Vocalese: Does it please?

[fasstrack]

6 minutes ago, duaneiac said:

Well, a lot of lyrics are not conversations, but monologues (internal or otherwise) -- and some great monologues at that:  "It Never Entered My Mind", "My Foolish Heart", "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?", "Crazy He Calls Me", "Last Night When We Were Young".

Some songs are one-sided conversations:  "Change Partners", "One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)", "For All We Know", "What's New?", "Too Young To Go Steady"

Some songs incorporate conversation into their structure, such as "Is That All There Is?" or "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face" which was written to be as easily spoken as sung since Rex Harrison was no singer.

Great lyrics are great lyrics and some stand quite nicely on their own as poetry -- perhaps not "literary" poetry, but poetry nonetheless..  For example, on the face of it, "My huckleberry friend" has absolutely no meaning, but I think each of us can attach our own meaning to it and that's one goal of poetry.

Very good points. One of my favorite lyrics is from These Foolish Things: 'The winds of March that made my heart a dancer'. Also, I'm not sure I understand all of Send in the Clowns, but the imagery is so strong it gets me every time.

I would add to your list perhaps the greatest internal monologue IMO: It was a Very Good Year.

 

Edited November 17, 2015 by fasstrack

[Larry Kart]

It's a little over the top in spots, but Strayhorn's lyric for "Lush Life" is quite something IMO. Cole Porter could be so perfectly direct and speech-like, e.g. "What Is This Thing Called Love?" I love the way that lyric is bonded to the music; you can't say the words without summoning up just how they're set. "In the Still of the Night" is pretty special, too. Ann Ronnell's lyric for her own "Willow Weep for Me" is perfect, especially as interpreted by Sinatra.

[JSngry]

Yeah, you catch somebody talking to themselves like that...they're crazy, and/or a simp. Singing to themselves like that, it's ok.

I was born in 1955, so here's my huckleberry friend, for better or worse. I wonder what he's singing!

[fasstrack]

15 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

It's a little over the top in spots, but Strayhorn's lyric for "Lush Life" is quite something IMO.

I don't find it over the top at all. From a 22-year-old who also wrote the masterful Something to Live For around the same time this is genius writing. Lush Life is the perfect saloon song for its interior monologue.

Edited November 18, 2015 by fasstrack

[Larry Kart]

20 minutes ago, fasstrack said:

I don't find it over the top at all. From a 22-year-old who also wrote the masterful Something to Live For around the same time this is genius writing. Lush Life is the perfect saloon song for its interior monologue.

Maybe "over the top" isn't the right term, but I do think the rhyme between "awful" and "trough full" is rather precious. Yes, indeed, to "Something To Live For."

[AllenLowe]

"waffle"

[JSngry]

Falafel!

[duaneiac]

And I wonder how many singers who have never actually read the lyrics have sung "distingue traces" as "distant gay traces"?

[JSngry]

You tell me which one he's singing. I can't tell for sure, but...hmmmm.....

 

Truthfully, either one works, and "distant gay traces" is at once more evocative and less precious, I think. A little faux-Franco sophistication goes a long way, and we're getting a week in Paris anyway.

 

[fasstrack]

52 minutes ago, duaneiac said:

And I wonder how many singers who have never actually read the lyrics have sung "distingue traces" as "distant gay traces"?

I thought it was 'distant gray traces' for years.

[fasstrack]

51 minutes ago, JSngry said:

You tell me which one he's singing. I can't tell for sure, but...hmmmm.....

 

Truthfully, either one works, and "distant gay traces" is at once more evocative and less precious, I think. A little faux-Franco sophistication goes a long way, and we're getting a week in Paris anyway.

 

As an aside, the only drag about that recording is the end ('of those whose lives, etc') where McCoy plays chromatic sharp nine chords instead of the beautiful contrary motion Strayhorn wrote. If it ain't broke.....

[JSngry]

More than compensated for, imo, by McCoy's lovely voicings elsewhere (on both this song and the record as a whole)...and the changes in general they use for every song. Listening to that record focused strictly on the Tyner/Garrison harmonic interaction is a reward unto itself!

Leave it to Mingus, though - he incorporated the parallel motion thing at the end of "Duke Ellington's Sound Of Love" to magnificent effect. Has that song become a standard yet, and if not, why?

[fasstrack]

19 minutes ago, JSngry said:

More than compensated for, imo, by McCoy's lovely voicings elsewhere (on both this song and the record as a whole)...and the changes in general they use for every song. Listening to that record focused strictly on the Tyner/Garrison harmonic interaction is a reward unto itself!

Leave it to Mingus, though - he incorporated the parallel motion thing at the end of "Duke Ellington's Sound Of Love" to magnificent effect. Has that song become a standard yet, and if not, why?

It's a great record. That was my only disappointment.

[JSngry]

Hey Joel - do you by any chance play "Duke Ellington's Sound Of Love", either on your own or with others? That's such a great piece...and Jackie Paris sang some pretty bad words to it, by Mingus himself, so nobody to blame this time but the originator.

It should be a "jazz standard" by now, a few people have done it, but it's a long-ish form, and not everybody wants to work that hard on a one-nighter, if you know what I mean...but damn, what a song.

 

[fasstrack]

2 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Hey Joel - do you by any chance play "Duke Ellington's Sound Of Love", either on your own or with others? That's such a great piece...and Jackie Paris sang some pretty bad words to it, by Mingus himself, so nobody to blame this time but the originator.

It should be a "jazz standard" by now, a few people have done it, but it's a long-ish form, and not everybody wants to work that hard on a one-nighter, if you know what I mean...but damn, what a song.

 

Can't say I do.

[JSngry]

Exquisite:

Unfortunate:

I mean, I so feel the meaning and intent, but as sung lyrics...yikes!

I'll pimp for this song gladly and willingly from now until the end of time. Suppose i could post the transcription I did in 1978 or so, but it's in pencil and has gotten smudged over the years. That, and I was still green as hell and can't guarantee that some subtleties weren't missed.

Whatever - It's available legit and correctly, so do the right thing as far as this thing.

Just play this song, somebody, anybody, anywhere, everywhere.

not gonna blame Jackie Paris, though, that cat could go deep, like, to the place where you don't generally want people to know that you have, even though everybody has it, whether they'll admit it or not.

"I don't need to buy love, you're a slave to my love"...and more...this is one case where singing it is just as creepy as saying it. Not bad creepy, just, you know, kinda real, ain't it...

[fasstrack]

Sorry to say this is getting to be routine. Heard another cringeworthy vocalese lyric expertly performed. This time the victim was Charlie Parker's Quasimoso. The performer, I'm very sorry indeed to say, was a singer and woman I've great respect for: Sheila Jordan.

I'm really beginning to think it's me.

[JSngry]

You need it, you need it.

This would have worked fine with a little crispier phrasing. Nat Cole would have killed it.

Interesting tale here: http://www.jazzstandards.com/compositions-1/yardbirdsuite.htm

After Parker’s death in 1955 a legal battle over his estate was pursued by his common-law wife and the mother of his children, Chan Parker, and his previous wife, Doris, whom he’d never divorced. “Summons were served on sixty-nine incredulous and indignant persons and firms in the phonograph record, concert bureau, booking, and music publishing industries....”

Some of his compositions had been sold outright and others were in the public domain and not copyrighted because Parker had never executed the Dial contract authorizing the publishing company. It was a mess, and this explains the discrepancies between the performance dates and copyright dates of Parker’s material. It also suggests that he did not copyright his lyric for “What Price Love?”

Therefore, confusion surrounds the lyrics of “Yardbird Suite/What Price Love?” In his book Visions of Jazz: The First Century, Gary Giddins says that Parker himself wrote a lyric: “‘Yardbird Suite’ [is] perhaps Parker’s most lyrical composition, and one for which he also wrote a lyric (he called the vocal version ‘What Price Love?’)” In his 1990 performance at a Parker tribute (available on DVD as Tribute to Charlie Parker), vocalist Jon Hendricks announces to the audience that the lyric for “What Price Love?” is Parker’s (in the second line Hendricks sings “my” instead of “one’s):

It’s hard to learn
How tears can burn one’s heart
But that’s a thing that I found out
Too late I guess,
Cause I’m in a mess.

Vocalist Sheila Jordan, who knew Parker, told JazzStandards.com that she learned the lyric from a 1948 recording by Earl Coleman, the first singer to record “What Price Love?” Woideck says, “This piece is best known in its instrumental incarnation, but in the 1940’s, singers Carmen McRae and Earl Coleman learned the lyric from Parker.”

McRae performed “Yardbird Suite” often and originally recorded it on her 1955 album By Special Request. However, in the liner notes to a 1991 compilation (Here to Stay) of her early Decca recordings, Dick Katz recalls that on March 12, 1955, he was on stage with Carmen when she performed the song around midnight at Carnegie Hall. “Later we learned that Bird had died that night, perhaps while Carmen was singing Eddie Jefferson’s vocal setting of his tune.” But the lyric which she sang was Parker’s own.

 

[fasstrack]

7 minutes ago, JSngry said:

You need it, you need it.

This would have worked fine with a little crispier phrasing. Nat Cole would have killed it.

Interesting tale here: http://www.jazzstandards.com/compositions-1/yardbirdsuite.htm

 

 

 

Unmoved, still. It's definitely me...

[JSngry]

I kinda like the "What Price Love" thing, they're straight up pop lyrics to a melody which can sure work as one. Sounds like Bird even intended such. Everybody's looking for that hit for the bank, ya' know.

[mikeweil]

On 17.11.2015, 01:20:27, GA Russell said:

Thanks for the tip, Mike! 

I see that that box is much less expensive on amazon.uk than on amazon.com  Have you found the cheapest price on the net?

I ordered from JPC for € 49,99, free shipping; I get 5% discount from them on this price. No idea how the current exchange rates are ...

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Going back to the question of whether poets can/do write good songs, over breakfast I was listening to an instrumental version of ‘Speak low’ and, perusing the sleeve notes, was surprised to find that my all time favourite poet – albeit an extremely  peculiar one, Ogden Nash – wrote the words. So I looked him up in Wiki and found that he wrote the words to two Broadway musicals:

One touch of Venus, with Kurt Weill, in 1943 – the show from which ‘Speak Low’ comes; and

Two’s company, with Vernon Duke (some of the songs written by Duke & Sammy Cahn), in 1952.

Apart from ‘Speak Low’, I’ve never heard of any of the other songs from those shows. I wouldn’t have thought that Nash’s general technique, which exhibits a very odd sense of rhythm, though it’s not a-rhythmic, was at all suitable for writing songs, but ‘Speak low’ has terrific words, which work as well as a song as they do as an Ogden Nash poem. Just don’t look for hilarity.

Speak low when you speak, love

 Our summer day withers away too soon, too soon

 Speak low when you speak, love

 Our moment is swift, like ships adrift, we're swept apart, too soon

 

Speak low, darling, speak low

 Love is a spark, lost in the dark too soon, too soon

 I feel wherever I go

 That tomorrow is near, tomorrow is here and always too soon

 

Time is so old and love so brief

 Love is pure gold and time a thief

 

We're late, darling, we're late

 The curtain descends, everything ends too soon, too soon

 I wait, darling, I wait

 Will you speak low to me, speak love to me and soon

 

Time is so old and love so brief

 Love is pure gold and time a thief

 

We're late, darling, we're late

 The curtain descends, everything ends too soon, too soon

 I wait, darling, I wait

 Will you speak low to me, speak love to me and soon

 Speak low

 

That’s somewhat typical Ogden Nash versifying; those uneven lines of his have a different time from other poets’. Consider:

When called by a panther

Don’t anther.

Or:

Parsley

Is ghastly.

Ogden Nash is mainly known for his humorous poetry, but that song ain’t humorous by ANY measure; it’s downright miserable. But not all of his poems were funny, or intended to be:

Why did the Lord give us agility

If not to evade responsibility?

Well, if you were ambushed in the night by Tom Lehrer’s songs as a youth, in particular ‘When you are old and grey’, you might well at first blush think those two Nash lines were meant to be funny but failed.

An awful debility,
A lessened utility,
A loss of mobility
Is a strong possibility.
In all probability
I'll lose my virility
And you your fertility
And desirability,
And this liability
Of total sterility
Will lead to hostility
And a sense of futility,
So let's act with agility
While we still have facility,
For we'll soon reach senility
And lose the ability.

With those 16 lines always in the back of one’s mind, misinterpretation of Nash is not hard. But Nash was making an untypically serious point (while Lehrer was making a serious attack on conventional songs, through humour).

As I was thinking about these two songwriters, it occurred to me to wonder why jazz vocalese words didn’t use Nash’s rhythmic techniques, and in particular, why they aren’t, at least sometimes, hilarious. I can’t think of any funny jazz vocalese I’ve heard. Is there such a thing? Some Fats Waller records are hilarious so it’s not forbidden for jazz to make one laugh, but why is it done so seldom? Vocalese SHOULD provide a heaven-sent opportunity for humour. Well, I think it actually does, but jazz singers don’t take advantage of it. Are they all miserable sods? I can't believe that.

MG

[fasstrack]

On ‎11‎/‎20‎/‎2015‎ ‎5‎:‎34‎:‎46‎, The Magnificent Goldberg said:

Going back to the question of whether poets can/do write good songs, over breakfast I was listening to an instrumental version of ‘Speak low’ and, perusing the sleeve notes, was surprised to find that my all time favourite poet – albeit an extremely  peculiar one, Ogden Nash – wrote the words. So I looked him up in Wiki and found that he wrote the words to two Broadway musicals:

One touch of Venus, with Kurt Weill, in 1943 – the show from which ‘Speak Low’ comes; and

Two’s company, with Vernon Duke (some of the songs written by Duke & Sammy Cahn), in 1952.

Apart from ‘Speak Low’, I’ve never heard of any of the other songs from those shows. I wouldn’t have thought that Nash’s general technique, which exhibits a very odd sense of rhythm, though it’s not a-rhythmic, was at all suitable for writing songs, but ‘Speak low’ has terrific words, which work as well as a song as they do as an Ogden Nash poem. Just don’t look for hilarity.

Speak low when you speak, love

 Our summer day withers away too soon, too soon

 Speak low when you speak, love

 Our moment is swift, like ships adrift, we're swept apart, too soon

 

Speak low, darling, speak low

 Love is a spark, lost in the dark too soon, too soon

 I feel wherever I go

 That tomorrow is near, tomorrow is here and always too soon

 

Time is so old and love so brief

 Love is pure gold and time a thief

 

We're late, darling, we're late

 The curtain descends, everything ends too soon, too soon

 I wait, darling, I wait

 Will you speak low to me, speak love to me and soon

 

Time is so old and love so brief

 Love is pure gold and time a thief

 

We're late, darling, we're late

 The curtain descends, everything ends too soon, too soon

 I wait, darling, I wait

 Will you speak low to me, speak love to me and soon

 Speak low

 

That’s somewhat typical Ogden Nash versifying; those uneven lines of his have a different time from other poets’. Consider:

When called by a panther

Don’t anther.

Or:

Parsley

Is ghastly.

Ogden Nash is mainly known for his humorous poetry, but that song ain’t humorous by ANY measure; it’s downright miserable. But not all of his poems were funny, or intended to be:

Why did the Lord give us agility

If not to evade responsibility?

Well, if you were ambushed in the night by Tom Lehrer’s songs as a youth, in particular ‘When you are old and grey’, you might well at first blush think those two Nash lines were meant to be funny but failed.

An awful debility,
A lessened utility,
A loss of mobility
Is a strong possibility.
In all probability
I'll lose my virility
And you your fertility
And desirability,
And this liability
Of total sterility
Will lead to hostility
And a sense of futility,
So let's act with agility
While we still have facility,
For we'll soon reach senility
And lose the ability.

With those 16 lines always in the back of one’s mind, misinterpretation of Nash is not hard. But Nash was making an untypically serious point (while Lehrer was making a serious attack on conventional songs, through humour).

As I was thinking about these two songwriters, it occurred to me to wonder why jazz vocalese words didn’t use Nash’s rhythmic techniques, and in particular, why they aren’t, at least sometimes, hilarious. I can’t think of any funny jazz vocalese I’ve heard. Is there such a thing? Some Fats Waller records are hilarious so it’s not forbidden for jazz to make one laugh, but why is it done so seldom? Vocalese SHOULD provide a heaven-sent opportunity for humour. Well, I think it actually does, but jazz singers don’t take advantage of it. Are they all miserable sods? I can't believe that.

MG

'The curtain descends, everything ends too soon, too soon...' That's great writing. Isn't he the guy that wrote:

On Icebreaking

Candy is dandy

but liquor is quicker

[Larry Kart]

Eileen Wilson (dubbing for Ava Gardner) and Dick Haymes sing it in the film version. A bit creepy to see the inherently creepy Robert Walker ("Strangers on a Train") opposite Gardner:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UluAL7GMPWw

[medjuck]

2 hours ago, fasstrack said:

'The curtain descends, everything ends too soon, too soon...' That's great writing. Isn't he the guy that wrote:

On Icebreaking

Candy is dandy

but liquor is quicker

I always thought it was Dorothy Parker but according to Google you're right.