[Dixielandjazz] Why Most Music Critics Don't Like OKOM

[Steve barbone]

List mates

This is an interesting article about the new crop of young jazz singers who
are reprising "The Great American Songbook." Also contains some parallel
nuances about OKOM. Bottom line view seems to be that playing/singing the
old stuff, just like the old musos, is not enough. You must bring something
new to the party if you expect to be taken seriously by the media critics.

In any event it's great that vocal jazz of the "Songbook" is getting some
attention, pro or con. Unlike Moon, I love Rene Olmstead's version of
Summertime and have put a similar head arrangement together for Allison
Landon, one of the 13 year old female singers who sits in with us from time
to time. It includes a funky beat plus two modulations, each up a step for
successive chorus', and we love to do it with her.

I also admit that I like our band sound better than the one backing
Olmstead. But then, like Phil Woods says, when you are still playing jazz in
your 70s, you are way ahead of the game and able to do things that the kids
haven't learned yet. ;-) VBG

Cheers,
Steve Barbone 

Philadelphia Inquirer Sun, Sep. 05, 2004
  
STANDARD-IZED  By Tom Moon Inquirer Music Critic


Young crooners get a kick out of the Great American Songbook, but delivering
the emotion and nuance can be tough.

'It's a great time to be a jazz singer in your 20s," Jane Monheit observes,
with the slightest hint of nervousness.

The 26-year-old performer admits to being a little surprised by the
explosion in vocal jazz over the last few years. When she began singing
professionally in the late '90s, Monheit was among a lonely handful of young
artists attempting to further the grand tradition of Ella Fitzgerald and
Sarah Vaughan.

Now, as the major labels strive to superserve those bewitched and bedazzled
by Norah Jones, there are scores of fresh-faced stylists, each hoping to put
his or her stamp on the Great American Songbook, each selling a different
shade of saloon croonerismo, each determined to buff the standards until
they're fabulous again.

"All of a sudden, they're coming out of the woodwork," Monheit says of her
unexpected competition, including Jamie Cullum, 24; Renee Olstead, 15; Peter
Cincotti, 21; and Michael Bublé, who turns 29 on Thursday and is Monheit's
duet partner on her new CD, Taking a Chance on Love. "I really think it's
amazing.

"I mean, there are now 20 million people, and a bunch of teenagers, who know
'The Nearness of You' because Norah sings it on her album."

OK, sure. In terms of cultural literacy, Monheit is right. It's great for a
new generation to experience Hoagy Carmichael's simple celebration of
intimacy, especially as Jones interprets it, in wistful whispers far from
typical shooby-doo jazz singing.

But is it great to hear actress Olstead, of the CBS sitcom Still Standing,
do another color-inside-the-lines rendition of George Gershwin's
"Summertime"? Do we really need the students of Sinatra to mimic the
master's devil-may-care attitude and bring nothing of themselves to the
party? Is there a reason to reward reasonable facsimiles of postwar classics
just for their look-what-I-can-do glibness?

This crooner kick, which resembles the youth movement among jazz
instrumentalists in the early 1980s, is another of those moments when the
hype gets ahead of the music. The focus is on technical accomplishment, not
the open-hearted expression of soul and sharing of insights that has marked
pioneers going back to Louis Armstrong. The artists display proper respect
for their material, but in only a few cases have they managed what Jones did
from the start: to create a compelling, contemporary atmosphere that speaks
to the ages, not just a crushed-velvet banquette-bedecked showroom circa
1955.

These unimaginative updates appeal to people who like the upscale allure of
the jazz "lifestyle" more than the actual music. They're Restoration
Hardware re-creations, collections of nostalgic design elements that are
somehow cold and digital underneath.

There's an art to performing enduring songs, particularly evergreens such as
"I Get a Kick Out of You," so that they're more than audio comfort food.
This skill isn't like learning a foreign language. It's not about dutifully
following the melodies and parroting, as some new crooners do,
long-established phrases.

No, it's about the ability to make a cluster of complex emotional memories
signify something universal. Put on anything by Billie Holiday and you hear
a woman acquainted with love's all-consuming heat and, when the affair is
over, its bitter backlash. Inside her music is the wisdom of one who has
been burned, whose romantic illusions have been shattered. She doesn't throw
her tribulations in your face, the way a punk-rock singer might. Rather, she
lets them seep into every crevice, every sigh. They are the DNA of her
music, the almost imperceptible counterpoint that runs beneath the words.

The velvety musings of any number of others - Johnny Hartman, Chet Baker,
Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett - offer similar life lessons. There's
reflection, and sometimes regret. The great jazz singers know how to freeze
time; they scrutinize stray bits of conversation and replay moments until,
by the final verse, they have pieced together the shards of a broken union.
They know too much, and are too ambivalent, to rhapsodize in primary colors;
they'd rather tease out the shades and hues, the richness in the deep
background.

Most of the new-crooner crew miss those nuances. By a mile. They understand
the melodic contours but sound like youngsters as they cop worldly
affectation and spout received wisdom. The way they do it, swingin' easy
doesn't seem particularly easy: It's laborious time travel, a willful act of
transporting themselves into the old supper-club circuit.

When Cincotti enthusiastically bellows "Bali Ha'i," what comes through isn't
a startling new perspective, but an almost pathetically self-consciousness
throwback: He's out of his depth, singing and playing with such calculation
that the joy is crushed out of the song.

The youngster who best understands this conundrum is Cullum, who wrote a
talky ditty called "Twentysomething" about being a disaffected kid out of
step with his peers - and whose reckless renditions of the canon seem
destined to keep him slightly out of step with jazz orthodoxy as well. He's
not trying to croon tales of failed romance as if he's suffered terrible
trials.

He'd rather be who he apparently is: an impulsive rebel applying the
freewheeling looseness of jazz to modern song structures. This attitude
gives his treatments of standards and rock-era songs by Radiohead and Jimi
Hendrix, as well as his originals, a playful irreverence with none of the
awkwardness of trying to appear "mature."

Cullum doesn't churn out tinkly dinner-jacket fare to soothe the
sensibilities of well-heeled aesthetes. And that's a sign of health. He has
evolved beyond the hallowed texts and found that thing that's been absent
from vocal jazz for so long: a brash, brazen spirit.
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Contact music critic Tom Moon at 215-854-4965 or tmoon at phillynews.com.