WNPT, our local PBS station, aired a recent Four Freshmen concert in Las Vegas which was an hour-long uninterrupted program with some excellent music, if you’re into that sort of thing. It had been many years since I saw them on TV, and the last time I did it was a totally different group of guys. (That should help pin down how long ago it must have been).
Anyway, I’m curious if any of you share my appreciation for the group, or if you did in any of its earlier incarnations.
Also, are there other jazz-flavored harmony groups you can add to this list of similar sounding ones:
The Hi-Los
Take 6
The Double 6 of Paris
Manhattan Transfer
Rare Silk
The L.A. Voices
And are there other 4-person harmony groups in other genres that strike you as top-of-the-list groups?
I have the Four Freshman’s “best of” CD on my iPod, and listen to their songs fairly often. Ditto for the Manhattan Transfer’s anthology. Multi-part vocal harmonizing is magic to me.
I know the feeling. It’s puzzled me – since I haven’t the first clue – how they develop their sound: whether they start from a printed arrangement and learn their individual parts, or if they just wing it around the basic melody and chords until they find the blend they want. So many of their endings and codas are just mind-blowingly right. I’ve heard accomplished keyboard players approximate the voice-shifting glides and vibratos, but some of the FF voicings are almost scary-good.
Whenever I try to sing along with somebody else, my efforts to harmonize usually revert back to the melody (perhaps an octave away) because I get distracted by the other person’s (people’s) sound. To hold a specific interval over a beat or two is out of my capacity.
Do any of you have group vocalizing experience? How is it done?
I sang in two choruses in high school and for a church choir. The best way was for each vocal part to be learned separately, combined only when perfected, sung with the singers clustered in groups, and with sheet music in front of us so we could follow our vocal lines.
Extemporaneous harmonizing never works! You might get four notes in a row to harmonize, but then blow it with that off-track fifth note.
How familiar are you with “shaped note” singing? The movie Cold Mountain had a noteworthy example. Those folks sang with conviction and authority and were hitting some really harsh intervals.
And I know I’ve asked this before but it’s been a while. In two-part harmony (a la The Everly Brothers) what’s the interval most often used – if there is one?
Huh? “Never?” You’ve never just gotten together with a group of friends to sing, with people making up harmony on the fly? What do you mean by “off-track”? Off-key?
I realize you are unlikely to get intricate, complex harmonies this way, but c’mon, for a lot of songs you could just sing a third below the other person for most of the song and make it work. “Never” is certainly too strong a word to use here.
I’m in that camp, too, but I believe it’s the material choices rather than the harmonies that turns me away from Barbershop. That and the funny-looking clothes.
Maybe I don’t know enough details about Barbershop? Isn’t it mostly a capella?
If so, the Freshmen stand out equally well as instrumentalists, and that’s even more scary to me: to be able to play along with those tight harmonies, while perhaps supplementing them with what your hands are doing, strikes me as the ultimate in coordination.
Barbershop Quartets are virtually always sung a cappella.
You don’t really think the Four Freshmen played instruments while singing, do you? Trumpet? Trombone? They recorded the vocal and instrumental tracks separately.
All I can say is that if that’s true, then the entire Vegas concert was lip-synced! I will admit that the trumpet wasn’t being played while the guy was singing, but the other instruments (bass, drums and guitar) looked well done enough to fool me.
There were some obvious edits, like when the trumpet became a fluegelhorn for a beat or two, then switched back (with telltale lighting differences) to a trumpet again. And some of the fingerings on the guitar looked a bit strange. But to lip-sync an entire hourlong show seems hard to take.
