Fall in love with jazz and you'd better believe those words down to your soul. To be a jazz artist is to commit to work, work and more really hard work with little remuneration, a constant struggle for gigs, a pitched battle for an audience in a nation obsessed with mediocrity. A serious jazz vocalist will spend a lifetime learning an art form which she or he will never fully perfect, and there are no shortcuts. Every other day I think I must be out of my mind. At least once a week a career in architecture starts to look really good.
Then I stumble into an adventure like my current Monk obsession and I know that I could no more give up jazz singing than I could abstain from oxygen. The challenges Thelonious Monk's music poses to a vocalist are manifold: Monk did not write a vocal melody line; the words were added later by a variety of lyricists with varying degrees of success in blending musical and lyrical themes; the music is angular, full of minor thirds and chromatic scales; the melodies have enormous range (having been written for piano, not voice) and rhythmic variety. And it has been the most inspiring, exciting, moving material to sink my teeth into.
The first four bars of I Mean You are pretty straightforward if you are playing them on a piano; singing them is a whole different ball game. The line arpeggiates quickly down the tonic chord plus a fourth, up a fourth, down a fourth, and up in thirds chromatically, all in the span of a few of seconds (if you count it off at a good clip). The lyric (by godfather of vocalese Jon Hendricks) flies alongside the melody with a perfectly clipped consonant syllable to match each note. It is an exhilarating song to sing, as are most Monk tunes.
The overall vocal control - dynamics, pitch, tone, color - required to pull Monk off has taken my singing to another level. It may be a little challenging to audience members accustomed to hearing standards from vocalists, but I am confident in the power of the music to create more true believers. And remember: the journey is the destination.
Thanks for checking in. I'd love to hear from you; feel free to send email to andrea at this domain.
