I recently dug out an old Louis Armstrong cassette that I’ve been listening to on my way to and from work; it’s a collection of supposed greatest hits, and as such it’s a pretty mixed bag. About half the songs on the tape are great; the rest range from mediocre to lousy – there are one or two I fast forward through.
Now it occurred to me that the common element to all those songs, good and bad, is Louis Armstrong. The element that changes from song to song is the songwriter – and there is (not surprisingly) a high correlation between the better songs, and the better songwriters.
My point is that although the tape is billed as Louis’s greatest hits, the way I’m listening to it, it’s as a selection of great songs by the likes of Kurt Weill and Jerry Herman (and some other mediocre writers) that happens to be sung by Louis Armstrong. Probably about 2/3 of my enjoyment of the tape is based on the quality of the song, and 1/3 is Louis. Any number of decent bands that played the exact same lineup of songs would probably give me approximately the same degree of pleasure (though admittedly somewhat less – maybe in the 75/25% ratio; I do enjoy Louis’s unique sound).
Do you think most people hear music this way? When people say they love Ella Fitzgerald, is it really Ella they loveso much, or is it the great Gershwin song they remember her singing? Or do I just have an insufficient appreciation of jazz – which after all, as I understand it, is all about the singer, not the song? What do you think?
I think it depends not only on the singer, but the musicians and their arranger. Sometimes, another group of musicians are able to bring something to the execution of a song that separates it from all other versions. “Better” is subjective. Any song can be performed masterfully and with palpable emotion or unclocked enthusiasm, or just run off like a Xerox of musicality. Sometimes both are hits. That said, I only want to hear Louis Armstrong singing “Hello Dolly”, and not anybody else, not even Carol Channing. Well, especially Carol Channing. Everybody else who has recorded that song has just been parroting it. Nobody ever did it any better than Satchmo. He owns that song. Not because he sang or played better than anyone on subsequent versions, but because no one else has been able to capture the “rightness” of his execution of it.
I’m more likely to get into a great performance of a middling song than a middling performance of a great song. Any capable musician can bang out a fair version of a song that was already good. (Not that just anybody can write a really great song, of course. Great songwriters are even rarer than great performers, I think.)
For example: on paper, Hidden Charms is not one of the great songs Willie Dixon wrote for Howlin’ Wolf. It’s okay, but that’s about it. But Wolf turns in a good effort on the vocals, and Hubert Sumlin plays one of the great solos in guitar history. Viola, the thing is a must-hear.
One of my favorite songs is “Just My Imagination.” The original version is by the Temptations, and that continues to be definitive – no cover can match it, let alone beat it.
Another of my favorite songs is “Night and Day,” and it’s taken me decades to find the definitive version. The first one I heard was Fred Astaire singing in in The Gay Divorcee, and that is wonderful – as a number in a musical, it distills everything I worship about Fred Astaire – but as a song to listen to, it’s good, not spine-tingling. I’m not a Sinatra fan, so I don’t care particularly for his version. I was deeply disappointed that they gave that song to U2 on the Red Hot + Blue album – I don’t hate their version, but I certainly don’t love it. I liked – liked very much, actually – the moment in De-Lovely when Kevin Kline, as Cole Porter, sang a few bars to show the actor who’d introduce it how to deal with that wild fall of notes – he stares into the young man’s eyes and oof, it’s breathtaking. But it’s not definitive.
It turns out that the definitive version, for me, is actually an instrumental – Stan Getz recorded it a few months before his death, and he pours an entire life’s worth of passion and an entire career’s worth of skill into it. The man is dying, and he has to stop for a while in the middle and catch his breath – so the pianist, Kenny Barron, takes over. It’s … spine-tingling, because the song and the artists come together on it.
First I should say that only a few songs appeal to me for their lyrics. I prefer instrumental music. You don’t want to see my list of acceptable singers, but I can assure you it’s fairly short and pretty well equally divided male and female. Most are dead.
I’m going in favor of the songwriter on this, although a few of the singers I regard as noteworthy can do something with any song they select to perform. This, to me, is the crux of the issue: a decent singer only selects songs to perform that are 1) worthy to be sung at all, and 2) songs he/she can bring something to.
Even my favorite singers can mangle songs, some of them "good " songs, and there are a very few songs that nobody can mangle but it’s really hard to cite an example. Danny Boy maybe.
So, in summary, I’d rank the criteria like this:
Songwriter
Song itself
Singer
Accompaniment/arrangement
BTW, Sinatra and Rosemary are my favorite singers. But, as I say, you don’t want my list.
How could it be anything but the combination of the two?
Example:
Another Piece of My Heart by Janis Joplin: a heart-rending passionate cry
Another Piece of My Heart by Faith Hill: commercial pap on a par with Britney Spears (and I like some of Faith’s stuff, but really, she shouldn’t’ve tried…)
The singer interprets the song. If the pair is well-matched, magic occurs. If poorly matched, both suffer.
It’s neither: it’s the recording, or the performance if you see it live.
A lot of elements come together in the experience of listening to the performance of a song (recorded or live): the song, the arrangement, the production, the singer, etc. Some of those individual experiences of a uniquely woven set of variables are sublime; some, not so much.
Now, if you listen to a dang lot of music, you might begin to notice that certain of those variables tend to be present pretty frequently during moments of the sublime. Some of those recurring variables, for me, are such elements as Ella Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Doris Day, Hoagy Carmichael, etc. Sometimes many different elements come together all at once (Ella’s recording of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby” from Ella in Rome: The Birthday Concert, or Betty Hutton’s recording of Carmichael’s “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief” to pick a couple such moment out of thin air), and you have a performance-experience that sticks with you.
Personally I have way too many such experiences to even begin to catalog; the above examples are nearly random.
And while I tend to gravitate to vocal jazz more than instrumental jazz, I would still prefer a great “side” by Django Reinhardt or Fats Waller to a weak “experience” [<==shorthand for all the variables that come together in any particular musical “moment”] by Ella or Doris. So for me, one of the more heavily weighted variables is probably the singer, but each individual musical experience is an opportunity for exceptions to that.
Not every singer (no matter how good they are) can sing every song. Sometimes great singer will just not be able to do justice to a great song because their vocal range, the timbre of their voice or their emotional range just don’t suit it.
Sometimes a great singer can make a pretty awful song come to life because of the way they sing it. Sometimes it “clicks”, sometimes it doesn’t.
Having said that, I’d Listen to Nina Simone sing the phone book, because I love her voice so much, and I’d rather pour bleach in my ears than listen to Russell Watson sing anything.
If you want to know about “the song” abstracted from actual throats, the subject of study is “composition.” I took a course in composition at a conservatory, and it’s the sort of subject whose study is mainly confined to the halls of music conservatories.
Song appreciation, however, is practiced by just about everyone. As WordMan and lissener said, it’s the performance we’re after. But speaking of instrumentals, I personally feel the pinnacle of the swing era was achieved by Gene Krupa’s solos in “Sing Sing Sing.” Now if I were a real jazz aficionado, I could name the date and place of the Krupa solo that rocked the mostest. It isn’t the same musical experience at all if anyone else but Krupa plays it. (Full disclosure: I’m a drummer.) You can notate what he played (composition), but you can never notate how he made it sound (performance). They’re apples and oranges.
Well, now I know how Penn Jillette stands on the issue. I was watching “The Aristocrats” earlier tonight, and at one point he says that the joke in question “proves that in all art, it is the singer, not the song, that counts.” And while I know he was speaking off the cuff, if I were to take him at his word, I’d have to say BS. “All art?” In some types of art, maybe, yes. Jazz and comedy, in particular, seem to be more about the “singer” – maybe that’s why there are so many comparisons between the two forms. But in many other types of art I think the “song” has the upper hand. People say they love Mozart more often than they say they love the Boston Symphony Orchestra, great though the BSO is. A good high school performance of Hamlet can be better than a Steppenwolf performance of a crap play.
The best singing Dionne Warwicke ever did can be heard on her *live *albums, Unfortunately, when they produced the *best *is often the recordings of the songs she sang when she didn’t really know them yet. It’s only after she sang them a few hundred times were these songs nuanced the way that made them special.
As in most things artistic, the best answer is probably “it depends”. But the best example I can think of that supports “It’s the singer not the song / that makes the music move along” is Stevie Ray Vaughn’s version of Mary Had a Little Lamb. I can’t hear it without moving, and I couldn’t say the same for any other version I’ve ever heard.
What makes them comparable in the context of the movie is the notion of a “standard.” There are tons of pop standards in music, dating back to the times when many more families owned pianos. Stores would sell the sheet music to the day’s hits so everybody could play and sing them at home. In time, jazz musicians started improvising and doing bizarre things to these songs, since they already knew them, and so did everybody else. They also tended to have simple forms that allowed for a lot of jamming and interpretation. “My Favorite Things,” “All the Things You Are,” “My Funny Valentine,” list goes on.
When you’re dealing with a standard, it’s absolutely about the ‘singer.’ Everybody knows the words and the music to these songs, it’s all about what the particular performer brings to it. And they’re not always great songs (cough cough Star Spangled Banner), what matters is that everybody knows them. The Aristocrats joke allowed Penn to show off that idea with regard to comedy. No matter who tells it, the joke is basically “Guy walks into a talent agent’s office … [disgusting stuff]… ‘The Aristocrats!’” So you take the form for granted and focus on the differences
It’s common for diverse musicians to play the same song, but you don’t really see that in comedy. As somebody says in The Aristocrats, very few comedians actually tell jokes these days, so they sure aren’t going to get up onstage and tell their own variations on the same joke.