, what it is that is going to be my contribution to the music world at large other than interpretation. Because I know I’m always going to be an interpreter. That is something I do well and is something that is important not to lose sight of, but I also feel like I do have a voice to be heard. I want to make sure that there’s something really important being said.”

Learning Curves and Musical Curiosities: An Interview with Rhiannon Giddens

The Passionate Listener

Rainy Day Soul

Bettye LaVette's True Grit

Bettye LaVette is a soul survivor. She is the greatest living R&B singer most people have never heard. LaVette's deep, rapturous voice excels at portraying the anger and pain of love gone wrong. She sings with the passion of a woman who understands the tenderness of falling in love and the bitterness of breaking up. LaVette released a hit single "My Man- He's a Lovin' Man" in her teens and chased the fame of her first record for the next forty years.

 

The moment before Bettye LaVette walked on the stage at the 2008 Kennedy Center Honors, she would have been remembered in the history of R&B as a footnote. That night she sang "Reign Over Me" in celebration of Kennedy Center honorees The Who. Her performance brought Pete Townsend to tears. Roger Daltry was mesmerized. Fellow honoree Barbra Streisand was engrossed by Bettye's re-defining rendition of The Who classic. The moment the last note left her lips, Bettye LaVette's career was reborn.

 

The reversal of fortune decades in the making is the central story of LaVette's memoir, "A Woman Like Me." With the help of David Ritz, she recounts the experience of having an incredible voice that turned heads with a career that went nowhere. The memoir is an honest remembrance of a life full of bad luck, terrible choices and missed opportunities. She is not shy. Bettye is open about her sexual exploits and fundamental enjoyment of weed and booze. Her candor includes sharing her plain-spoken support of domestic violence. "I realize it's politically incorrect to admit this, but the sight of a man slapping a woman did not horrify me. Context is everything. In the context of the Detroit showbiz culture of the sixties, men slapped their women around. They just did. It may sound radical to say so, but some women needed that. Some women even benefited from that." Her faulty logic on domestic violence would be welcome in a conference of pimps and human traffickers.

Bettye Jo Haskins became Bettye LaVette when she asked a singer named Ginger LaVette if she could have her last name. With her new name, Bettye LaVette took to the clubs of Detroit and fell in love with the music and culture of the R&B scene. "In music-crazy Motor City, no one was crazier for music than I was." Her encyclopedic memory provides an invaluable history of Motown and those Motown adjacent that cannot be found anywhere else.

LaVette's memoir is filled with fascinating and dramatic encounters. The characters in her world rose to the level of cinematic archetypes. She described her first singing mentor Johnnie Mae Matthews as "looking like Humphrey Bogart after a bad fight. She had cuts up and down her face, and forearms as big as Popeye's. Ugly as sin, but she had a voice that could shatter glass." Her lifelong friend Marrie Early lived an independent and sexually liberated lifestyle Bettye craved. "Marrie was queen of Miami, a city that didn't even like blacks. But there was no man- black, white, or orange- who didn't like Marrie. Of her many wonderful qualities, the best was her freedom. She was free to fuck whomever she wanted, and her lover was free to do the same. ...She was the first single woman I'd met with her own house." The various men in her life also left a mark in her prodigious memory. Some supported her financially. Robert Hodge "basically got me through the nineties," LaVette wrote. Others abused her. The first line of "A Woman Like Me" provides a vivid illustration of the terror Bettye LaVette endured at the hands of a pimp.

For those acquainted with LaVette in the 1960's the sight of her at The Kennedy Center Honors must have been a shock. Bettye continued to play small clubs in Detroit when Motown headed to Los Angeles. The remaining R&B scene was busted. Every attempt she made to gain a foothold in the music industry fell apart. LaVette had a decade’s long run of what she called "buzzard luck.”  Buzzard luck was an unrelenting streak of misfortune. Her mother died, her sister died, recording sessions didn't pan out and promised record deals never materialized. She was shut out of royalties. Her career was a piecemeal collage of small club gigs, a short-lived TV show in Detroit, a traveling production of the musical “Bubbling Brown Sugar,” and help from her friends.

 Bettye LaVette's resilience proved to be as powerful as her voice. "Luck had never seemed to go my way, and I'm not sure it was luck that turned the tables. I'd credit the change to pure tenacity. I was simply too headstrong to quit." A lifetime of buzzard luck could not stop Bettye LaVette. "A Woman Like Me" ends in triumph. There was no other option.

 

 

The Passionate Listener

The Bird (my eldest kid) and I listen to a lot of music together. Our drives to school this week have been dominated by Koko Taylor and Dionne Warwick. On the way home it has been Johnny Cash every afternoon. Listening to music together is a fundamental part of our family life. There isn't any censorship of content or hierarchy of genre. The musical relationship the Bird and I have is an extension of the way I learned to appreciate and love different kinds of music as a kid. Music was everywhere and part of everything. There was R&B, Soul and Rock & Roll. My mom had a love for Standards she embedded into my soul. When visiting her family in the Caribbean, Soca and Country played all day. The only break was the news on BBC World Service. At home with the Mexican side of my family, Rancheras and the songs of the mariachi filled the days. On Saturday mornings, my aunt cleaned the house while listening to Pedro Infante and Juan Gabriel on the hi-fi. Before I could choose music for myself, my elders' musical tastes became the soundtrack of my life.

The musical foundation of my childhood bloomed into a teen love of LA Hair Metal, New Wave and Rap. College was all about Classic Rock. I am dabbling in Opera now and coyly flirting with Bluegrass. The Blues has taken over my life.

There is always more music to consume the heart and fill the ears. Every so often, I'll share a short list of the music that's making me happy in a post called 'The Passionate Listener.' Here is the first installment:

Carmen McRae 'Ms. Jazz'  is one of my all-time favorite musicians. The Passionate Listener could only begin with her.  

Miles Davis Quartet opening for Grateful Dead, 1970 Fillmore West.

 

 

I don't understand a word they are singing, but thy are feeling the song and so am I. Bryn Terfel, Judith Howard, Marcelo Alvarez, and Denyce Graves are the singers.

 

 

'Oya' and 'Mama Says' by Ibeyi because one song is not enough.

 

 

 

 

 

The healing waters of Koko Taylor Chicago Blues are a balm for the soul.

 

 



 

 

 

The one and only “Chente,” Vicente Fernandez.

 



The diva in repose

"Stand Up Straight and Sing!" A memoir by Jessye Norman

The cover photo of Jessye Norman’s memoir "Stand Up Straight and Sing!" is glamorous. Her luminous face is set in mid-expression. The image seems to capture her singing the last note of something special. The book cover tempts the reader to immerse herself in the life of this singular artist.

For the opera lover there are many Jessye Normans. She was the diva whose flawless voice embodied the diverse pantheon of operatic heroines and villains. She was the marvel who performed France’s national anthem 'La Marseillaise' at the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Resplendent in a tri-color couture gown inspired by the French flag, Ms. Norman sang to a live audience of millions in Paris. Unfortunately, opera fans will not find many delicious details or behind-the-scenes stories about the world of classical music in "Stand Up Straight and Sing!.” Ms. Norman only provides very light sketches of her work with James Levine of the Metropolitan Opera and other conductors. After watching Ms. Norman in Julie Taymor's inventive production of Oedipus Rex, reading a more substantive reflection of the production from her would have been invaluable to the discussion of aesthetics in classical music productions. The most intriguing opera related story in the book is about Ms. Norman helping a friend and fellow singer defect from East Germany.

 

 

 "Stand Up Straight and Sing!" is at its best when Jessye Norman shares stories about her upbringing in segregated Augusta, Georgia. Tales of growing up in a middle-class black community in the Jim Crow South are not commonly documented in memoirs. She writes with love about her dedicated parents and credits them with setting expectations that have defined her approach to living: "Be conscious of one's choices, resolute in one's beliefs, and always maintain integrity and a work ethic that demands concentration and focus." Even in the midst of a loving community Norman could not escape the horrors of the times. She recounts the story of a black man executed for raping a white woman. According to Norman, the man and woman were caught by the police having consensual sex in the man’s car. The woman feared the consequences of having her interracial relationship exposed and claimed she was raped. The man was arrested, tried, convicted and executed by electrocution. The woman was broken by her lover's fate. “She would later be found wandering around various African American churches throughout Augusta on Sunday mornings, asking for forgiveness for what she had done; she could not find peace. When she found her way to a church, she was allowed to speak, as was anyone who wanted to stand up and testify before a congregation, whether it was to give thanks for the help that a grandmother received during her illness, or for being hired for a new job. Still, when this woman finished her apology and begged for forgiveness, the church was often silent as there was no discussion.”

Living in a segregated environment and under laws that conferred second-class citizenship upon her did not deter Jessye Norman. In addition to her parents and elders in her community, Ms. Norman found strength and inspiration in Marian Anderson. Ms. Norman writes about Ms. Anderson's concert at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday 1939 with reverence. Marian Anderson had been denied the right to sing at Constitution Hall by the Daughters of American Revolution. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt organized the concert at the Lincoln Memorial in protest. Ms. Anderson's first song was a scathing rebuke of the idiocy of American racism. She sang “My Country Tis' of Thee.”

 “Stand Up Straight and Sing!” is Jessye Norman’s testament to her phenomenal life.

Carmen McRae: Ms. Jazz

Credit: Tom Copi- Michael Ochs Archive/ Getty Images

 

When Carmen McRae died on November 10, 1994, she was remembered as one of the greatest singers of the 20th century. "With [Ella] Fitzgerald and the late [Sarah] Vaughan, Miss McRae formed the troika of female American jazz singers," the Los Angeles Times reported. She wasn't as well known as her two counterparts, but she was adored worldwide by her legion of dedicated fans. The jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason described her style this way: "Carmen McRae sings the lyrics like Laurence Olivier delivers Shakespeare."

 

 

For Ms. McRae singing was an immersive experience. "Every word is very important to me," she said. "Lyrics come first, then the melody. The lyric of a song I might decide to sing must have something that I can convince you with. It's like an actress who selects a role that contains something she wants to portray."

 

Ms. McRae recorded over 35 albums full of elegant, magisterial singing. In her Los Angeles Times obituary, Ms. McRae was quoted as telling friends, "I don't want a funeral. I don't want flowers. All I want to be remembered for is my music."

 

 

 

Thinking about Nina Simone

 

Nina Simone occupies a unique cultural space that cannot be claimed by any other musical artist, dead or alive. She is the patron saint of the lover and the fighter; the musical touchstone for the heartbroken; and the survivor. She was a master singer of standards and love ballads, and songs of protest. Those protest songs- Mississippi Goddamn; Strange Fruit; To Be Young, Gifted, and Black- helped galvanize the cause for civil rights around the world.

"My job is to somehow make them curious enough or to persuade them by hook or by crook to get more aware of themselves and where they came from and what is there, just to bring it out. This is what compels me, to compel them. And I will do it by any means necessary."

- Nina Simone: That Blackness

The choice to stray from love songs and popular themes cost Ms. Simone her career. There were years of exile in Barbados, Ghana and Liberia. She finally returned to public life in France in the 1980’s. Ms. Simone conducted interviews that allowed her to frame her own history. She spoke openly and passionately about her career to that point: the dreams of classical piano dashed; her rise as a singer of love songs; becoming an icon of the Civil Rights Movement; and ultimately the swift rejection by the majority of her fans.

In an expansive interview with British journalist Mavis Nicholson, Ms. Simone spoke about the great disappointment in her career:

"It is only normal to want acceptance from one's country, for one's gifts God has given me. And I am tired of begging for it. It took me twenty years of playing clubs, nightclubs, to get a decent, real accurate review of my gifts from the New York Times. It was the first time I had been compared to Maria Callas as a diva. All before that I had been labelled a Jazz singer, a Blues singer, High Priestess of Soul; which I am not sure what that is and I have studied piano for eighteen years.  Yes, I am tired. I am too old, asking for love from the industry."

Ultimately, a 1987 Chanel No. 5 commercial featuring her hit song “My Baby Just Cares for Me” re-ignited interest in her music, garnering her the love she desired and deserved.

Eighty-two years after her birth, Nina Simone remains a beatified presence in the cultural consciousness. Every time a person discovers her music, an angel gets its wings.

 



Links for the Voracious

Sometimes you don't know what you don't know. This informative piece about 18th century black fencers is fantastic.

 

When a few pictures of rooms full of books is not enough, there is bookshelf porn.

Dynamic Africa on the African influences on the cumbias of Latin America.

 

Orlando Jones (Captain Frank Irving on Sleepy Hollow) is writing, producing and plans to star in a movie about Ted Patrick, the 'father of deprogramming.’

 

Classic Ladies of Color tumblr posted a sweet 2003 video of Graciela Grillo, the ‘First Lady of Latin Jazz,’ talking about being a musician in the 1930’ and 40’s. Graciela was the first female star of the genre. She died in 2010 at the age of 94.

 

 

 

Missy's rertun

Missy Elliott's performance during the Super Bowl halftime show last Sunday was a joy to experience. It was a reminder that her music is still fresh despite her long absence. Missy’s influence on today’s hip hop can be heard in the cadence of Nicki Minaj and Kendrick Lamar. Before twerking became a sign of the impending apocalypse, Missy's dancers were doing it and nary a pearl was clutched. Hopefully the Super Bowl show was a test run for Missy Elliot's return to the music world.

 



 



 

 

Playlist

Feel like dancing. Here’s a Sunday night dance party mix. Big Freedia rocks it so nice, she is on the list twice.

Janelle Monae- Q.U.E.E.N. featuring Erykah Badu

Big Freedia- Excuse

Santigold- Disparate Youth

Ru Paul- Peanut Butter featuring Big Freedia

Fela Kuti and Afrika 70- Zombie

Remembering Lady Day

Source: Down Beat magazine, February 1947

Today is the 53^rd anniversary of Billie Holiday’s death. She died in a hospital in NYC at the age of 44, supposedly with $750 strapped to her leg. Ms. Holiday lived a tragic life of degradation and abuse. She could sing the blues because she lived them. No other popular singer in the English language has been able to express the depths and harrowing pitch of sadness like Lady Day. Her ability to embody and share the pain of living in song came from experiences so horrifying they almost seem unreal. She was forced into prostitution by her mother as a child, dropped out of school at the age of 11 and served at least three stints in juvenile detention facilities. We celebrate her talent and lament that it was destroyed by addiction. We don’t recognize that her ability to get up every day and live with the terror of memory was a feat of courage.

Her music touched people so deeply because she was not alone in experiencing melancholy so damaging it would make you want to get high, or at least forget entire parts of your existence.  

Lady Day will not be forgotten. May her soul be at rest.

"Good Morning Heartache"

"I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm"

"A Fine Romance"

Nina Simone Sunday

It is that time again. Enjoy.

"Four Women"

If you can't get enough of Aunt Sarah, Safronia, Sweet Thang and Peaches, The Black Girl Project is selling  "Four Women" t-shirts. The Black Girl Project shop also has t-shirts for sale of your favorite real and fictional black heroines.

"I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl"

"Cotton Eyed Joe"

Nina Simone Sunday

Nina Simone had a singular voice; lush and deep with a bit of a warble.  She was an incredibly talented songwriter and musician. Ms. Simone also had an unparalleled ability to transform beloved songs from Standards to Classic Rock.

In celebration of this gifted artist, enjoy these three songs she made her own.

“Suzanne”

“I Loves You, Porgy”

“Don’t Let Me Be Understood”

Music and Television: My Favorite Band is a Work of Fiction

The band I want to listen to everyday only exists in the fictional New Orleans of the HBO show ‘Treme.’ Antoine Batiste and His Soul Apostles bring the funk to every soul who craves it. When Ms. Wanda Rouzan, a goddess of New Orleans R&B joins the band, they cannot be touched by any band, even one in the real world.

Anotine Batiste and His Soul Apostles, Slip Away

Music: Vicente Fernandez

Vicente Fernandez is a disciple of love. He is consumed by its nuances and extremes. He sings of joyous exuberant love and of the torrent of pain and misery experienced by a lover betrayed. For those damned by jealousy or carrying the weight of unrequited love, Mr. Fernandez knows your heart. In his world love will prevail. There is no alternative.

 Here are three songs of love by Vicente Fernandez.

Volver, Volver

Miedo

El Ultimo Beso