Racism explains why white interpreters such as Bing Crosby, Mildred Bailey, and The Boswell Sisters were pivotal in getting pop audiences to see jazz as palatable. This does not imply that their performances were deficient or compromised but speaks to the cultural mindset of the time. Racism also speaks to why singers like Holiday and Fitzgerald were routinely given novelty songs at the beginning of their careers rather than quality standards that would permit a wider range of emotional depth and expression. Racism cannot be discounted from the common knowledge that a figure as talented as Billy Eckstine never garnered the commercial or exposure or the film or television opportunities offered to white peers because the society rejected a black man as a cross-racial romantic icon. As one of the first vocalists to lead a bebop orchestra and to integrate bebop techniques into his singing his contribution to vocal jazz is monumental.
Yet Perry Como, Andy Williams, and Dean Martin, whose musical innovations are slight comparatively, became television staples and massively popular recording artists. Just as albums regarded as "classic" can fail to age well and defy their reputation, albums viewed as "notorious" or "controversial" can warrant a second chance. Country legend Tanya Tucker's alleged pop crossover set TNT exemplifies this issue.
After six years of recording Southern Gothic songs Tucker, who had turned 18 recently, wanted a change. She switched to manager Jerry Goldstein, moved to California, and sought out a newer, sexier, younger sound and image. Though many people dropped their jaws at the cover image of a leather clad Tucker holding a microphone in her hand unsubtly snaked between her legs, as well as the back cover where she leers at the camera in a red leather jumpsuit holding a stick of dynamic, the music was mostly good.
The new tunes ranged from the growling "Lover Goodbye" to the sappy original "I'm the Singer You're the Song" are somewhat dated. More promising was its one hit "Texas " (#5 country charts) a rollicking country-rock singalong tune well-suited to her persona. The essence of the album, however, was the finest rendition yet of John Prine's "Angel from Montgomery" and superlative covers of the rock n' 'roll classics "Not Fade Away," "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," and "Heartbreak Hotel." These are great songs interpreted with brains and gusto. Had she made a full-fledged rock 'n' roll cover album (as John Lennon did on 1975's Rock and Roll) instead of blending rock with country-MOR mush she could've legitimately repositioned herself as a full-time rocker. She nearly did on 1979's Tear Me Apart a rock set produced by Australian glam rock producer Mike Chapman.
Alas, it had no hits and she floundered at Arista Records before returning to more palatable country hit material on 1986's Girls Like Me. Had the country audience been more open Tucker might have blazed an innovative rock flavored approach to country, one that other country artists, like Dwight Yoakam and Garth Brooks, have embraced openly since then. The Florida born Ray Charles grew up exposed to many types of music including gospel, jazz, and country.
After establishing himself as one of the pioneers of soul music in the late 1950s Charles took a seemingly 360 turn by recording an album of classic and contemporary country hits associated with Eddy Arnold, Don Gibson, The Everly Brothers, and Hank Williams, among others. Though this seemed as far removed from his soul, jazz, and blues roots he proved how versatile great songs could be. Whereas he recorded classic versions of Cundy Walker's "You Don't Know Me" and Don Gibson's "I Can't Stop Loving You" in a lush countrypolitan style elsewhere he took greater risks. He reinvents "Bye Bye Love" and "Hey Good Lookin'" as swinging brassy big band tunes, and recasts "Just a Little Lovin' " from a laidback ditty associated with Eddy Arnold to a horn-spiked shuffle with a strong backbeat. Though industry people had their doubts about this radical departure "I Can't" hit #1 on the pop, R &B, and easy listening chart, "You Don't Know Me" placed in the top 5 on all three charts, the album hit #1 (14 weeks!) on the pop chart and he won a Grammy. More importantly, his success expanded perceptions of what country music was and who could perform it successfully for generations.
Charles followed it up with the 1962's highly successful Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music Volume 2 and 1965's Together Again. Like 2001's Ken Burns' Jazz there's incessant discussion of music as a national metaphor via country music's "mix" of cultures but the racial equity argument never quite holds. Burns draws much needed attention to overlooked Grand Ole Opry harmonica player DeFord Bailey and Rufus "Tee-Tot" Payne's influence on Hank Williams, the radical disruption of Ray Charles's seminal Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music album and the requisite attention to Charley Pride . The film also includes Hootie frontman-turned-country phenomenon Darius Rucker and Rhiannon Giddens as younger black talking heads. Unexplored are the ways black singers like Solomon Burke, Etta James, Millie Jackson, Esther Phillips, Bobby Womack, Dorothy Moore, and Aaron Neville incorporated country music into their repertoires.
Or the unique career of Dobie Gray who pioneered country-soul with 1973's Drift Away and Loving Arms albums. Though the film's focus on country music through 1996 rules out discussion of more recent country artists of color including Kane Brown and the ubiquitous "Old Town Country Road" country-rap hybrid song no one probes why there has not been a major black country singer since Pride. The film's blandly optimistic investment in stylistic mélange as proof of racial unity mutes the specter of naming white exclusion explicitly as a defining aspect of country. We have all been pulled in by a catchy melody or swelling chorus of a song even when we've recognized the sentiments as cliched or silly.
For people who consider themselves discriminating listeners "guilty" pleasures are occasional indulgences not a commitment. The music industry is mostly immune to subjective matters of "taste" beyond an interest in what will sell. The tools that have enabled artists to market themselves independently, including MP3 technology, social media sites, and YouTube, have made it easier for artists to operate with autonomy. But record companies remain a formidable force in shaping the popular musical landscape. Because of record industry politics and social segregation black vocalists of the pre-rock generation had to speak multiple musical languages.
They needed a sound that resonated with the consumers who purchased records at independent black owned record stores. This sound did not necessarily need to be gospel, blues, or jazz-oriented—attested to by the popularity of Johnny Mathis on the R&B charts, for example—but it meant the black audience was typically the first stop before black artists could hope to cross over. This versatility meant that black artists had their feet in multiple places to cover their bases and build an audience. This explains why black audiences seem less skeptical of "jazz" singers recording material beyond the Songbook canon compared to a lot of jazz and traditional pop music critics.
The rise of rock 'n' roll, which was shaped by R&B, and aspects drawn from country music and blues, threatened the commercial dominance of Broadway and film music. The dominant song publisher of the pre-rock era, ASCAP, deeply resented the 1950s era commercial rise of "ethnic music" and "regional music" whose copyrights were mostly held by rival publisher BMI. The enduring legacy of the "threat" is the retrogressive effort by gatekeepers to distinguish certain musical forms over others via the lens of "preservation" or "appreciation." This is not a benign practice. Rather, it draws rigid distinctions between the past and the present by using exclusionary notions of what is "great" and "not great" through culturally and musically biased lenses.
As such, the songs these preservation efforts want audiences, especially younger audiences, to embrace seem irrelevant, fixed, and dead; the province of people nostalgic for a long gone past. What's needed are fewer "American Ambassadors" and more globally minded bridge builders. Though he is best known for his Tony-Award winning role as Aaron Burr in Hamilton and as a featured player on the NBC series Smash, Odom showcases his pop savvy on this delightfully eclectic collection of songs. Modern without sounding generic or anonymous he finds his own groove in varied, textured musical settings. Informed by swing jazz, contemporary R&B, and modern pop he sings about love, social justice, and the demands of everyday life in full command of his formidable vocal range. Whereas many musical theater artists struggle with pop music settings he is uncommonly versatile and appealing in his approach.
If her audience found her shift from country-rock and pop to pre-rock popular songs abrupt she really threw folks for a curve on 1987's Canciones de mi Padre. Having defied all logical odds with the sales of her standards albums her record company reluctantly allowed her to record an album in Spanish steeped in the mariachi music tradition. Though Ronstadt's father was Mexican and she grew up singing Mexican folk songs, she was perceived as "white" and few knew that Lola Beltrán was one of her idols. Ronstadt worked with Mexican violinist and composer Ruben Fuentes on this sparkling set of rancheras and huapangos.
In the context of Fuentes's stirring arrangement Ronstadt's voice has never sounded as full or expressive. Though it only rose to #42 on the pop album chart it has sold 2.5 million copies making it the biggest selling non-English album in U.S. pop music. The response was so strong she hosted the musical special Canciones de mi Padre through PBS's Great Performances series and won a Primetime Emmy for her impassioned vocal performances .
Carmen's favorite album of all time was Stevie Wonder's 1976 masterpiece, Songs in the Key of Life. Wonder spent over a year working on the album, which appeared as a double album with a four song EP. A pivotal album for popular music, it was the first album by a U.S. artist to debut at number one on the albums/LP charts, won four Grammys, including Album of the Year, and has influenced generations of artists. "Sir Duke," "I Wish," "Knocks Me Off My Feet," "As" "Isn't She Lovely," and "If It's Magic" would uplift any album as single recordings. Carmen recognized the album's vibrancy most poignantly on Wonder's epic ode to the power of love, "As" which she often quoted and sang in a very lively fashion. You will find vocal jazz, pop, blues, rock, gospel, R&B, and a lot of music that defies categories.
I appreciate both jazz singers who honor the past and those who experiment with repertoire and arrangements. I enjoy the ways R&B singers add textures constantly to the genre, and express themselves in concept suites. Though digital singles and anthological listening have largely edged out albums and linear, conceptual listening the album form remains a satisfying mode for engaging with artists intimately. I arrange the 50 albums by year and have bolded the titles that stand out most to me.
The rise of rock 'n' roll in the mid-1950s slowed down the dominance of showtunes and movie songs in the pop mainstream but standards never went away. Most jazz singers had their commercial peak as album sellers during the first few years of rock 'n' roll ( ). In the 1980s cabaret singer Michael Feinstein capitalized on the renewed interest in standards, as did jazz pianist and vocalist Harry Connick Jr. During the decade, singers from the rock generation, such as Linda Ronstadt, Maria Muldaur, Maureen McGovern, and Carly Simon began recording albums of standards.
Natalie Cole, Boz Scaggs, Rod Stewart, Cyndi Lauper, Queen Latifah, and Bob Dylan followed suit in the 1990s and 2000s. She was a jill-of-all-trades; a quality she shares with Alexandria and Lynne that is underrecognized. Comparatively, critics sometimes fawn over white singers who sing a blues tune. For proof, read Friedwald's frequent gushing over Peggy Lee, who is not much of an R&B or blues singer, or his praise for Jo Stafford's tepid 1959 album The Ballad of the Blues.
The underlying presumption is that black singers are more "naturally" comfortable singing blues songs, so it bears no mention, whereas it is lauded as unique achievement for white singers. Vocal jazz histories commonly focus on pioneers and innovators such as Louis Armstrong, The Boswell Sisters, Billie Holiday, Fitzgerald, Washington, and Vaughan, to name a few obvious choices. The path of singers outside of the pantheon are, of course, far more representative of the pathways of jazz-oriented singers especially as R&B, rock 'n' roll, rock, soul, and hip-hop reshaped mainstream popular music. Three singers whose careers overlapped the transition of vocal jazz to the rock era were Alexandria, Lynne, and Staton. In addition to his vast repertoire, sly humor, and penchant for the blues, Cole was also an unabashed romantic.
No one currently singing pop music sang with the wide-eyed sense of appreciation and love in their tonal choices on ballads. In surveying the range of songs he has sung since the early 1990s I'm struck by the near randomness of the songs. Alan and Marilyn Bergman wrote "Love Makes the Changes" for him because they were so impressed by his singing.
A listener can never go wrong hearing Cole as he has recorded many ballad-heavy sets, and hearing him sing romantic ballads is a unique kind of bliss. You almost take it for granted that he is going to do the right thing with every song and you're correct. After listening to the Freddy Cole Quartet play live, I sought out every recording I could find in physical form and streaming services. This list included his "comeback" This is the Life, 1997's To the Ends of the Earth, 1998's Love Makes the Changes, and 2010's Freddy Cole Sings "Mr. By the mid-1960s, however, the boundaries between black and white music, and adult and teen music grew more rigid. Black popular music became far more associated with R&B and soul which created a dilemma for emerging singers steed in multiple fields.
Franklin famously struggled to find a sound and an audience at Columbia during her six-year stint until recording in a more R&B focused style at Atlantic. While soul music became her signature style other singers of her generation straddled the soul and jazz worlds with more mixed results. One of our most intimate connections was a shared love of music, film, theatre, the visual arts, and literature. Here, I reflect on our mutual passion for music in various forms—pre-rock popular standards, radio hits, Broadway and Off-Broadway repertoire, film songs and beyond. Whether cruising in a car, or lounging around the house, music always filled the atmosphere.
Some of our most memorable adventures have included seeing Rent performed in Washington D.C., watching performances of Sunday in the Park with George and Sweeney Todd during a 2002 Stephen Sondheim revival, and hearing jazz vocalist Diane Schuur sing out in Bethesda, Maryland, among others. It's important to share some of the contents of these conversations so they are not lost. Below, I walk through "Carmen's Playlist" to illuminate an important dimension of her life. His taste is a lynchpin of the film, but two things stuck with me as the film concluded.
First, one of the more telling moments in the film is a "quality control" meeting where Davis and a room of record executives listen to different mixes of songs to determine which pieces of the recordings should be combined to foster the most commercially successful rendition of a song for radio. This disturbingly literal pseudo-scientific approach to a medium that listeners may associate with "fun" illustrates the calculated attitude about audience tastes and represents the proliferation of bland formula pop. Second, Davis's most important legacy is his emphasis on having a "hit" single. But since albums no longer sell as they once did, and people feel freer to download or stream singles his approach seems antiquated. Pop music ate itself gradually by overcharging consumers for CDs and creating a bloated web of promotional machinery.
Though the digital revolution has never fulfilled some of its utopian aims for connectedness it gave musicians and audiences options that have chipped away at the top down structure of the industry. Davis's endurance notwithstanding, his approach seems more like a reminder of the immediate past than the future of pop music. The film's title alludes to some imagined populist camaraderie between the audience and the music Davis "gave" us by the memoir's title is more accurate—it's all about him we're just meant to consume. While Broadway and Hollywood largely shunned composers from diverse backgrounds, swing, bebop, urban blues, and proto-R&B music were blossoming and providing venues for composers outside of Broadway and Hollywood.
While jazz-oriented music dominated the record industry well into the mid-1950s R&B became the more common musical lingua franca for black listeners. R&B allowed performers like Louis Jordan and Dinah Washington to expand their impact in the jazz and R&B worlds. Swing jazz, and other pre-rock informed generations of singers who began recording in the 1950s and 1960s, including Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye. But the rise of soul music offered new opportunities for black singers to create contemporary classics in a language more influenced by gospel than anything.
Another strand connecting our aesthetic is our disdain for overproduction and repetition. While technological innovations have expanded the tools available to record producers an avalanche of sound effects, often understood as "signatures" for superstar producers, tends to bury the musical heart of many contemporary songs. I have noted this trend on several nominees including songs by The Black Eyed Peas, Beyonce, and Justin Timberlake. While I'm not a proponent of the notion that acoustic music is "purer" or more musical—there are many artists who employ digital technology deftly—there's a latent anxiety in many recordings.
Aura trumps voices, and hooks are repeated with the numbing incessantness of a commercial. This tacit "branding" fosters a relentless genericism that makes singers seem increasingly irrelevant to the designs of production. Since his 2010 debut Water Porter has steadily established himself as the most thrilling and unpredictable male singer in vocal jazz. Rather than relying on traditional standards or vocalese he has dedicated his career to writing idiosyncratic songs that continually add layers to his dynamic personality on albums like Be Good and Take Me to the Alley .
He is one of the leading artists expanding the scope of what constitutes contemporary jazz. More than a vocalist or a songwriter he is an embodiment, a kind of irrepressible presence. On All Rise he draws from gospel, 1970s soul R&B, and jazz to advance an epic musical sensibility. The result is a kind of secular gospel of love almost overwhelming in its emotional uplift. Whether saluting deep romanticism ("Faith in Love"), recognizing everyday kindness ("Mister Holland"), or extending an olive branch to social outcasts ("You Can Join My Band") he is in full command of his robust baritone and blends effortlessly with sweeping yet tender choral arrangements. Blues, country, pop, R & B, and rock songwriters are typically the best interpreters of their music.
Many writers in these genres have been celebrated by other artists via tributes. Broadway and film composers, and many professional pop/rock composers, are often represented by "various artist" compilations and tributes since most are not performers. For Broadway composers cast recordings are an excellent source for the original versions of songs. However, the "songbook" interpretations of their songs by jazz, pop, and cabaret singers are usually the most relevant and compelling versions for popular audiences. Record executive Clive Davis, the subject of The Soundtrack of Our Lives, released in 2017 and now available through Netflix , stands tall among the classic "record company men" of the rock era who have influenced the machine.
