R&B singers, many of whom received their early training in church choirs, invariably have perfect diction (“R-E-S-P-E-C-T!”). One of my only quibbles with Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” a wonderful song by just about any measure, is that despite Cee-Lo’s great performance, he elides the endings of some of the most emphatic words. He was out of “touch,” but not because he didn’t know “enough.” Opera singing, on the other hand, is tough enough: you have to make a physically demanding sound, fill a hall with it, unamplified, and still make it beautiful, convey emotion. Besides that, you have to have fluent diction in, at least, Italian, German, French, and English. Which is why translation so often fails. Mozart wrote music that would fit the sound of Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto. Some have claimed that English is unsettable for opera. American composer Virgil Thomson, however, felt he’d solved, “for all time,” the English words-and-music thing. His breakthrough: setting the poetry of Gertrude Stein. “My theory was that if a text is set correctly for the sound of it, the meaning will take care of itself.” Stein, of course, with meanings “already abstracted or absent, was “manna” for Thomson.
In his recent piece on Dylan in the New Yorker, Louis Menand wrote, “It is always the sound that interests Dylan,” adding that it was sound more than lyrics that got Dylan interested in Woody Guthrie and that his lyrics are often little more than “placeholders, devices to fit the melody and fill out the line.” The meanings? Abstracted or absent. So: the greatest “poet” in the history of rock is a peddler of nonsense verse.
Which isn’t to say the words aren’t important — they’re as important for their sound as for their sense. “Pigeons on the grass alas,” as they sing in the Thomson/Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Or, Little Richard: “A-wop-bop-a-loo-lop a-lop-bam-boo.” The meaning, in either case, is implied, even clear. (A vision of the Holy Ghost, it’s been said of the Thomson/Stein declamation.)
Three recent jazz vocal CDs stand out simply because the sound is so distinctive. On Mythologies (Blue Note), Patricia Barber as a songwriter is as wordy as Alex Turner. She’s a lucid, beautiful singer, with a small range, perfect diction, and a great ear for text setting. Maybe it’s all those words — and the narrow range — but some listeners have told me that they think of her work as sing-speech rather than real singing. Barber also has a great longstanding back-up with its own sound: her piano, electric guitar, bass, drums, and an approach that criss-crosses though jazz and pop.
Madeleine Peyroux on Half the Perfect World (Rounder) continues to mine a vaguely ’20s-’30s era sound with an acoustic band, her own on-the-beat guitar chording, and a Billie Holiday vocal timbre. I don’t know about you, but I never learned a song lyric (except maybe “Strange Fruit”) from a Holiday album. Seduced by her sound and by some of the greatest small-band jazz in the history of the music, I never did sing along. Some of the same lyrics hold up better on a Chet Baker record: flat affect, no tone but great pitch, and every word is there. In concert, it’s Peyroux’s sound and her improvisatory approach that keep you hanging on lyrics that you probably won’t remember later.
