There is a story about Miles Davis that tells you something about the uneasy relationship between musicians and singers. Many years ago, as Lorraine Gordon, co-owner of that Manhattan landmark the Village Vanguard, recalls in her memoirs, Davis was in the middle of a residency when Gordon’s husband, Max, asked if he would accompany a promising new vocalist. Davis, brusque as ever, turned him down flat. “I don’t play behind no girl singers,” he rasped. And that was that. The young woman — whose name was Barbra Streisand — was left to search for other paths to glory.
In fact, Davis did make a point of championing the elegant singer-pianist Shirley Horn. But, by and large, the division he evokes, between serious-minded instrumentalists and decorative vocalists, still holds firm. Jazz history is sold as a succession of towering soloists — from Charlie Parker to John Coltrane — with most singers allotted the role of supplying the fripperies for the 52nd Street equivalent of the tired businessman. There are important exceptions to that broad-brush rule — Billie Holiday comes instantly to mind — but the critical consensus has been that the heavy lifting is done by the men with the horns and the pianos.
But is that really the case now? Coltrane, the last undisputed giant in the instrumental field, has been dead for nearly 40 years. Since then, jazz has stubbornly clung to its minority share of the listening public. Given the dearth of radio airplay and its near invisibility on mainstream TV, it is miraculous that the music has any public profile at all. Jazz musicians rightly point the finger at our obsession with celebrity culture and X Factor wannabes.
Yet what if the players themselves are partly to blame? What if they are failing to reach out to the potential audience? Such questions are seldom raised in public, which was why recent comments by the saxophonist Branford Marsalis in The New York Times made such fascinating reading. A member of America’s most famous jazz family — the trumpeter Wynton is his younger brother — Marsalis has led a curious dual career, blowing molten choruses in select clubs while also jamming with Sting and leading the house band on that late-night American institution The Tonight Show.
He has always had a reputation for speaking his mind, yet his remarks were astonishingly frank: “Musicians are always talking about, ‘Why isn’t jazz popular?’,” he wrote. “But musicians today are completely devoid of charisma. People never really liked the music in the first place. So now you have musicians who are proficient at playing instruments, and people sit there, and it’s just boring to them — because they’re trying to see something or feel it.”
Sad but, in many cases, all too true. Which is where singers enjoy an advantage. While the instrumentalists chase ever more abstruse combinations of chords, vocalists are left to build meaning out of that most basic element — words. Instead of seeing them as somehow second-class citizens, we need to encourage them to become the new avant-garde.
Look around the popular-music scene and there is an undeniable hunger for the virtues of grown-up songs. Which explains Michael Parkinson’s emergence as one of the important new tastemakers in jazz. “Will Parky play it on Radio 2?” is the question bouncing around countless record-company offices. The rise of Madeleine Peyroux, the American gamine with a gift for fusing Lady Day phrases with sensual blues-jazz riffs, owes much to what you could call the Parkinson effect. The broadcaster’s gastropub, the Royal Oak, set in the Berkshire countryside a few miles from his home, has become a kind of home-counties answer to Ronnie Scott’s, regularly playing host to hugely promising performers, including Clare Teal and the gospel-inflected American newcomer Lizz Wright.
Parkinson’s endorsement is no guarantee of success: for instance, despite all the airplay for the clean-cut American singer-pianist Peter Cincotti, his last album achieved disappointing sales. A promising, if slightly airbrushed talent, Cincotti had the misfortune to arrive on the scene at roughly the same time as the more rumbustious Jamie Cullum. Most purists loathe the young man from the West Country; much of his material, it has to be said, is closer to pop than jazz. But, at his best, the mischievous showman at least reminds us that, during its most productive years, jazz was an integral part of the entertainment industry.
Parkinson’s preferences reflect the tastes of the Saga generation, hence the bias towards adept but anodyne entertainers such as the big-band pin-up Michael Bublé, the Sinatra-style crooner Steve Tyrell and the technically flawless Jane Monheit. But there are edgier performers out there. Gwyneth Herbert and Lianne Carroll patrol the unmarked territory lying between pop and jazz, while one of the best of the newcomers is Cormac Kenevey, a young Irishman who bears the influence of Harry Connick Jr, yet possesses his own brand of beatnik charisma — as he proved during an imposing Soho club debut earlier this year. His first album, This Is Living, was released on Candid, the label that propelled Cullum into the limelight. The company’s owner, Alan Bates, a man with a shrewd eye, has also signed the mesmerising French vocalist Mina Agossi, a kittenish nonconformist who has created her own intelligent form of acoustic drum’ n’bass.
Agossi demonstrates that it’s possible to combine innovation and respect for the tradition, as does that rowdy, self-styled “dyke” comedian turned bopper Lea DeLaria. A DeLaria show is not for the faint-hearted: women sitting close to the stage are in danger of being subjected to serious french kissing. But beneath the burlesque exterior, there is an astute musical mind. An improviser who cites Coltrane as her prime influence, DeLaria is a long way from easy listening, yet on an album such as Double Standards, she shows that it really is possible to turn Blondie’s Call Me into an out-and-out swinger.
A much cooler presence, Norway’s Solveig Slettahjell has brought a pensive Scandinavian aura to a repertoire that ranges from Tom Waits to Cole Porter and John Hiatt. She plays the London Jazz Festival on Friday.
One of the biggest jazz acts in America, Cassandra Wilson, also appears at the festival tomorrow. Wilson, though, has been treading water of late, which is why I am much more excited about the arrival at Ronnie Scott’s later this month of that enigmatic, Chicago-based singer-pianist Patricia Barber. While Diana Krall has been deservedly cleaning up on the romantic front, Barber opts for much darker and more challenging material. (Gotcha, perhaps her best song, is a fantasy about a cheated wife’s thoughts of revenge.) Barber’s latest disc, Mythologies, is her most ambitious yet, a song cycle inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The notion sounds impossibly pretentious; she and her band transform it into a funky, bluesy triumph.
Two other Americans are busily making nonsense of traditional categories. Kurt Elling — many critics’ choice as the finest male singer around at the moment — blends poetry, urbane scat and laid-back standards. Meanwhile, Curtis Stigers, a 1990s pop idol who has brilliantly reinvented himself in the jazz-blues idiom, continues his mission to win over the more hidebound reviewers.
A commercial background has always aroused the suspicion of the jazz police, yet Stigers will, I suspect, win the battle in the long run.
None of this means that instrumentalists are redundant. Far from it. The point, though, is that the music as a whole needs to strike a better balance between self- expression and conservatory-level self-indulgence. Jazz is good at shooting itself in the foot, but to continue underplaying the role of vocalists would be the ultimate self-inflicted injury. Time, in short, to stop sneering about girl singers and give artists their due.
