Hilary Kole’s Vocal Style Overtakes Substance

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

After a few weeks of confusion, probably a side-effect of pandemic conditions, the latest album of jazz vocalist Hilary Kole has finally secured a page on Amazon.com. Sophisticated Lady is an eleven-track album devoted primarily to standards, with the title track introducing the album with one of Duke Ellington’s compositions. (To be fair, however, Ellington first composed this piece as an instrumental in 1932. Words were later added by Mitchell Parish; and that version, sung by Adelaide Hall, was not recorded until 1944 with Hall backed up by Phil Green And His Rhythm, rather than Ellington’s orchestra.)

That hiatus of about a dozen years should not be surprising. Bearing in mind that one seldom approaches Ellington in terms of a theoretical infrastructure, it is worth noting that Ellington had a prodigious command when working with sizable intervallic leaps; and “Sophisticated Lady” shows off that command at its best. However, if the tune itself is irresistible in its “sophistication,” it is a killer for vocalists, even those with rigorous classical training.

Kole’s Wikipedia page cites her attending the Manhattan School of Music but says nothing about when (if ever) she graduated. To be fair, however, she may not have graduated because, during her student days, she landed a gig at the Rainbow Room, which kept her busy six nights out of the week. Her successful command of the Great American Songbook led to subsequent bookings at the Blue Note, Birdland, and the Algonquin Hotel.

Nevertheless, readers may have noted that I can be very picky when listening to jazz vocalists. That is because, for better or worse, I expect any singer to make sure (s)he has nailed all the intervals (from the chromatic half-step all the way up) before adding stylizing tropes to the delivery. In that context, I have to confess serious disappointment in how Kole handles those aforementioned intervalic leaps in “Sophisticated Lady.” To be fair, her account of Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood” takes a somewhat more secure account of those intervals (unless one is listening for the lapses, for which I plead guilty-as-charged).

Some of the difficulty may be due to the arrangements. These were made by Chris Bryars, who plays a variety of wind instruments. On “In a Sentimental Mood” he is playing flute, which has its own share of problems when one needs to establish intonation. On the other hand his command of “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” on saxophone could not be more satisfying, while Kole’s approach to Irving Berlin’s intervals is even weaker than her approaches to Ellington; and, by the time the album closes with Richard Rodgers’ “The Sweetest Sounds,” she seems to have thrown any serious intentions regarding intonation to the wind.

The other instrumentalists are guitarist John Hart, pianist Adam Birnbaum, Paul Gill on bass, drummer Aaron Kimmel, and Tom Beckham on vibraphone. Whatever intonation difficulties Bryars may have had with this flute, his’ arrangements place all of these players in a perfectly good light. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, this is, after all, supposed to be a vocal album.

Falbo’s Comfort Zone in Times of Lockdown

courtesy of Kate Smith Productions

Chicago vocalist Josie Falbo began recording tracks for her new album, You Music Believe in Spring, in September of 2016. However, her sessions, which included working with a full orchestra of over 50 players, continued through this past April, which means that all thirteen on the songs on the album were not accounted for until after shelter-in-place had been imposed in response to COVID-19. Mixing was concluded the following May, and the album was released by Southport Records at the end of this past August.

Under current circumstances, one can call this album “the vocal equivalent of comfort food,” even if that was not the original intent of either Falbo or her Producer, Carey Deadman. Mind you, there is a healthy share of upbeat scat singing from Falbo; and Deadman’s arrangement of Clifford Brown’s “Joy Spring” serves up soaring intricacies worthy of Brown’s own trumpet improvisations. Still, it is the heartfelt interpretations of quietude in songs like the title track and Billy Strayhorn’s “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing” that endow this album with the power to provide psychological shelter in the midst of seriously troubling times. If there is any shortcoming, it arises during Richard Rodgers’ “Manhattan,” when Falbo does not quite get the acrobatics of some of the more eccentric rhymes that Lorenz Hart evoked to account for Manhattan geography. I suspect that only a “real New Yorker” can facilely deliver Hart’s wordplay with the right sense of humor.

Roger Kellaway is Back with Straight-Ahead Jazz

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

At the beginning of last month, Roger Kellaway celebrated his 80th birthday. As a professional musician and alumnus of the New England Conservatory of Music, Kellaway has had his thumb in more pies than I could possibly enumerate; and he has managed to pull any number of tasty plums from many, if not most, of them. Nevertheless, “Remembering You,” the closing theme for All in the Family may have been his best shot at mass recognition.

However, those of us more interested in serious listening, rather than mass appeal, will probably gain more from listening to Kellaway’s latest album, released by IPO Recordings. The Many Open Minds of Roger Kellaway consists of seven tracks recorded from performances at the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles. Kellaway is back in a straight-ahead jazz groove behind a piano keyboard, where he leads a trio whose other members are Bruce Forman on guitar and Dan Lutz on bass. As of this writing, Amazon.com is only distributing this as an MP3 album; and Google has not been particularly helpful in finding a source that is selling the album in a physical medium.

From the very first track, Kellaway seizes listener attention by going back to the basics of Thelonious Monk. Too many modern jazz artists have used Monk’s “52nd Street Theme” as “sign-off” music, meaning that too many listeners know the music through only one motif. (Grumbling about Miles Davis may now commence!) Kellaway’s trio deconstructs and reconstructs the full thematic richness of this composition, charging through the building blocks of the piece at a breakneck pace, the perfect way to get listeners on board for the diversity of selections that will follows.

The Monk track is coupled with music by one of his long-time colleagues. Sonny Rollins is represented with his tune “Doxy.” However, the overall scope of the album also reaches back to the book for Duke Ellington’s band, including one of Billy Strayhorn’s most familiar compositions, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and “Caravan,” which Ellington wrote in partnership with Juan Tizol. There are also instrumental accounts of two “songbook” selections, “Night and Day” by Cole Porter and “Have You Met Miss Jones” by Richard Rodgers. Finally, there is one selection from the Dave Brubeck book, Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.”

For my money listening gets most interesting when Kellaway and his colleagues are not afraid to exercise prolonged improvisation. “Have You Met Miss Jones” runs longer than ten minutes, while “Take the ‘A’ Train” exceeds the twelve-minute limit. However, even when durations are shorter, this album consistently explores how trio work can mine considerable inventiveness out of even the most familiar of tunes. The Many Open Minds of Roger Kellaway is definitely an album for any lister serious about the scope of jazz improvisation; and, however marketing may currently be trying to shape the very practices of listening, this is an album that deserves beginning-to-end listening attention for what it is, a document of a gig in Los Angeles that has now be preserved for posterity.

Palmetto Records will Release a New Live Recording of Fred Hersch at the Village Vanguard

Jazz pianist Fred Hersch (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

This Friday Palmetto Records will release a new recording entitled Sunday Night at the Vanguard, for which Amazon is currently taking pre-orders. The title refers to a session at the Village Vanguard in New York that took place this past March 27 featuring jazz pianist Fred Hersch leading a trio whose other members were John Hébert on bass and Eric McPherson on drums. Hersch has been a frequent visitor to my home town of San Francisco, most often appearing in concerts organized by San Francisco Performances (SFP), the most recent of which took place about a month before the recorded Vanguard session and presented the same trio.

One has to be careful in applying the adjective “cerebral” to jazz. Many think of the bad old days of the Third Stream movement, when Gunther Schuller tried to build a bridge between his experiences with some of the most adventurous composers of the twentieth century, particularly those coming up to speed following the Second World War, with his hands-on experiences of playing in equally adventurous jazz combos. (Schuller played French horn at the March 9, 1950 recording session for Birth of the Cool for the tracks that included the standard “Darn That Dream,” Miles Davis’ “Deception,” and Gerry Mulligan’s “Rocker.”) Others think of the introspective intensity that can be found in the recordings of pianists such as Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, and Cecil Taylor.

Hersch does not fall into either of these categories. However, he shares with pianists like Monk, Evans, and Taylor a keen sense of focused attention to every note he draws from his keyboard. He is not shy about taking familiar tropes from the bebop era as points of departure, but he never seems to have trouble conveying them in new directions. Thus, as I discovered at his last SFP gig, it is very difficult to listen to Hersch in performance without sitting on the edge of your seat, hanging on every phrase trying to figure out where he will next take his melodic lines. That may be the key to his cerebrations: Hersch approaches his keyboard as a pianist well-versed in counterpoint. Thus, he can let his bass player worry about establishing any sense of harmonic progression while he allows his melodic lines to superimpose and interleave in any number of imaginative ways.

The result is that none of the tracks on this album allow for what we might call “casual” listening. Even when the tune is as familiar as Richard Rodgers’ “A Cockeyed Optimist,” Hersch cooks up a rhetoric that is as remote from the pablum of a Broadway show tune as was John Coltrane’s take on “My Favorite Things.” Furthermore, even if we know that Sunday Night at the Vanguard is a “produced recording,” the attentive listeners among us can still reconstruct some feeling of the spontaneity of the session that had been captured for reproduction. The virtue of this album resides less in its “documentation” of a club date than in the extent to which the attentive listener can begin to imagine having been there at the Vanguard marveling at the in-the-moment immediacy of it all.

Learning to Listen to Ravel

During my formative student years, when I consumed everything voraciously without necessary savoring or digesting it, I cultivated a rather dismissive attitude towards Maurice Ravel. With my immature obsession with rank-ordering everything, he always seemed to fall short of someone else, whether it was George Gershwin's sense of jazz that he could never approach, or Claude Debussy for just about anything else, string quartet, orchestral color, or piano composition. Some of these feelings remain with me. I still have a hard time fixing my attention on the entirety of Ravel's string quartet, which I feel never really takes me anywhere. I have a similar problem with Gaspard de la Nuit: I cannot deny its virtuosity; but I have yet to grasp the "journey" in it that conducts me from beginning to end, whether in a single movement or over the entire suite.

In spite of all this baggage, I have discovered that, almost every time I set myself to write about a performance of Ravel on Examiner.com, my text always seems to take a positive direction. Most recently I encountered this last night at the San Francisco Symphony Opening Night Gala, which is about as far from an ideal listening experience as you are likely to get. Looking back on the whole affair this morning, I realized that the high point of the evening had been "La Valse." Perhaps this was just my way of restraining any tendency to praise Franz Liszt and Sergei Prokofiev (to say nothing of Richard Rodgers); but I think it also had to do with how dark this composition actually is and that it took a certain amount of courage for Michael Tilson Thomas to program something so sinister for such a festive occasion. I suspect it also had to do with my memory of how George Balanchine had realized this music through choreography as a Dance of Death and how, through the program notes by the late Michael Steinberg, I recognized that Balanchine's interpretation matched that of a composer who had been profoundly scarred by the First World War.

It may thus be that Ravel, like many other composers, is receiving much better performances today than he did 25 years ago, when intellectuals found it easy to dismiss the man and could never quite figure out how to talk about something like "La Valse." Perhaps Ravel's only sin in the eyes of those intellectuals was that, every now and then, he could latch on to a truly beautiful gesture; and any such invocation of beauty was dismissed as a betrayal of the cerebral. Thus, performers who now know how to respect Samuel Barber (about whom I wrote on Examiner.com this past Tuesday) may recognize that Ravel may be seen through the same lenses, which serve to enhance, rather than distort. I still encounter performances of Ravel that sell his music short, but they seem to occur less frequently these days. He has always had a significant place in the history of music, but performers seem to be acquiring a better sense of what that play is and how it may be presented through their performances.

Gil Evans' Bartók Connection

That passing reference to Gil Evans while writing about Porgy and Bess reminded me that it has been a while since I did some serious listening to Evans. On the Porgy and Bess album he had the chutzpah to supplement his arrangements of George Gershwin's music with an original composition of his own, "Gone," which is far more than a paraphrase of the music for Robbins' funeral scene in Scene 2 of Act 1 of the opera. This is symptomatic of the way in which Evans could turn the work of another composer into a new and original object. This was probably most evident in the way in which he reworked the second movement of Joaquín Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez," originally written for guitar and orchestra, for the Sketches of Spain album he prepared with Miles Davis. Less familiar may be "Song of our Country," recorded at the Sketches of Spain sessions but not released on the original Columbia vinyl. The title is the English translation of the subtitle of the second movement of the second of Heitor Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasileiras suites ("O Canto de Nossa Terra"); and Villa-Lobos is far better served by Evans' treatment than he ever was by the overabundance of hack adaptations (anyone remember Johnny Mathis?) of the aria from the fifth Bachianas Brasileiras suite.

More surprising, however, is when Evans moved away from Spain and Brazil and turned to Béla Bartók. This is a more subtle (if not downright concealed) adaptation, since it resides in the introduction to his arrangement of the tune by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, "Wait Till You See Her." The source comes from the introduction to the first movement of Bartók's "Concerto for Orchestra." Hopefully, one of these days some capable graduate student will get around to writing a thesis on Bartók's influence on jazz in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Given Evans' extensive literacy, finding that influence in his music is no surprise. More surprising may be accounts that John Coltrane used to practice by playing along with the opening measures of that same Bartók composition, which may well be where he got his idea for "Giant Steps." At the same time we find piano solos by Mose Allison with a strong Bartók influence (which I was able to confirm through a conversation with Allison "back in the day"). The middle of the twentieth century was an exciting time for both making and listening to music. Gil Evans was a champion of that time; and the recordings he influenced, both directly and indirectly, constitute a valuable legacy.

Fitting the Voice to the Space

The last time I reviewed a performance in the Schwabacher Debut Recital Series (run under the auspices of the San Francisco Opera Center), I discussed the problem of a singer who had not been particularly successful in scaling her operatic voice down to the intimacy of a recital setting. In yesterday's concert in this same series at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco, baritone Quinn Kelsey had no such problem with scale. There is no questioning the strength of his voice, wonderfully demonstrated this past fall both in the role of Marcello in the San Francisco Opera La Bohème and as the baritone solo in the San Francisco Symphony performance of Gustav Mahler's eighth symphony. Yesterday, however, he demonstrated that he was just as comfortable with smaller-scale settings, although he did not choose to diminish his interest in the dramatic in his selections for his program.
Three languages were represented by this program: English, German, and Russian. I do not know enough Russian to account for his diction in that language; but his English and German had the sort of splendid clarity that draws the ear to the words themselves, even when, as was the case with the selections by George Frideric Handel, the texts themselves left much to be desired (and probably had not occupied much of the composer's attention). Still, Handel could take texts that were, at best, "borderline ridiculous," such as John Gay's libretto for Acis and Galatea and Newburgh Hamilton's for Samson, and serve them up with a thoroughly sublime treatment. Kelsey clearly favored Handel's side of the story, using the energy of his settings to begin his recital with a dynamic opening.
From this point of departure he could turn to far better words in the hands of a composer with a keen sense of English poetry. The composer was Gerald Finzi, whom I know best from his settings of the poems of Thomas Hardy. Kelsey's selections, however, were from Let us Garlands Bring, whose texts are by William Shakespeare. I used to hear these from time to time back when XM Radio had their Vox channel, but I could not always follow the words on the recordings they broadcast. The combination of Kelsey's clarity and the texts in the program revealed the merits of Finzi's ear for setting Shakespeare, as well-tuned as that of any actor or director with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Finzi also had a nice trick of rendering nonsense syllables ("hey ding a ding a ding") in double-time, rather than letting them weigh down the import of the text that they embellish.
Finzi's faithful setting of Shakespeare's well-crafted way with words was followed by Mahler's hyperemotional setting of his own texts for his four Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. This is the young Mahler getting his act together (particularly since material from his cycle later emerged in two of the movements of his first symphony); and we are back in the domain of texts in dire need of rescuing by the music. Kelsey approached this as the mini-opera captured by the narrative that cuts across the four poems in the cycle. He also had no trouble letting us know that the protagonist of this opera is more than a little deranged at the very beginning of the first poem, after which the path is all down a precipitous slope. The standard opera repertoire rarely gives the baritone a chance for a mad scene, but the young Mahler did a good job of compensating for this lacuna! Kelsey had the dramatic sense to keep the overwrought texts from carrying him over the edge, but he was also not afraid to unleash some raw emotions to give those texts the impact they deserved.
In this performance particular credit must also be given to accompanist Peter Grunberg. This cycle fares much better in its orchestral setting, but Grunberg clearly had a keen ear for that setting. He knew how to bring out the most important details even when limited by his piano keyboard, and the result was a performance as effective as any orchestral performance I have heard.
The intermission was followed by a different kind of song cycle, the Songs and Dances of Death by Modest Mussorgsky. This is the first time I have heard these four songs in a recital, although I worked on some of them when accompanying a baritone friend of mine back in Los Angeles. There is a bit of a pun in the title, since Death appears as a character in each of these songs. Thus, they are not so much about Death as they are performed by him. The author of the texts, Arseny Arkadyevich Golenishchev-Kutuzov, was clearly very sympathetic to this Death-as-character; and Mussorgsky captured this sympathy in what are four decidedly different emotional settings. Once again this was an opportunity for Kelsey to exercise his dramatic training through opera, endowing each of the songs with the uplifting spirit behind the texts. It was the sort of performance that makes one wish this cycle was heard more often.
The encore, on the other hand, has been heard so much that it is always right on the brink of cliché. It was "Some Enchanted Evening," from Richard Rodgers' score for the musical South Pacific. People who know this show only from the film and subsequent revivals may not know that this song was originally written for Ezio Pinza, who, in his time, may well have been the quintessential Don Giovanni. It would be unfair to expect that Kelsey would be channeling Pinza in this encore; but he endowed this song with the straight reading of a respectful baritone with little care for its inferiority to the standard repertoire. This made for a good encore choice. However sympathetic a character Death may have been, this selection provided a touching way to relieve the hall of his presence.

A New Voice in San Francisco

I spent the better part of the day at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, since a Graduate Piano Recital at 11 AM was followed by a San Francisco Performances event for which I had purchased tickets at the beginning of the season. This latter performance was the final event in their "Young Masters Series," consisting of the San Francisco debut recital of mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard. Ms. Leonard certainly deserves to be called a "young master," since she has already made her Metropolitan Opera debut (as Stéphano in Charles Gounod's Roméo et Juliette) and has sung Zerlina in the Chicago Opera Theater production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don Giovanni and will sing Cherubino this summer in the new Santa Fe Opera production of Le Nozze di Figaro. Nevertheless, the circumstances of her schedule make her new to San Francisco.

Her selection for a program was particularly interesting. For one thing all the selections fit within the span of a single century, although that century happened to begin in 1890. For another it was refreshingly polyglot, with songs in Spanish (Joaquin Nin and Manuel de Falla), German (Hugo Wolf and Arnold Schoenberg), French (Reynaldo Hahn), Russian (Serge Rachmaninoff), and English (Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Meredith Wilson, and Richard Rodgers). I tend to be skeptical about opera singers venturing into both cabaret songs and show tunes. However, Leonard did both (Schoenberg providing the cabaret repertoire) and pulled it off more than effectively, first by recognizing that these songs were not the same as the other "art songs" on the program and second by endowing her performance with a level of theatrical smarts that was neither too much nor too little.

Since some of that skepticism came from my recently recorded impressions of Heidi Melton's Schwabacher Debut Recital last month, I should also observe that Leonard did not have that problem of scale that had frustrated me at the Melton recital. The Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music is on a scale comparable to the Temple Emanu-El auditorium (the site of Melton's recital); but Leonard had a good sense for how to project into this space without overwhelming it with an intensity intended for a full-sized opera house. Indeed, she was so good at maintaining a proper level of energy that she had enough strength at the end of the recital to give three encores, two of which featured music that she had prepared for Roméo et Juliette and Don Giovanni. Those theatrical smarts also cultivated a well-understood sense of the diversity of the program she had prepared, which made for a much broader sense of variety than I had experienced at the Melton recital.

When programs are so diverse, I tend to dwell, as I did in writing about Melton, on those selections that are personal "old favorites" (usually associated with memories of first hearing them at recitals during my concert-going days in Manhattan). The "old favorites" that Leonard offered to me were six selections from Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch (which I had the joy of hearing performed in its entirety at one 92nd Street Y recital) and Falla's Siete canciones populares españolas (for which, at the latest count, I have two recordings). Leonard had an excellent feel for the Falla songs, which are definitely "art songs" rather than "popular songs," that feel being one of an almost impetuous spontaneity. There was less of that variety in the Wolf selection, but she still endowed each song with a distinctive personality. These "old favorites" helped whet my appetite for the works that were unfamiliar to me and left me hoping that Leonard will be returning to San Francisco for further performances in recital, with the San Francisco Opera, or with the San Francisco Symphony.