|
|
|
|
|
|
HOME | ABOUT | BIOS | EMAIL |
|
 |
| |
Friday, March 27, 2009
COME RAIN OR COME SHINE
Sarah Vaughan
Sarah Vaughan in Hi-Fi
Sony : 1949
[Buy It]
COME RAIN OR COME SHINE
Billie Holiday
1954
Available on : Lady in Autumn: The Best of the Verve Years
Polygram : 1991
[Buy It]
PINKY
Sarah Vaughan
Sarah Vaughan in Hi-Fi
Sony : 1949
[Buy It]
DO U LIE?
Prince
Parade
Warner Bros. : 1986
[Buy It]
This week, Prince released two new albums.
Today is Sarah Vaughan's birthday.
We will bring these two things together soon.
Sarah Vaughan would have been eighty-five today. She's been dead since 1990, taken after a short but painful battle with lung cancer. According to more than a few published accounts, she expired at home, in bed, while watching a television movie starring her daughter.
Of the three women generally considered to be the triple pillar of American jazz singing, Vaughan is usually my least favorite. Billie Holiday comes in first, almost always, and Ella Fitzgerald comes in second. Vaughan is third: not distantly, but definitively. I realize that this is an idiotic exercise, to take three people with vast and important bodies of work and rank them top to bottom like I am filling out a March Madness bracket. I apologize to them, their families, their spirits.
Sarah Vaughan is always praised for her voice, which I suppose makes sense, though it makes less sense to me when I am listening to her. Her incredible control, her vast range, her box (or is it bag?) of improvisational tricks, they're all indisputably impressive, but for some reason they leave me cold, or have generally done so. If I listen to Billie Holiday's version of "Come Rain or Come Shine" and then hers, one moves me and the other doesn't. For a while, I thought it was because Vaughan was following Holiday's more powerful original, but in fact the reverse is true: Vaughan's was recorded a full five years before Holiday went into the studio for Verve in 1955. Maybe the fact that Vaughan's such a virtuoso works against the song, which purports to be about powerful devotion but sounds like a song about romantic helplessness. Why would someone with ultimate power worry about having none? Holiday, on the other hand, is a more limited vocalist who makes the lyric -- and the song -- work the way it should. When she does away with the idea of contentment, it's heartbreaking:You're gonna love me like nobody's loved me
Come rain or come shine
Happy together unhappy together
Won't it be fine? Again, this is just me. I once lived with a woman who put the three women in a different order. For her, Ella Fitzgerald was first, Sarah Vaughan second, and Billie Holiday flat last. "Too mopey," she said with a showily dismissive flip of the hand. It hurt me to see her flip her hand that way, but what could I do? I had no choice but to stand by and watch it happen. To get back at her, I decided to dislike Ella Fitzgerald, and for many years I succeeded: she was too chipper, too cheery, too up. Sarah Vaughan hung in the middle, though. I tried to listen to her, tried often, never had much success. The one exception was instructional: "Pinky," which I loved because it was a wordless vocal, Vaughan's equivalent of "Dark Was the Night." I couldn't identify a lack of conviction in her performance because I wasn't sure what exactly she was trying to communicate.
This woman also hated Prince. Well, I should clarify. She loved Prince in the mid-eighties. Who didn't? Crazy people, maybe, or art directors. She was neither, and when I met her in the late eighties, she was still very much in love with Prince, and we would lay awake at night listening to "Something in the Water Does Not Compute" over and over again. She made me a tape with "Purple Rain" on it, even though I already had "Purple Rain." Who didn't? Crazy people, maybe. She stuck with Prince through "Around the World in a Day," through "Parade," through "Sign O The Times" and "Lovesexy." But then, all at once, she acquired the most dangerous thing a Prince observer can have: perspective. She saw through the ridiculous parts of the "Batman" soundtrack, and most of "Graffiti Bridge," and by then we were heading out the door, perhaps because she had also begun to see through the ridiculous parts of me. Her eyesight improved markedly as we hurtled toward separation. Once, very late in the game, I came home and she was in the bathroom with the door locked. I asked what she was doing. "Thinking how long I can do this," she said. I told her I hoped that was a euphemism for something fun. She didn't even laugh. "If you don't like it," I said, "I'm going to release it to everyone else as a euphemism." This time, there was a laugh, but a tiny one that I knew wouldn't be enough.
This week, Prince released two new records and I thought of this woman, wherever she was (is?). I wondered if she cared about the records, if she planned on paying [insert large amount of money] a year to subscribe to Prince's new Website or in standing in line at Target and buying them for [insert smaller amount of money]. I doubted that she did. I doubt that she does. I have heard the records, repeatedly, and as much as I want to say that I now see through the ridiculous parts of Prince, the fact is that I am as incapable of objective assessment as I was in 1989, when I spent the better part of the summer listening to the "Batman" soundtrack on an auto-reverse cassette player, over and over again. The new albums are not that good, and maybe they're not good at all, but they're Prince, and because of that, I'm somewhat powerless to do anything but love them come rain or come shine.
Does that bring the two things together? Not quite. Time works, when it works correctly, like auto-reverse, always moving forward but reliably returning you to the past. When I heard the new Prince records this week, there was a moment in one song that reminded me of a moment in another song. It's not a direct connection -- not a lyrical or musical one, but an impressionistic one -- and so there's no need to restage it. The song I was reminded of was "Do U Lie?" which was (is?) the second song on the second side of Parade, a moody ballad tucked between the album's two most massive songs, "Mountains" and "Kiss." When the album came out, a billion years ago, I did not know this woman I have been discussing. But when I knew her, the album was not yet old, and we played it the same way we played "Something in the Water Does Not Compute," late at night and often. It was on cassette, and sometimes after "Mountains" I would get up out of bed to fast-forward to "Kiss." She didn't like that, I suppose because she liked "Do U Lie?" After I had been stopped from skipping it a few times, I asked her why she liked it so much. "Sarah Vaughan," she said with a showily dismissive flip of the hand. I understood what she meant, to some degree. She was saying that it was Prince's attempt to mimic Vaughan's vocal mannerisms, especially at the end, when he sounds like he's practicing "Pinky" in the shower. (I release this to everyone for use as a euphemism: practicing "Pinky" in the shower.) But I misunderstood in another regard. I thought she was dismissing Prince for this affectation, or dismissing Sarah Vaughan (who was, after all, second in her bracket). A little while later, a little bit too late, I realized that she was dismissing me.Labels: ben, jazz, vocals
posted by Ben
LINK |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
