The Boswell Sisters: Temporary Fame, Longstanding Loyalty

[mjzee]

On Oct. 9, at Snug Harbor here, the vocal trio Duchess reached a point in the middle of a number when the arrangement called for an abrupt tempo change—and all of a sudden the three singers up front realized that they were going one way while their rhythm section was going another. Singer Amy Cervini waved the band to stop and told the crowd, “Tempo changes were one of the Boswell Sisters’ signatures.” Then she added, “We have no idea how they did it!”

There’s a lot about the Boswell Sisters that people don’t know, even those who have studied their music and career for decades. For five years at the start of the 1930s, the Boswell Sisters were perhaps the most popular musical group in the country, and to this day they are ranked among the most important vocal-harmony ensembles in all of jazz. They dazzled Depression-era audiences not only with their telepathic stop-and-start arrangements (likely the product of their classical music training), but their bluesy cadences, luminescent vocal blend, and—most of all—their freewheeling interpolation of jazz techniques, essentially rendering irrelevant the boundaries between composition, improvisation and interpretation. They did for group harmony what Bing Crosby did for popular singing and Louis Armstrong for jazz improvisation.

Full article here: WSJ, or Google the article title "Temporary Fame, Longstanding Loyalty"

[sgcim]

Donald Fagen wrote a chapter on them in his recent book "Eminent Hipsters".