Mongolian Metal Band Ego Fall: Metal + Overtone Singing!

Harry Connick Jr. Schools American Idol Contestants on the Great American Songbook

Why Harry Connick Jr. Couldn't Sit Idle During 'Idol'
The star couldn't stand hearing young singers mangle the Great American Songbook

posted by John Stark, May 4, 2013

From the Daily Roadmap

Those of us who grew up in the 1950s and '60s got to constantly hear — on radio, TV and vinyl — the Great American Songbook sung by the likes of Bobby Darin, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé, Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald, Doris Day, Sarah Vaughan. ... The list goes on. These were singers who belonged to our parents more than to us. Still, they set a high bar for crooners, even if we didn’t fully appreciate it when we were kids. Besides having intonation, perfect pitch and beautiful voices, these artists respected a song, its melody and lyrics.

They made singing sound easy, which it isn’t.

My favorite singer as of this week is Harry Connick Jr., but not for his vocal talent. As a guest mentor on Wednesday's American Idol, he did something I’d never seen done on that show — and it was long overdue. He made it clear why, despite the impressive vocal abilities of the four finalists — Candice Glover, Angie Miller, Amber Holcomb and Kree Harrison — they probably will never be truly great singers in the mode of those who came before, like Dinah Washington, Peggy Lee, Vic Damone and Billy Eckstine. Again, the list goes on.

Idol's theme on Wednesday was “Then and Now.” Each contestant was asked in the first hour of the show to perform a current hit song. They chose newly released tunes by Pink, Bruno Mars, Rihanna and Carrie Underwood, who won American Idol in 2005. In the second half, they were asked to sing a classic from the Great American Songbook.

During the mentoring sessions, Connick would listen to the singers perform the songs they had chosen and advise them how to do it better. He was a kindly coach throughout the "Now" portion of the show, teasing, praising and hugging the contestants. But when it came to the “Then” segment, the joking stopped. His demeanor changed.

Songs of the past are an essential part of Connick's repertoire. He loves, respects and understands their exquisite craftsmanship. He knows how to make them sound “now” without losing what they were "then."

As Amber started to sing Rodgers & Hart’s “My Funny Valentine,” Connick stopped her. He asked her what the song is about. "What does it mean, 'Your looks are laughable?'" he asked her, or "'Is your figure less than Greek?'" Amber looked blank — she had no idea. She struggled for words. He told her to go do some research on the lyricist, Lorenz Hart, a physically diminutive, closeted homosexual who died of alcoholism at age 48. Before singing the song, Connick sternly told Amber, you need to understand what Hart was writing about.

Kree also got stopped shortly after she launched into Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather.” She was singing in a loose, bluesy manner, like she said she'd heard Etta James do the song. But for Kree to do those fancy runs, Connick said, were diluting the meaning of the lyrics. The woman in this song, he explained, is sad and depressed; she's lost her man. “You don’t sound depressed,” Connick observed. He wanted Kree to do it more like Lena Horne, who introduced the song in 1940. No frills needed.

Not one of the contestants took Connick's "Then" advice when they got on stage. Substance was thrown out the window for pyrotechnic vocal tricks. Angie sang Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” an ode to vulnerability, in full-power voice. She hardly came off as “a little lamb who’s lost in the wood,” as the lyric says. More like a John Deere tree cutter.

The judges loved Candice’s version of Billie Holiday’s “You’ve Changed,” giving her a standing O. Not Connick, whose tip to "Keep it simple" went completely over her head. “One of the worst things that can happen in a relationship is when the other person starts to drift away from you,” Connick told Candice. She needed to express that feeling. Her blaring version had no poignancy.

Connick squirmed in his front-row seat during the “Then” performances. I haven’t seen such facial contortions since Linda Blair got anointed with holy water in The Exorcist.

His breaking point came when Randy Jackson implied that Connick's advice had hindered Kree’s vacuous rendition of "Stormy Weather," which none of the judges liked. He thought she should have sung it more like Etta James, as she had wanted to do. As it turned out, her rendition was neither Etta nor Lena, nor even Kree. It lacked any personality or feeling. You could see Connick about to pop his cork. That's when Keith Urban went into the audience, took Connick by the hand and brought him to the judge’s table. Taking a seat, Connick proceeded to school a very defensive Jackson in the art of singing standards. The point Connick tried to make, which Jackson didn't want to hear, was that the show’s contestants didn't know these classic songs well enough to take liberties with their melodies and lyrics. In doing so, they were murdering the music.

To me this made an even bigger point. Since its debut in 2002, Idol has always put value on over-the-top vocal performances. Subtlety and intimacy gets you the boot. If minimalists like Peggy Lee or Billy Holiday were to compete on Idol today the judges would eat them alive.

I was friends with Hal Schaefer, a famous vocal coach who died last October. He’s credited with teaching Marilyn Monroe to sing. I once asked him what he thought of Barbra Streisand. “When she was a teenager she came to my apartment on Riverside Drive to see if I would give her vocal lessons,” said Schaefer, who was then living in New York. “I was blown away not just by her voice, but her knowledge. She knew who every composer and lyricist was. She knew the entire American songbook. I told her after she sang for me that I would not work with her. She didn’t need me. But I told her she had to promise me never to take vocal lessons from anyone, because what she did was completely right. Once in a while that kind of talent comes along.”

On a recent NPR interview Streisand talked about how, when interpreting a song, she never violates its melody or lyrics, even when putting her own distinct spin on it. That’s why she's so great. And that's why Connick got so frustrated with the Idol contestants.

He listened to them, but they wouldn't listen to him.

Una Furtiva Lagrima (Enrique Caruso and a Fish)

Una Furtiva Lagrima from Carlo Vogele on Vimeo.

"Vocal Fry" Creeping into US Speech

Article in Science magazine, including an audio sample of this glottalization (a creaky sound that you've heard before). Check out the article and sample HERE.

Doesn't sound very new to me.

Adya & Geisha Do Mozart Aria Europop Style

Cherubino's Aria - Non So Piu Cosa Son Cosa Faccio; From the Opera "Le Nozze di Figaro" (The Marriage of Figaro) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It's a tribute to the tune itself that it can survive the Europop treatment.

Marvin Gaye's 1983 national anthem performance

Tonight Christina Aguilera messed up a line of the national anthem at the Super Bowl. In seeing a few posts about it I was reminded of this performance for the 1983 NBA All Star Game. No other artist singing the national anthem will floor an audience with soul and surprise like Marvin Gaye did back in 1983.



and some of the back story to this performance here on NPR.

NYT on the decline of diva melissma in pop singing

NYT
December 24, 2010
Trilling Songbirds Clip Their Wings
By DAVID BROWNE

AS symbolic shifts go, two recent events in pop music couldn’t have been more illuminating. On Nov. 24 “Burlesque,” a big-screen musical starring Christina Aguilera, opened and landed with a thud, both critically and at the box office. On Dec. 2 came the Grammy Award nominations. Among releases up for the album of the year award are those by Lady Gaga and Katy Perry; Ms. Aguilera, who also released an album, “Bionic,” in 2010, was ignored.

Such turnover is part of pop’s constant process of renewal: out with the old idols, in with the new. But the ground shifted under pop in an even bigger way. As seen and especially heard in “Burlesque,” Ms. Aguilera has been one of the foremost practitioners of the overpowering, Category 5 vocal style known as melisma. The female pop stars who have dominated the charts this year rarely opt for that approach. Their ascent makes it clear that melisma has retreated, while pop, which has just wrapped up one of its best years in at least a decade, has benefited from a return to less frilly, less bombastic vocal showcases.

Although there’s nothing simple about it, melisma in its simplest form is a vocal technique in which a series of notes is stretched into one syllable. Its roots can be tracked back to gospel, blues and even Gregorian chant; Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder used it sparingly early in their careers.

But beginning two decades ago, melisma overtook pop in a way it hadn’t before. Mariah Carey’s debut hit from 1990, “Vision of Love,” followed two years later by Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You,” set the bar insanely high for notes stretched louder, longer and knottier than most pop fans had ever heard. A subsequent generation of singers, including Ms. Aguilera, Jennifer Hudson and Beyoncé, built their careers around melisma. (Men like Brian McKnight and Tyrese also indulged in it, but women tended to dominate the form.)

That melisma heyday is jarringly invoked on Ms. Carey’s current album, “Merry Christmas II You,” a collection of seasonal standards and originals. One of the tracks, a rendition of “O Holy Night” recorded in 2000, is a reminder of the days when Ms. Carey and her voice were in full melismatic overdrive.

Whether it’s because of public fatigue or the advancing ages of its mainstays, who can’t quite sandblast the high notes as they once did, those days appear to be over. Ms. Aguilera’s “Bionic,” along with recent releases by Ms. Carey (“Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel”) and Ms. Houston (“I Look to You”), have sold far below their usual multimillion levels. “American Idol,” whose contestants have long been clearly influenced by melisma, is in ratings and buzz decline.

Beyoncé and Pink, who embraced melisma early in their careers, have both left it behind. Pink’s new compilation, “Greatest Hits ... So Far!!!,” is dominated by her rock-leaning rasp, whether she’s taking a crack at a ballad (“Dear Mr. President”) or a party anthem (her current single, “Raise Your Glass”). Although she was fond of elongated syllables while a member of Destiny’s Child, Beyoncé gradually moved away from brassy displays. Her luminous recent hit “Halo” has only a suggestion of melisma. It’s telling that her most recent hit, the irresistible dance pop song “Telephone,” is a collaboration with Lady Gaga.

Starting with Lady Gaga and Ms. Perry the nonmelisma female performers who have taken over iPods and the radio couldn’t be more different vocally. On “California Gurls” and “Teenage Dream,” her ubiquitous 2010 hits, Ms. Perry opts for short, breathy gulps in her singing. Her voice occasionally glides into an upper register, as on the bridge of “California Gurls,” but it mostly aims to convey likability and approachability, not prowess and imperiousness.

As heard on her current single “We R Who We R” from her new mini-album, “Cannibal,” Kesha has a thin, often computer-manipulated voice that recalls ’80s new-wave pop acts. It’s often hard to tell when her singing voice ends and the Vocoder processing kicks in.

The technically best singer of the bunch, Lady Gaga, has a deep, mildly nasal delivery that, on hits like “Alejandro,” evokes a more tuneful Madonna. Her version of melisma is more visual than aural: her Broadway-inspired stage shows, arresting videos, Warhol-redux costumes and exploding bras are over the top, as opposed to her singing.

What all those singers have in common is a delivery far less virtuosic than the melisma queens of old. (Some, like Taylor Swift, they may not be vocally capable of it either.) None is likely to inspire contestants who will stand before Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler on the next season of “American Idol.” Rather than wrestling the melodies to the ground, these singers adhere closely to them. The high notes Ms. Perry reaches for on “Teenage Dream” are the merest of vocal trills. One of the year’s most arresting hooks, Rihanna’s contribution to Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie,” conveys sadness and regret in a beautifully understated manner devoid of vibrato.

What makes singles like “Telephone” and “Alejandro,” “California Gurls” and Kesha’s “Tik Tok” and “Your Love Is My Drug” stand out aren’t the voices at their core. It’s the combination of vocal personality, arrangement, hook and songcraft — the eternal, enduring ingredients of classic pop. Even their voices are turned into hooks: one of the most memorable parts of “Telephone” is the moment Lady Gaga’s voice imitates a busy signal.

Those songs were also central to this year’s invigorating resurgence of pop. From the teen-bop star Justin Bieber to the casts of “Glee” and the boy-band TV series “Big Time Rush,” dance-infused pop singles made a triumphant comeback in 2010. Beats and melodies once again became the stars — a welcome reprieve from the melisma era, when emphasis shifted from songwriting to Olympic-style displays of lung power. To test the damaging influence of melisma, one need only try to hum one of Ms. Carey’s vaporous hits all the way through; it’s virtually impossible.

Melisma may have also run its cultural course. Ms. Carey, Ms. Houston and Ms. Aguilera, to name its three main champions, are most associated with the period from the late ’80s through the late ’90s: an era now largely associated with money, ostentation and American power, especially during the latter half of the ’90s. Their brawny vocal approach and lush, widescreen records reflected their times as much as the Clinton-era Wall Street boom.

Pop’s new divas may not be able to ascend to vocal heights the way Ms. Aguilera still can in “Burlesque.” But in many ways they’re better suited for the post-crash economy. Every so often even pop music has to downsize.

The Vocoder

NPR had a story on the vocoder, its development and eventually transference from military to music technology.

f you've listened to pop music in the past 40 years, you've probably heard more than a few songs with a robotic sound. That's thanks to the vocoder, a device invented by Bell Labs, the research division of AT&T. Though the vocoder has found its way into music, the machine was never intended for that function. Rather, it was developed to decrease the cost of long-distance calls and has taken on numerous other uses since.

Music journalist Dave Tompkins has written a book about the vocoder and its unlikely history. It's called How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II to Hip-Hop.

Tompkins says the machine played a significant role in World War II. After the U.S. government discovered that Winston Churchill's conversations with Franklin D. Roosevelt were being intercepted and deciphered by the Germans, it decided to invest in speech-encoding technology. So the National Defense Research Committee commissioned Bell Labs in 1942 to develop a machine — and Bell Labs delivered.

The vocoder wasn't without its flaws. Intelligibility of speech sometimes proved a problem, but Tompkins says pitch control was a bigger concern.

"They didn't mind world leaders sounding like robots, just as long as they didn't sound like chipmunks," he says. "Eisenhower did not want to sound like a chipmunk."

From Military Base To Music Studio

The vocoder experienced a major transition from military device to musical effect when Wendy Carlos used it on the soundtrack for 1971's A Clockwork Orange. Carlos did a vocoder interpretation of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which Tompkins says exposed the vocoder in unprecedented ways.

"Essentially, that introduced the vocoder to its first major audience," he says. "A lot people had no idea what it was. As the vocoder evolved, they knew the voice but had no idea where it came from."

After A Clockwork Orange, though it was still an expensive technology, the vocoder saw wider use in music studios. The German band Kraftwerk was one of the first musicians to employ it in its work. It fit perfectly, Tompkins says, because the band's work was primarily electronic.

Later, in the 1980s, the vocoder became the voice of electro-funk hip-hop. Michael Jonzun recorded what is believed to be the first hip-hop vocoder album, Lost in Space, in 1983. The futuristic sounds complemented the synthesizer, which became widely heard in music from that decade.

The vocoder is less prevalent in today's popular music, but its legacy lives on. Its successor is Auto-Tune, the pitch-correcting software prominent in popular music today.

Listen to the story and read book excerpts HERE.

EBTG's Tracy Thorn's new album

New Yorker

Pop Music
Everything but the Tour
Tracey Thorn turns semi-pro.
by Sasha Frere-Jones

May 17, 2010
The widely reported demise of the music business isn’t necessarily going to be bad for music. The forty-seven-year-old British singer Tracey Thorn, who has removed herself from a race she once ran—and ran well—has added a fantastic album, “Love and Its Opposite,” to her solo catalogue. Both the album’s themes and how it was made suggest a model that may become increasingly popular: the semi-professional musician. Making music as a pastime has appealed to talents as diverse as the modernist composer Charles Ives and the post-punk engineer and guitarist Steve Albini. If hits are to be had by only the very few, perhaps more musicians will feel free to stop worrying about making them.

Thorn will not tour for “Love and Its Opposite,” and she didn’t tour for “Out of the Woods” (2007), her second solo release. (Her first was a 1982 EP called “A Distant Shore.”) With the collapse of album sales, touring is one of the few dependable sources of income for artists; Thorn’s decision not to do it suggests that she is taking a hobbyist’s approach. “I just want to make it and then get back to my other life,” she told me.

Thorn is best known as the singer of Everything But the Girl, a duo she has maintained with her husband, Ben Watt, since 1982. Though the couple is still together, the band hasn’t released an album since 1999, which she attributes largely to the demands of raising three children in London.

Read the full review HERE.

Graciela Peréz-Gutierrez (1915-2010)

NYT has an obituary of the famous Graciela:

April 9, 2010
Graciela Peréz-Gutierrez, Afro-Cuban Singer, Dies at 94
By BEN RATLIFF

Graciela Peréz-Gutierrez, known professionally as Graciela, one of the great voices in Afro-Cuban music, died on Wednesday in Manhattan, where she lived. She was 94.

The cause was renal and pulmonary failure, said Mappy Torres, her friend and assistant.

For 32 years, Graciela sang with a band formed by her foster brother, Machito, whose real name was Frank Grillo.

Many of Graciela’s most famous appearances on records, including “Que Me Falta,” “Vive Como Yo,” “Ay José” and “Si Si No No,” were swoons and flirtations, from coy to outrageous. She was a forthright performer, singing with a clear and powerful alto voice; she could make it soft, then expand it into a clipped vibrato or a ragged shout.

Graciela and Machito, both raised by Graciela’s parents in Havana, were each established professional singers before they teamed up in New York in 1943.

In Cuba, Graciela had been singing with the all-female Orquesta Anacaona and El Trio Garcia and had traveled to New York, South America and Europe. Machito had moved from Havana to New York City in 1937, recorded with the Orchestra Siboney and Xavier Cugat, and ultimately formed the Afro-Cubans with the trumpeter Mario Bauzá, a group that helped galvanize the mambo and Latin-jazz movements.

When Machito was drafted into the United States Army in 1943, Bauzá sent for Graciela, eight years Machito’s junior, to join the Afro-Cubans. She was the band’s lead singer for a year before Machito’s return. From then through the 1950s, with the two lead singers trading off vocal turns and Graciela clicking through the rhythm pattern with her wooden claves, the band established a high standard for the mambo orchestra.

The Afro-Cubans played to integrated audiences at the Palladium, Town Hall, the Apollo, the 52nd Street jazz clubs, the Concord Hotel in the Catskills and the Crescendo nightclub in Hollywood, among other places.

Graciela left the Afro-Cubans in 1975 but rejoined with Bauzá’s own band, first in 1976 on “La Botanica” and then during the 1990s in his career’s 11th-hour revival.

Graciela was never married and had no immediate surviving family members. She died, Ms. Torres said, with her claves in her hands.

Pink's Epic 2010 Grammy Awards Performance

video below




I'm over a week late on this, but I've been busy. Before I forget, I just wanted to comment briefly on Pink's performance of her song "Glitter In the Air" at last week's Grammy Awards show. It's early in the decade, but Pink's performance, from her current Funhouse tour, was breathtaking. There are sometimes some really epic revelatory performances that artists pull off on big broadcasts, and this one goes on the list. The staging was really incredible. VH-1 has recently broadcast the tour from Australia, so you might be able to catch more of her amazing staging.

Serious Beat Box

Watch Amazing Beatbox Kid on CollegeHumor

A Voice in the Ear Proclaims Change (Prompting Opera Singers)

NYT
December 14, 2008
Music
A Voice in the Ear Proclaims Change
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

WHAT do the New York Jets quarterback Brett Favre and the Tristan-singing tenor Peter Seiffert have in common?

They both rely on electronic signals to get cues from coaches on the sidelines.

There is no mystery about the speaker in Mr. Favre’s helmet. Over the last 15 years or so it has become standard in the National Football League for quarterbacks to be equipped with devices through which instructions can be relayed before each offensive play. This practice is universally regarded as a major improvement over the days when quarterbacks had to interpret the distant hand signals of gesticulating coaches or take messages from other players shuttling in and out of the game, and now the device has been extended to defensive play callers as well.

But remote electronic cues in opera?

For the Metropolitan Opera’s first performance this season of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” conducted by Daniel Barenboim on Nov. 28, Mr. Seiffert, 54, a German singer acclaimed for his portrayals of several leading Wagner roles, had an electronic device in one ear that allowed him to hear cues from his own prompter. He used the device only for Acts II and III of the work, which runs five hours with two intermissions.

This was the first time in Met history that a singer had used an earpiece for assistance rather than relying on the house prompter in the box at the front of the stage. And the news rippled through the opera world, stirring debate and casting doubt on Mr. Seiffert’s readiness to sing Tristan, one of the most daunting tenor roles in the repertory.

The controversy raises a larger issue. It has long been standard practice for an operatic artist who has prepared a role thoroughly to take cues from a house prompter. But does a singer cross a line by putting an electronic gizmo in his ear?

Julien Salemkour, a veteran coach and conductor and the prompter who assisted Mr. Seiffert during the rehearsals and performance of “Tristan und Isolde” at the Met, strongly defends the electronic earpiece, made by Sennheiser. Speaking on behalf of Mr. Seiffert, who was fighting a cold and under doctor’s orders not to talk, Mr. Salemkour said during a telephone interview that using earpieces is “not new at all.”

“Just watch the U.N. General Assembly,” he said. True, delegates to the United Nations have long used earpieces to hear translations of one another’s comments. But none of them are trying to sing Tristan.

Mr. Salemkour, a musical assistant to Mr. Barenboim at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, came up with the idea to use earpieces for prompting two years ago, during a production there of “Tristan und Isolde.” It was Mr. Seiffert’s first Tristan, and he was struggling to learn the role. Its difficulties, combined with the challenges of the staging, made him insecure. The high-concept modern production raised the level of the stage floor two feet and covered the prompter’s box. To compensate, up to three coaches at a time, including Mr. Salemkour, stood in the wings practically shouting cues to the singers.

Mr. Salemkour thought that an electronic aid would be more efficient and less distracting to Mr. Seiffert, allowing him to relax and empowering him to give his best performance, which is the whole point of prompting. Mr. Barenboim, who conducted the Berlin production, gave his blessing.

A plugged-in Tristan has one disadvantage, Mr. Salemkour conceded. “The singer has one ear half blocked,” he said, and while that does not prevent the performer from hearing the orchestra and other singers, “it is uncomfortable physically.” Otherwise, Mr. Salemkour added, the device works extremely well.

So what’s the harm?

It depends on the results. Many opera roles are long, complex and difficult. For a singer in the midst of an impassioned scene, with the orchestra blaring and the chorus soaring, remembering the words or finding the first notes of a vocal line can be extremely hard. And given the expansiveness of a stage like the Met’s, a singer at any moment can be positioned too far from the orchestra pit for the conductor to be any help. The Met’s current production of “Tristan und Isolde,” by the director Dieter Dorn, uses a deep and spacious unit set.

At the Met the musicians who perform the prompting are officially titled assistant conductors, and when things go well, that is exactly the function they fulfill. The prompter’s box is aptly named. To enter the one at the Met, you must climb a steep metal ladder and squeeze into a narrow chair with a hydraulic lift. Small video monitors on either side allow the prompter to see the conductor, and speakers pipe in the performance from the pit. The box hides the prompter from audience members, who seldom hear the cues.

Many companies, especially those with smaller houses, dispense with prompters entirely: the New York City Opera, for one. (Remember the good old City Opera, nearly dormant and badly struggling right now?) There is no prompter’s box at the David H. Koch Theater. So when singers in a City Opera production get in trouble or draw a blank on a line, they resort to the time-tested solution of actors in the theater: just wing it and move on. Some opera buffs would argue that it is worth trading off occasional flubs from singers for the enhanced spontaneity that comes from performing without a prompter. But it is hard to imagine a performance of an opera like “Tristan” that would not require prompting.

Just as some opera houses use prompting and others don’t, some sports allow coaching during competition while others, curiously, forbid it. Tennis, for example. For whatever reason, tennis players are not allowed to communicate with coaches during matches, though many have worked out cagey systems of secret cues. As a fan of the sport, I’ve never understood why it is considered almost cheating for a player to get input from a coach during the throes of a match.

No opera buff objects to the use of prompters per se, as long as it does not become an enabling device for unprepared singers. On the first night of the Met’s run of “Tristan und Isolde,” which was also Mr. Barenboim’s long-awaited company debut, Mr. Seiffert, despite using his earpiece for the final two acts, seemed to be glancing rather often at the prompter’s box.

The complicated logistics that night explained this, in part. During Act I Mr. Seiffert relied only on the house prompter, Carrie-Ann Matheson. During Act II, with his earpiece in place, he received cues from Mr. Salemkour, who stood in the wings wearing a headset so he could hear the orchestra clearly. For Act III, dominated by Tristan, Mr. Salemkour occupied the box, with Ms. Matheson off to the side.

Mr. Salemkour said that Mr. Seiffert was understandably nervous about singing this touchstone role at the Met. In addition Mr. Seiffert, who sounded congested in his lower register that night, was already battling a cold. He pulled out of the following two performances of “Tristan.” (Gary Lehman took over. At press time it was not known which tenor would sing in the fourth performance, on Friday.)

Vocally and dramatically Mr. Seiffert was at his best that night when it counted the most, during the notoriously difficult and endless scene in which the wounded, delirious Tristan works himself into frenzied states, erupting with anguish and longing for his beloved Isolde, then turning half-crazed as he thinks he sees the ship bringing Isolde to the shore of his castle in Brittany. Perhaps having an earpiece during this scene accounted for the confidence he projected, even when his voice faltered.

Still, many longtime opera lovers will see the introduction of earpieces as at best distracting and at worst cheating.

Compare, for a moment, prompting in opera with the protocols of a voice recital. A pianist accompanying a singer typically performs from printed music, often with a page turner seated nearby. But because a singer in recital is presenting a musical-dramatic performance, a recitation of poetry set to music, the ideal is for the singer to perform from memory. Though singing without a score is not always possible or even wise, especially in challenging contemporary music, it remains the goal.

But suppose a singer in recital had an earpiece through which an offstage prompter could provide needed cues. The idea might seem dreadful in concept. But if the device liberated that singer to give a strong performance, well, why not?

I am not ready to condemn the use of earpieces right off, especially since there appears to be scant interest among other singers, so far, in following Mr. Seiffert’s lead. A singer wearing an earpiece bothers me less than a sound-enhancement system, like the one the City Opera has been using since 1999. This leap has introduced amplification into an art form that for centuries cherished natural sound.

But in coming up with increasingly sophisticated technological methods to assist singers in opera, coaches and conductors should be careful not to complicate things. The basic issue with this performance of “Tristan und Isolde” was pretty elementary: Mr. Seiffert, it seemed, did not know the role well enough to sing it. Neither an old-fashioned prompter nor a newfangled earpiece can compensate for that.

Bel Canto: Audiences Love It, but What Is It?

NYT
November 30, 2008
Music
Bel Canto: Audiences Love It, but What Is It?
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

IN 1858 Gioachino Rossini, wealthy, well fed and, at 66, retired from the opera business for nearly 30 years, bemoaned the decline in the heritage of Italian singing during a conversation with friends in Paris. “Alas for us,” he is reported to have said, “we have lost our bel canto.”

He was referring to the art of singing as it flourished in Italy from the mid-1700s through the first decades of the 19th century. He might also have been referring to the approach to writing operas by the Italian composers who were steeped in the bel canto singing tradition. It is not really clear.

Quite a bit about the concept of bel canto has long been open to interpretation, including the meaning of this loose term itself, which literally translates as beautiful singing. (Or beautiful song. See what I mean?) But one indisputable point is that the singing tradition for which Rossini was waxing nostalgic was not known as bel canto during the decades when it was supposedly thriving.

The term did not come into fashion until midway through the 19th century. To speak of the bel canto era in opera is like referring to the Lost Generation of young Americans, mostly creative types, who flocked to Paris during the 1920s. Only after the fact, through the propaganda of Ernest Hemingway, did those expatriates discover that they had been lost.

Opera buffs today use the term bel canto all the time. Yet we each seem to bring a different set of assumptions to the concept.

So here is one opera lover’s attempt to explain bel canto as I understand it, a primer of sorts, along with recommendations of a few recordings for those who don’t want to wait for the presentations of bel canto operas next year at the Metropolitan Opera to bone up. Mary Zimmerman’s production of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” will be revived in late January with Anna Netrebko in the title role, and Ms. Zimmermann’s new production of a Bellini classic, “La Sonnambula,” opens in early March, starring the soprano Natalie Dessay and the tenor Juan Diego Flórez, two leading exponents of bel canto repertory.

In its narrowest sense bel canto opera refers to the early decades of 19th-century Italian opera, when Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti dominated the field. But the overall concept of bel canto started much earlier, with a consensus among opera enthusiasts that there was nothing more ravishing than a beautiful voice singing a beautiful melodic line beautifully, especially a melodic line driven by a sensitive musical setting of a poetic and singable text.

The technique of singing that produced the desired results valued smooth production, or legato, throughout the entire vocal range. Ideally, you did not want to hear singers shifting gears as their voices moved from low to middle to high registers. Also prized was the ability to execute effortlessly all manner of embellishments — rapid-fire runs, trills and such — the better to decorate vocal lines. So the use of a lighter yet penetrating sound in the upper register was crucial to the style.

But as the Romantic movement took hold in the 19th century, the public taste for operatic drama evolved. Composers started writing works that demanded more intense and powerful singing. Voices grew weightier. A telling example of the shift in fashion was the acclaimed tenor Gilbert Duprez, born in Paris in 1806.

In his early days Duprez was a “tenore di grazia,” a light lyric tenor with an agile and flexible voice, which he showed in roles like Almaviva in Rossini’s “Barbiere di Siviglia.” But increasingly he displayed dramatic intensity, notably in Rossini’s “Guillaume Tell” and later in operas by Donizetti and Berlioz. He is believed to have been the first tenor to sing a high C not with the lighter, ringing so-called head voice but with a full, powerful chest voice. It drove crowds wild, but it drove Rossini crazy. He likened the sound to “the squawk of a capon with its throat cut.”

A tenor’s high C’s can still drive audiences wild. Last season, though Mr. Flórez was completely charming and sang beautifully as Tonio in the Met’s production of Donizetti’s “Fille du Régiment,” he garnered excessive attention for his dispatching of the tenor’s showpiece aria with its nine high C’s. When Luciano Pavarotti sang this bel canto tour de force, he stunned his audiences by tossing off those notes with astounding power. His voice was an uncanny hybrid, combining the colorings and agility of a lyric tenor with an enormous sound. When a light-voiced lyric tenor like Mr. Flórez sings the aria, it is not all that hard. Still, Mr. Flórez is a gift to bel canto opera fans.

The other historical dimension of the bel canto era has to do with the nature of the operas written for voices steeped in the practice. Since beautiful singing carried the day in the bel canto tradition, it was natural to compose music that would showcase such vocalism. For me the most fascinating element of the practice has to do with the approach to writing melody.

The melodic line is everything in a bel canto opera, not just in the arias but in the elaborate scenes that contain them. Those scenes offer long stretches of lyrically enhanced recitative and extended spans of arioso, a halfway station between full-out melody and conversational recitative.

Catchy tunes in all styles of music tend to have something in common: they are laid out in symmetrical phrases with simple melodic riffs that are repeated. Think of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Or the operatic equivalent of a catchy tune, Figaro’s “Non più andrai” from Mozart’s “Nozze di Figaro.” Such melodies are analogous to poetry written in symmetrical verses with lines of equal length and repeated phrases.

But the bel canto melodies that most captivate me are those that spin out in long, elegant, endless lines that almost disguise the phrase structure of the melody. For a modern equivalent, think of the Beatles’ song “Yesterday,” with its elusive and haunting melody. A prime example from bel canto would be Norma’s aria “Casta diva” from the Bellini masterpiece that bears her name.

The elaborately ornamented phrases of “Casta diva” sensitively elongate every syllable of the Italian text. But the result is a melody that seems to hover wondrously above the undulant and respectful accompaniment pattern.

It’s easy to poke fun at those simple, some would say simplistic, accompaniment patterns in a bel canto aria, or the oom-pah-pah’s in an early Verdi aria, which Wagner mocked, likening Verdi’s orchestra to a big guitar. Verdi understood, however, that when a melody was pure, strong and beguiling, it was enough for an accompaniment to provide harmonic support and rhythmic lift. Defending Verdi’s standard approach to aria writing, Stravinsky, no less, in his “Poetics of Music,” wrote that “there is more substance and true invention in the aria ‘La donna è mobile,’ for example, in which the elite saw nothing but deplorable facility, than in the rhetoric and vociferations of the ‘Ring.’ ”

As every opera historian will say, the problem in talking about early-19th-century bel canto opera is that no work from that era relied solely on creating longspun phrases of ethereal melody. Bellini was probably the purest bel canto master, but an opera like “Norma” is rich with declamatory vocal writing, fits of Romantic passion, fearsome outbursts for the volatile tragic heroine in which the soprano must summon chilling power and dispatch quick-paced lines full of daring leaps.

The practice of bel canto in its purest form had enormous influence on subsequent composers. Donizetti cleared the path that Verdi followed. Verdi became a bold innovator later in his career, but early on he struggled to find a balance between transcending the parameters of opera as it was practiced and honoring the bel canto heritage to which he was beholden.

It’s a wonder that Chopin, born in 1810, never tried to write an opera, because he was completely smitten with bel canto works, especially Bellini’s. Chopin’s melodies, like the opening theme for the soloist in the Piano Concerto No. 1, composed in 1830, sing with the long-lined, profoundly melancholic elegance of a bel canto melody. Chopin and Bellini sometimes seem like distant composer cousins drawing from the same creative well.

Listen to the scene at the beginning of Act II of “Norma,” which appeared the year after Chopin’s concerto. When the title character, a druid priestess who has secretly violated her vows and given birth to two children by an occupying Roman, contemplates killing them, she pours out her anguish in a profoundly sad melody, “Teneri figli” (“Tender children”). There are remarkable similarities.

Even Wagner was influenced by the principles of bel canto opera, though he did not like to admit it. His early works, especially “Das Liebesverbot,” have set-piece arias with florid melodies and chordal accompanimental patterns, the whole works.

Naturally, Wagner, who debunked just about everything, described bel canto singing as blandly lyrical and obsessed with vocal niceties. He called for a German school of singing that would bring spiritually vibrant and profoundly passionate qualities into vocal artistry.

For sure, Wagner demanded new levels of vocal power and stamina from singers. Yet at other times he supported the essential approach to singing that the bel canto tradition espoused. Brünnhilde has extended passages of elegiac melodic lines. Even in her trademark “Hojotojo!” battle cry, she must execute a long trill. The German soprano Lilli Lehmann, who participated in the first complete “Ring” production at Bayreuth in 1876, would later become renowned both as Brünnhilde and as Norma and considered the roles complementary. More recently Jane Eaglen also sang both prominently, though how well she handled Bellini’s florid vocal lines was a hot topic among operagoers.

As for the bel canto approach to melodic construction, Bellini and his generation were hardly the first to compose long, winding vocal lines. What could be more melismatic and endlessly melodic than medieval chant? And in the arias of his Passions and cantatas, Bach could spin a florid melodic line as well as any bel canto master.

Think of the artful pop songs of Rufus Wainwright, who knows opera like an expert and is nearly finished writing one. Or of Burt Bacharach’s dreamy melodies, like the quirky song “Alfie,” which does its thing, complete with twists and turns, oblivious to phrase structure.

And though Stephen Sondheim has a love-hate attitude toward opera, many of his melodic lines show its influence. In “No Place Like London” from “Sweeney Todd,” the title character, an avenging barber, gives hints of his woeful story to the sailor Anthony (“There was a barber and his wife”) through a slow accretion of melodic phrases that grow increasingly prolonged and anguished. Verdi could not have done it better.

I would like to think that the practice of writing free-roaming melodic lines, which continues, is in part a result of early-19th-century Italian opera, which empowered composers to push the practice to the hilt. Whatever you want to call it.

But one thing about opera hasn’t changed since the days of Rossini’s maturity. Buffs are always complaining that singing was better in the old days.

That Sound at Its Best

DONIZETTI: ‘LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR’

Maria Callas, Giuseppe di Stefano; Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by Tullio Serafin (EMI Classics 5 66438 2; two CDs).

Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, Sherrill Milnes; Royal Opera Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by Richard Bonynge (Decca 410 193-2, three CDs).

Maria Callas’s 1953 “Lucia,” with forces from the May Festival in Florence, Italy, is not just her best recording of the role but a milestone in the discography of opera. Also splendid is the 1971 recording with Covent Garden forces, starring Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti, both in superb voice.

BELLINI: ‘LA SONNAMBULA’

Maria Callas, Cesare Valletti; La Scala Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Leonard Bernstein (EMI Classics 5 67906 2; two CDs).

There are excellent studio recordings of “La Sonnambula,” including the 1980 Decca account with Joan Sutherland and a superlative Luciano Pavarotti. Still, though you have to listen through some surface noise, my favorite is the 1955 live recording from La Scala, with an inspired Callas and, of all people in a bel canto opera, the 37-year-old Leonard Bernstein, conducting with a wondrous balance of urgency and lyrical elegance.

South Africa Singer/Activist Miriam Makeba (1932-2008)

NYT
November 11, 2008
Miriam Makeba, Singer, Dies at 76
By ALAN COWELL

LONDON — Miriam Makeba, a South African singer whose voice stirred hopes of freedom among millions in her own country though her music was formally banned by the apartheid authorities she struggled against, died overnight after performing at a concert in Italy on Sunday. She was 76.

The cause of death was cardiac arrest, according to Vincenza Di Saia, a physician at the private Pineta Grande clinic in Castel Volturno near Naples in southern Italy, where she was brought by ambulance. The time of death was listed in hospital records as midnight, the doctor said.

Ms. Makeba collapsed as she was leaving the stage, the South African authorities said. She had been singing at a concert in support of Roberto Saviano, an author who has received death threats after writing about organized crime.

Widely known as “Mama Africa,” she had been a prominent exiled opponent of apartheid since the South African authorities revoked her passport in 1960 and refused to allow her to return after she traveled abroad. She was prevented from attending her mother’s funeral after touring in the United States.

Although Ms. Makeba had been weakened by osteoarthritis, her death stunned many in South Africa, where she stood as an enduring emblem of the travails of black people under the apartheid system of racial segregation that ended with the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the country’s first fully democratic elections in 1994.

In a statement on Monday, Mr. Mandela said the death “of our beloved Miriam has saddened us and our nation.”

He continued: “Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years. At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us.”

“She was South Africa’s first lady of song and so richly deserved the title of Mama Afrika. She was a mother to our struggle and to the young nation of ours,” Mr. Mandela’s was one of many tributes from South African leaders.

“One of the greatest songstresses of our time has ceased to sing,” Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said in a statement. “Throughout her life, Mama Makeba communicated a positive message to the world about the struggle of the people of South Africa and the certainty of victory over the dark forces of apartheid and colonialism through the art of song.”

For 31 years, Ms. Makeba lived in exile, variously in the United States, France, Guinea and Belgium. South Africa’s state broadcasters banned her music after she spoke out against apartheid at the United Nations. “I never understood why I couldn’t come home,” Ms. Makeba said upon her return at an emotional homecoming in Johannesburg in 1990 as the apartheid system began to crumble, according to The Associated Press. “I never committed any crime.”

Music was a central part of the struggle against apartheid. The South African authorities of the era exercised strict censorship of many forms of expression, while many foreign entertainers discouraged performances in South Africa in an attempt to isolate the white authorities and show their opposition to apartheid.

From exile she acted as a constant reminder of the events in her homeland as the white authorities struggled to contain or pre-empt unrest among the black majority.

Ms. Makeba wrote in 1987: “I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa, and the people, without even realizing.”

She was married several times and her husbands included the American black activist Stokely Carmichael, with whom she lived in Guinea, and the jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, who also spent many years in exile.

In the United States she became a star, touring with Harry Belafonte in the 1960s and winning a Grammy award with him in 1965. Such was her following and fame that she sang in 1962 at the birthday party of President John F. Kennedy. She also performed with Paul Simon on his Graceland concert in Zimbabwe in 1987.

But she fell afoul of the U.S. music industry because of her marriage to Mr. Carmichael and her decision to live in Guinea.

In one of her last interviews, in May 2008 with the British music critic Robin Denselow, she said she found her concerts in the United States being cancelled. “It was not a ban from the government. It was a cancellation by people who felt I should not be with Stokely because he was a rebel to them. I didn’t care about that. He was somebody I loved, who loved me, and it was my life,” she said.

Ms. Makeba was born in Johannesburg on March 4, 1932, the daughter of a Swazi mother and a father from the Xhosa people who live mainly in the eastern Cape region of South Africa. She became known to South Africans in the Sophiatown district of Johannesburg in the 1950s.

According to Agence France-Presse, she was often short of money and could not afford to buy a coffin when her only daughter in 1985. She buried her alone, barring a handful of journalists from covering the funeral.

She was particularly renowned for her performances of songs such as what was known as the Click Song — named for a clicking sound in her native tongue — or “Qongoqothwane,” and Pata Pata, meaning Touch Touch in Xhosa. Her style of singing was widely interpreted as a blend of black township rhythms, jazz and folk music.

In her interview in 2008, Ms. Makeba said: “I’m not a political singer. I don’t know what the word means. People think I consciously decided to tell the world what was happening in South Africa. No! I was singing about my life, and in South Africa we always sang about what was happening to us — especially the things that hurt us.”

In a tribute, Jacob Zuma, head of the ruling African National Congress, said the party “dips its banner in tribute to an African heroine, Miriam Zenzile Makeba, a freedom fighter and outstanding African cultural figure.”

“Miriam Makeba used her voice, not merely to entertain, but to give a voice to the millions of oppressed South Africans under the yoke of apartheid,” Mr. Zuma said.

Celia W. Dugger contributed reporting from Johannesburg and Rachel Donadio from Rome.

"The Singing Revolution": How Estonians sang their way to freedom

CS Monitor
How Estonians sang their way to freedom
A new documentary tells story of how the national tradition of singing helped unite the masses against the Soviet occupation.
By Gloria Goodale | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the October 24, 2008 edition

Walk around the verdant green amphitheater known as the Lauluvaljak, or song ground, here on the outskirts of Tallin, Estonia, and it's easy to imagine the air alive with music, reverberating up the grassy slopes from the half-domed, vaulted stage at the bottom of this natural theatrical setting.

But to grasp what it feels like to be amid an audience 300,000-strong, singing in Von Trapp family-like harmony with sub rosa political purpose, you'll just have to pick up the DVD of "The Singing Revolution," a passion project by documentarians Jim and Maureen Tusty. Released this week, it is the story of how a tiny country (population: 1 million) with a 5,000-year-old culture, perched on the western edge of the Russian giant, used its tradition of song to finally free itself of foreign occupation, in this case the Soviet state, in 1991.

This tale of how peaceful crowds managed to fend off Soviet tanks as they attempted to take over the local television station is operatic in its drama, says the married couple. "This is the story of the power of nonviolent resistance to succeed where guns and rock-throwing would have resulted in death and more political oppression," says Jim Tusty. The nation was trying to throw off the Soviet yoke, which ensnared it in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin secretly signed a pact to divide up the Baltic countries. But, says Jim Tusty, it is also the story of a relationship between art and politics.

"We wanted to tell this remarkable story ... before the generation that lived it is no longer around," he says. He adds that a number of the older Estonians he interviewed say they are grateful to have the narrative preserved. They see that the next generation – a global, externally focused cohort in a nation that is now part of the European Union and NATO – has little awareness of the struggles of an earlier generation, he says.

The story began for the filmmakers when they taught a cinema class in Estonia during the summer of 1999 and began to hear about the song festival and the revolution it had inspired. In the festival, founded in 1869 and held every five years, choirs from all over the nation audition to be part of the 20,000 to 30,000-member chorus that takes the stage and leads the huge crowds that attend.

The music is a mix of modern and traditional folk songs, many of which have what the team calls the kind of oral traditions that are full of hidden, deeply patriotic meaning that sustained Estonians through centuries of oppression. As they investigated the festival itself, they discovered the role that the traditional songs played during the critical years leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union, 1987 through 1991. Rather than engage the Soviets directly, as Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania did, all with disastrous results, the various political groups united in song.

"They never wanted to give the Soviets a reason to arrest or hurt anyone," says Maureen Tusty. Paraphrasing one of the Estonians who survived the brutal years of Soviet gulags, her husband adds, "Art used to be serious when real political participation was not possible," but now, with meaningful political activity allowed, the arts have become trivial and the next generation is not interested in the power of this culture to make a difference.

Beyond that, the filmmakers say the film has a role to play in a world that is getting increasingly violent, particularly a Russia with more aggressive foreign policies. They have assembled a three-disc educational DVD version (available at www.singingrevolution.com), complete with maps and historical data. But, Jim Tusty hastens to add, they are not advocacy filmmakers. "We just believe in this story, which has its own message."

• Los Angeles-based writer Gloria Goodale toured the Tallinn festival grounds in 2007.

Peruvian Singer Yma Sumac (1922-2008)

LAT
Yma Sumac, 'Peruvian songbird' with multi-octave range, dies at 86
The singer with a persona matching her exotic voice became an international sensation in the 1950s.
By Dennis McLellan

November 3, 2008

Yma Sumac, the Peruvian-born singer whose spectacular multi-octave vocal range and exotic persona made her an international sensation in the 1950s, has died. She was 86.

Sumac, who was diagnosed with colon cancer in February, died Saturday in an assisted-living facility in Silver Lake, said Damon Devine, her personal assistant and close friend.

Bursting onto the U.S. music scene after signing with Capitol Records in 1950, the raven-haired Sumac was known as the "Nightingale of the Andes," the "Peruvian Songbird" and a "singing marvel" with a 4 1/2 -octave (she said five-octave) voice.

"She is five singers in one," boasted her then-husband Moises Vivanco, a composer-arranger, in a 1951 interview with the Associated Press. "Never in 2,000 years has there been another voice like hers."

After Sumac performed at the Shrine Auditorium with a company of dancers, drummers and musicians in 1955, a Los Angeles Times writer observed:

"She warbles like a bird in the uppermost regions, hoots like an owl in the lowest registers, produces bell-like coloratura passages one minute, and exotic, dusky contralto tones the next."

Sumac's first album for Capitol, "Voice of the Xtabay," soared to the top of the record charts. A handful of other albums followed during the 1950s.

With her exotic beauty, elaborate costumes and singing voice that could imitate the cries of birds and wild animals, the woman who claimed to be a descendant of an ancient Incan emperor offered Eisenhower-era audiences something unique.

During her 1950s heyday, Sumac sang at the Hollywood Bowl, Carnegie Hall and Royal Albert Hall. She reportedly made $25,000 a week in Las Vegas.

She was featured in the 1951 Broadway musical "Flahooley" and appeared in the films "Secret of the Incas" in 1954 and "Omar Khayyam" in 1957.

Although details of her birth date and early life vary widely, Devine said Sumac was born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo in Cajamarca, Peru, on Sept. 13, 1922.

Sumac said she began singing when she was about 9.

After joining Vivanco's large group of native singers, dancers and musicians, she made her radio debut in 1942; she and Vivanco were married the same year.

In Argentina in 1943, Sumac and Vivanco's group recorded a series of Peruvian folk songs. By then, she was known professionally as Imma Sumack. (Capitol Records later changed the spelling.)

In 1946, she and her husband moved to New York City, where they performed as the Inca Taky Trio, with Vivanco on guitar, Sumac singing soprano and her cousin Cholita Rivero singing contralto and dancing.

After making her name as a solo artist, Sumac toured around the world for several years in the '60s, but her popularity in the U.S. had waned by then.

In 1971, she recorded a psychedelic rock album, "Miracles," that was not widely released, and semi-retired to Peru later in the decade -- at least that's what she always said.

"That's the legend that she stuck with all through these decades," Devine, who runs the Sumac website www.yma-sumac.com, told The Times in June. "She didn't want people to know she was here and not working. The story was good for her. She's a very eccentric woman. . . . Her whole career and life is based on her mystery, and so the facts and fiction is a fine line with her."

Sumac, however, did return to performing in 1984 at the Vine Street Bar & Grill and the Cinegrill in Hollywood. In the early 1990s, she toured in Europe and continued to perform until 1997.

"The younger generation loves the music, loves Yma," Sumac told the Tampa Tribune in 1996. "The new generation told me many times: 'Miss Yma, we love you. Your music is something. It's out of this world.' "

Sumac, who was divorced from and remarried to Vivanco in the late '50s and divorced from him again in 1965, is survived by their son, Charles, who lives in Europe, and three sisters, who live in Peru.

Services will be private.

McLellan is a Times staff writer.

U.S. Refuge for Pakistani Singer Fleeing the Taliban

NYT
October 13, 2008
U.S. Refuge for Singer Fleeing the Taliban
By BEN SISARIO

The threats started about a year ago, telling Haroon Bacha to stop singing or else.

“There were letters, there were phone calls, there were text messages,” Mr. Bacha said, sitting upright on a floor in Brooklyn, surrounded by smoke from Pakistani cigarettes. “They used to come very frequently back home, just telling me to stop music, or else I would be killed and my family would be. ...”

He trailed off, tears welling in his eyes. Mr. Bacha, 36, is a Pashtun, the Muslim ethnic group of the mountainous northwest of Pakistan and southeast Afghanistan, and at home he is a star, with dozens of albums, slick videos and regular television appearances. In a sweet high baritone, he sings of peace, tolerance and resistance to war. Those liberal themes have endeared him to his war-weary Pashtun fans, he says, but made him a target of the local Taliban, which has been waging an escalating campaign against music and popular culture, calling it un-Islamic.

Two months ago Mr. Bacha escaped from his home near Peshawar, in Pakistan, and came to New York, leaving behind his wife, two young children and an extended family. If he goes back, he said, he will be killed. With a sharply reduced audience in the United States, Mr. Bacha faces an uncertain career, but on Saturday he sang at a small but lively benefit concert in Queens, organized by the Pashtun immigrants who have adopted him and held at an unlikely place: the Forest Hills Jewish Center.

“Anybody who is hated by the Taliban is starting out with a check in my column,” said Rabbi Gerald C. Skolnik, the leader of the center, a Conservative synagogue. Rabbi Skolnik said that an initial phone call from one of the organizers had “raised a red flag,” but that after the groups were vetted to make sure none of the money raised would go to terrorist groups, he was happy to rent the space.

In the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, the Taliban has intimidated musicians and record store proprietors; recently dozens of music shops have been bombed, reportedly by pro-Taliban militants.

“Cultural activities are badly affected by what’s going on in the region,” said Hasan Khan, news director of the Islamabad-based television channel Khyber News, in a recent phone interview. “We have lost everything. We have lost music, we have lost local games, we have lost children playing in the street. It is almost impossible to visualize what is happening there.”

The soft-spoken Mr. Bacha, who has striking green eyes and short brown curls, is a slightly unusual figure as a Pashtun star; he has a university education and, unlike most Pashtun singers, he does not come from a family of musicians. He said he saw his role as helping to lead a broad cultural resistance to Islamic fundamentalism.

“These people are bringing Pashtuns a very bad name,” said Mr. Bacha, at one of the apartments in Brooklyn where he has been a guest. “The reason I didn’t succumb to these threats is that I should work for my people, for Pashto as a language and rich tradition. I need to promote it and show to the world that we are not like these people.”

Before the concert, held in the Jewish Center’s mirror-lined basement ballroom, Mr. Bacha led evening prayers, facing Mecca in the small lobby. And once the audience of 300 or so had taken its seats — the event was far from sold out — Mr. Bacha began performing, accompanied by two musicians and pumping a harmonium as he sang.

In the first songs of the night he declared his love for the Pashtuns’ land and traditional lifestyle: “Our mud houses are like palaces to us.” But soon his lyrics, which are drawn from old and new Pashto poetry, turned to topical struggles. “This is not my gun/This is not our war,” he sang, “They are bringing it to us.” The small crowd roared and clapped along, as men danced and threw money on the stage, in a sign of praise and approval.

“We are a peace-loving nation,” said Reyaz Nadi, 44, a Long Island architect originally from Kabul, the Afghan capital. “Unfortunately there’s always a war from the outside, going back to Alexander the Great. America is only the latest one.”

There is a historical precedent for the Taliban’s cultural clampdown. After taking power in Afghanistan in the 1990s, it banned public performances of most forms of music — some religious chants were permitted — and symbolically hanged musical instruments in effigy. Many musicians went into exile in Pakistan, but since the American invasion of Afghanistan and establishment of a new government there, most have returned, said John Baily, an ethnomusicologist and Afghanistan specialist at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Professor Baily said it was not clear whether the same pattern was unfolding in Pakistan. “This is a very musical country with a huge range of different music,” he said. “It’s not that easy just to ban music. But they’re doing what they can.”

Mr. Bacha said he was not hopeful about his homeland’s future.

“If it continues like this, and these fanatics get power, our social fabric, our institutions — everything will be destroyed,” he said. “I don’t know what these elements want to have in their lives, what their world would be like.”

In the way of many musicians who come to New York who were accustomed to be big fish in smaller musical ponds, Mr. Bacha is adjusting to diminished prospects. Last week in New Jersey, for example, he played a wedding, something that his associates say he would never have done back home. On Saturday he will play at St. Michael’s Rectory in Bedford, Mass., and on Oct. 24 he will perform again in New York, at the Adria Hotel in Bayside, Queens.

“Wherever I find Pashtuns I can live as a singer,” Mr. Bacha said. “It could be America. It could be any part of the world.”

Ruedi Rymann, Swiss Yodeling Star, Dies at 75

NYT

October 7, 2008
Ruedi Rymann, Swiss Yodeling Star, Dies at 75
By BRUCE WEBER

Ruedi Rymann, a Swiss farmer and cheesemaker renowned in his home country as a yodeler and the man who recorded what came to be known as “Switzerland’s greatest hit,” died on Sept. 10 at his home in Giswil, south of Zurich. He was 75.

His family told the Swiss newspaper Blick he had been suffering from liver cancer and decided in June to end chemotherapy treatments. He is survived by his wife and six children.

To the Swiss, Mr. Rymann was something of a cultural representative, the embodiment of a kind of Swissness that was steeped in tradition. A forester, a hunter and generally an outdoorsman, he was an athlete as well, running a local club devoted to the uniquely Swiss style of wrestling known as swingen, in which the combatants strive to toss each other beyond the bounds of a circular bed of sawdust. And though yodeling — a type of singing in which a falsetto, or head voice, alternates with a deeper, natural chest voice — is native to a number of countries and migrated to a number of others, including the United States, it is most closely associated with Switzerland, where one theory has it that it developed as a method of alpine communication, to be heard from mountaintop to mountaintop. The Swiss Yodeling Association, founded in 1910, attracts over 200,000 visitors to its National Yodeling Festival every three years.

Mr. Rymann was a master yodeler in the Swiss style which, according to the book “Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo,” a remarkably comprehensive tour of the yodeling universe by Bart Plantenga (Routledge, 2004), does not make use of the “eee” sound.

“And, to the surprise of most neophytes, it has a decided melancholy feeling — slow, mournful, forlorn,” Mr. Plantenga wrote.

Mr. Rymann, whose natural voice was a bell-like tenor, made numerous recordings, singing alone or with other yodelers — sometimes even yodel choruses — and often accompanied by a jaunty accordion or two. His recording of a traditional folk song, “Dr Schacher Seppli,” became a fixture on Swiss request radio.

The song is a melodic lament by a poor wanderer, the title character, whose name roughly translates as Joe Schacher, about the unfairness of life and the rewards awaiting him in heaven. The lyrics go, in part:

The world is a turbulent place.

I’ve observed it many times:

People hurt each other just because of that damned money.

How beautiful it could be down here.

The bird on the tree sings,

“Look at your land, isn’t Switzerland a dream?”

The song was so popular that in 2007, when a Swiss television series devoted to popular national music polled its viewers, they voted Mr. Rymann’s “Dr Schacher Seppli” the greatest Swiss hit of all.

A Capella Group Straight No Chaser

NYT



October 5, 2008
Music
A Cappella Dreaming: 10 Voices, One Shot
By MICKEY RAPKIN

TEN years ago, the founding members of Straight No Chaser — an undergraduate a cappella group from Indiana University — performed at Carnegie Hall. They sang the national anthem at a Chicago Cubs game. They took road trips, ensnared female fans and created a lasting tradition on campus. And then they graduated.

Save for the odd wedding or college reunion, these men had not sung together with any regularity since. Until 2008, when Craig Kallman, the chairman and chief executive of Atlantic Records, offered the 10-man group a five-album record deal.

This may be the year’s most unlikely major-label story.

David Roberts, 31, a project manager for a Midtown bank, was sitting in his cubicle in January when he got the call. Michael Itkoff, also 31, a sales rep for a medical-device company, was at home in Atlanta. Jerome Collins, 32, was in Hong Kong starring as Simba in a theme-park production of “The Lion King.”

“We thought it was a joke,” Mr. Itkoff said. “But Atlantic flew us to New York and put us up at the Dream hotel. There was a fruit plate in my hotel room. They were talking about a tour with Josh Groban or Michael Bublé. I thought, Are you kidding me?”

Mr. Kallman — like nearly eight million others — discovered Straight No Chaser on YouTube in December, through a 1998 video of the group performing an unlikely riff on “The 12 Days of Christmas” (a riff that incorporated snippets of everything from “I Have a Little Dreidel” to Toto’s “Africa”). Randy Stine, an original member, had uploaded the clip strictly for the group’s own amusement, but it quickly went viral.

“We thought the attention would die down after the New Year,” said the group’s founder, Dan Ponce, 31, now a reporter for ABC News in Chicago.

But Mr. Kallman smelled a potential holiday crossover hit in the vein of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, a metal band famous for playing Christmas music in large, sold-out arenas. That band has sold more than five million albums, and last year it played a 90-city tour that grossed more than $45 million.

“We’re at a time when we’re entertained by air-guitar video games and reality competitions about hairstyling, dressmaking and grocery bagging,” Mr. Kallman said in a telephone interview. “Straight No Chaser was this organic YouTube sensation. The idea is to develop an act with real resonance for the holiday season and build a brand in the a cappella arena.”

Major labels have flirted with a cappella groups before. R&B acts like the Persuasions had been signed to the majors in the 1970s before moving to smaller labels in recent years. In 2005, Tonic Sol-fa, an a cappella quartet out of Minneapolis, was briefly signed to Vivaton Records (a division of Sony), but the label folded a week before the group’s album hit shelves. At the height of the 1990s boy-band boom, an a cappella group called 4:2:Five (featuring a young Scott Porter of NBC’s “Friday Night Lights”) met with Sony, but when the executives suggested adding backing tracks and choreography, the members walked.

That kind of tinkering is perhaps understandable. While there are more than 1,200 collegiate a cappella groups in the United States, according to estimates from the Contemporary a Cappella Society of America, mainstream attitudes toward the genre are not kind. A cappella is regularly mocked on screen, notably on the NBC comedy “The Office” and recently in the Will Ferrell film “Step Brothers.” Still, Mr. Kallman was not deterred. He did not want to hide that these men were an a cappella group. Rather, he hoped to embrace it.

“Group harmony is in the air,” he said. “ ‘Jersey Boys’ is a worldwide phenomenon. The ‘Mamma Mia!’ soundtrack is Number 1.” With Straight No Chaser, Atlantic is aiming for the mass audience that made Mr. Groban’s “Noël” the top-selling album of 2007.

Perhaps the idea of a major-label a cappella Christmas hit isn’t so far-fetched. “Once in a while a fresh Christmas album breaks through and has a chance of becoming a perennial seller,” said Jay Landers, senior vice president of A&R at Columbia Records, an Atlantic competitor. “Josh Groban and Mannheim Steamroller will continue to sell for years. A cappella might be considered a niche signing, but if the repertoire is fresh and accessible, then it could work.”

And so a Straight No Chaser album, “Holiday Spirits,” is due out Oct. 28 on Atlantic’s Atco imprint. The album is a collection of 12 Christmas classics (and two original holiday tunes), including a live version of “The 12 Days of Christmas.” (Richard Gregory, 76, now a retired music teacher in Massachusetts, wrote the original comic arrangement of the traditional carol while serving in the Navy in the 1950s. It became a staple of the Princeton Nassoons, and Straight No Chaser added its own funny flavor.)

There may even be a reality show on the horizon. Mark Burnett of the “Survivor” franchise, Jesse Ignjatovic, the executive producer of this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, and Atlantic are shopping a competition show featuring Straight No Chaser that is tentatively titled “A Cappella Nation.”

“Look at what’s working in the reality space — family-friendly entertainment,” Mr. Burnett said. “There’s no way this is not a big hit. It’s great music. It’s fun for the whole family.”

The Straight No Chaser “12 Days of Christmas” video had a certain kitsch appeal, what with 10 men harmonizing to “I Have a Little Dreidel.” But the eight million people who clicked on it were also likely responding to the genuine, unironic enjoyment plastered across the members’ faces; the video begged to be forwarded.

But the trick was capturing that energy on disc. Straight No Chaser — the name was inspired by the Thelonious Monk composition — began album rehearsals in March, and the first day was surreal. “It was like we were right back in the senior year of college, and we were going over music for a show at a sorority house,” Mr. Itkoff said. “It was like no time had passed.”

Except time had passed — nearly a decade. Mr. Itkoff, the medical-device salesman, was married now and had to convince his wife that frequent trips to New York (and whatever might come next) would not upend their life in Atlanta. They’d recently had a baby, and his wife had stopped working. “Her biggest worry was that I’d leave her for months at a time, with no income and a child.”

For a similar reason, one original member, Patrick Hachey — a high school music teacher in New Jersey with three kids and a wife — declined to join the reunion. (Another original member, who had fallen out with others in the group, was not asked to join, and the slots were filled with two younger alumni. The group has had several lineups at Indiana University.)

Most of the album was recorded over two weeks in July in Bloomington, Ind. Steve Lunt of Atlantic, an industry A&R veteran who has worked with Britney Spears and ’N Sync, was brought on to produce.

Though they were recording for a major label, the budget was conservative. Not counting travel and other expenses, they spent roughly $20,000 on recording.

Mr. Lunt flew to Bloomington twice to put his stamp on the project. “Collegiate a cappella is intentionally goofy and tongue-in-cheek and ironic,” he said. “But there’s a thin line between goofy and stupid, and goofy and funny.”

The members of Straight No Chaser understand Mr. Lunt’s concern, and they are in on the joke — to a point. “It’s great to see a cappella lampooned on shows like ‘30 Rock,’ ” Mr. Stine said. “We laugh at a cappella along with everyone else. Clearly it doesn’t have the coolest reputation. Maybe we can change that.”

Still, Mr. Lunt refers to the finished project as “Beach Boyz II Men,” a comment that highlights the inherent marketing challenge. “This is a 10-piece, slightly overgrown college vocal band,” he said. “We’re trying to catch lightning in a bottle. We’re swimming upstream. There are a lot of mixed metaphors here. But the genuine enthusiasm you feel from these guys is infectious.”

Despite the excitement of a major-label deal, most of the group members have kept quiet about it until now. “We had to protect our jobs,” Mr. Itkoff said. “We’re not 19 anymore. But it was like leading a double life.”

With the album’s release approaching, it is hard for the members not to daydream. To that end, Mr. Stine recently quit his day job, in part because he couldn’t get two weeks off to record the album but also because he hopes the project will have legs. Mr. Roberts, the Manhattan finance guy, is more conservative. “The economics in the group are tough,” he said. “There are 10 mouths to feed here, and any money will be split 10 ways.”

Mr. Kallman of Atlantic described the project as “low risk.” He signed Straight No Chaser to what is called a 360-degree deal, meaning Atlantic will share in potential revenue from merchandise, concert tours, even ring tones. The group was given a very small advance (basically just enough money to cover recording costs), and it will take a “standard cut of net sales,” according to Mr. Ponce. “We’re happy with the deal.”

There’s a distinct possibility, all involved agree, that this excitement could disappear as suddenly as it arrived. “We’re talking about a cappella,” Mr. Roberts said. “Let’s be honest.”

But if the scene in Bloomington is any indication, perhaps there is hope for an a cappella Christmas hit. On one of the last nights of recording, the boys were out celebrating, playing a drinking game called Sink the Bismarck at an old haunt. There was a bachelorette party a few tables over. A member of Straight No Chaser was making small talk when one of the women — an Indiana University alumnus — interrupted him.

“Are you the original members of Straight No Chaser?” she asked. And then she screamed.