The Art of Vocalese or How I Got Twisted Pt. 2 (Chappell Holt)

What is vocalese? It is the art of writing lyrics to jazz tunes and solos. In “Doodlin’,” Jon Hendricks’ wrote lyrics to Horace Silver’s music. It starts with a catchy blues-based melody and witty lyric, goes to a fun bridge, then the fireworks begin. The poetry, over the main theme and then Silver’s improvised piano solo, is a brilliantly funny take on analysis and reaching the unconscious through drawing, doodling, with a sly sexy turn at the end of the song. The big challenge in singing the solo portion is there is no actual melody, rather a long passage based on the moment of felt improvisation. It requires great concentration and focus to do it well. 

King Pleasure’s often recorded “Moody’s Mood for Love” (“I’m in the Mood for Love” from around 1952-54) was the first fully realized vocalese recording and hit. “Twisted” was released on the same record. Eddie Jefferson and Jon Hendricks started writing in these early years also. Eventually Jon combined writing, arranging, and singing talents with Annie and Dave Lambert to form the dynamic trio of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. 

Jon has a vast catalogue of jazz poetry lyrics. Called the James Joyce of Jive by the NY Times in 1959, Dave and I think he should be a permanent American Poet Laureate. In 1985 the Manhattan Transfer commissioned him to write a complete album of lyrics for “Vocalese.” This tour de force of dazzling singing shows off Jon at his word wizardry best. Listen to the philosophizing of “Sing Joy Spring” or the hilarious “Blee Blop Blues,” lamenting a late night dripping faucet. 

One day in 1979 Dave heard a jazz singer/writer on the car radio who wigged him out, a great vocalese artist we’d never heard of, Mark Murphy. His career had begun in the late 50’s just in time to be submerged by the British Invasion of rock n roll. When we discovered that Mark was singing in a cocktail lounge in Tiburon we drove down from Santa Rosa to see him. We were hooked. Through him we discovered Eddie Jefferson who came to play at the Inn of the Beginning in Cotati, where we saw him a month before he died. In 1980 Mark released “Bop for Kerouac” one of the all time greatest vocal jazz albums. It was nominated for a Grammy. 

Kurt Elling is probably our most important vocalese jazz singer/writer today. Whereas Jon is all street, funk, witty, and soul food wisdom, Kurt is refined, academic, deeply romantic, spiritual, lofty, and deliciously erotic.

So, the vocalese tradition continues to challenge those of us who find this music the Mt. Olympus of jazz singing. Although we have not yet recorded vocalese covers, Dave and I continue to work away at these songs both at home and in performance. We are also trying our hand at writing original vocalese songs and lyrics.

- Chappell

The Art of Vocalese Pt. 1 Or How I Got Twisted (Chappell Holt)

In 1961 when I was 10, my father was stationed on Treasure Island, SF, as the Protestant base chaplain, we lived a half hour east in Pleasant Hill. My family was deeply afraid of popular entertainment so I was not allowed to listen to much radio. We watched only selective TV. I managed, however, to find detours around these restrictions. One day, the radio quietly on with the bedroom door shut, a song came on that utterly captivated me. A woman was singing music I had never heard, didn’t know what it was, who she was or how to find her again. 

Fast forward to 1973. I was living in Sebastopol, Ca, playing folk music and working at the local music store, People’s Music (see Dave’s Raves). An intriguing album came into the 50 cent used rack, “The Best of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross,” with clever cover art of a cool cat silhouetted against the night sky. I took it home and there it was, the mysterious song from my childhood, “Twisted.” The lyric was by Annie Ross, words set to the tenor sax instrumental by Wardell Gray (recording with the Al Haig Quartet). Annie first recorded the song “Twisted” in 1952 on the album “King Pleasure Sings.” Hearing Lambert, Hendricks, & Ross was a revelation, a brilliant uniting of jazz music with hipper than hip lyric poetry, street wisdom, wit, sex, philosophy, up-to-the-minute 50’s psychology, and spirituality. 

Strangely, the next year (1974), Joni Mitchell released her ground-breaking album “Court & Spark” and there it was again. In Sheila Weller’s “Girls Like Us,” the dishy bios of Carole King, Carly Simon, and Joni, she reports Joni was hospitalized after an attempted suicide over her affair with Jackson Browne. Her song “Trouble Child” segues into “Twisted.” The conjoined songs tell the tale. 

For years I performed “Twisted,” educating folks to the fact that Annie wrote it, not Joni. The fun of doing this song was partly its obscurity. No one else I knew was doing it, but later it became something of a standard for jazz singers. When Dave and I were together doing our originals, jazz standards and other vocalese songs; we dropped “Twisted” as a regular piece. It had lost its uniqueness as a choice in a singer’s repertoire.

- Chappell Holt

The Kate Wolf Music Festival is Coming Up, June 29, 30, & July 1, 2012

Chappell Holt and I met in the town of Sebastopol, in Sonoma County, California, in the 1970’s. We both remember how we fell in love with its beautiful hills and valleys, how Mt. Saint Helena greeted us and welcomed us “home” years before we fell in love with each other. Married in 1979, we were content to stay a while in this peaceful rural countryside, an hour and a half north of San Francisco. It was less “citified” in those years. There were more ranches, farms and apple orchards. Cow pastures and apple trees have since been replaced by vineyards after the explosive growth of the wine industry that began in the 1980’s. Thus the county, along with its more famous neighbour, Napa County, has retained the agricultural character and charm that we love. 

Both Chappell and I worked at People’s Music (http://www.peoplesmusicontheweb.com/) in Sebastopol, a supplier of picks, guitar strings, books, and equipment to local musicians. Perhaps more importantly, it was a place where musicians gathered to swap tall tales and share tips about where the gigs were. Sebastopol was once the home of the Gravenstein apple, the migrant workers who picked them, and the local Miwok Indians who worked the canneries where the apple harvest was processed. They are closed down now. There were cowboy bars, card rooms, bowling alleys, and dance halls complete with bar brawls and romances—lots of work for a country rock musician, or for a folk musician who could learn the Country & Western trade.

In those years, Kate Wolf was hard at work as a musician and a DJ on KVRE, growing and nurturing folk music in Northern California. Chappell attended the music jams that Kate held at her home in Santa Rosa, and Kate later organized the successful Santa Rosa Folk Festival. Her first album on Owl Records, Back Roads, was recorded with the group The Wildwood Flower in 1976. It was one of the most successful independent record releases of the day. The next year she recorded her second independent Owl label release, Lines on the Paper. John Croizat, www.royzat.com, one of our musician friends, played fiddle and contributed the song, Midnight on the Water, to the album. 

After the end of Kate’s partnership with mandolinist, Don Coffin, the Wildwood Flower group disbanded in 1979. She teamed up with Nina Gerber, http://www.ninagerber.com/, a talented guitarist and mandolin player who would be her accompanist throughout the rest of Kate's career. Both Chappell and I knew Nina and her family well, ever since she was a teenager and aspiring musician with a talent for hot flat-picking, a frequent visitor to People’s Music in Sebastopol. Nina and her brother Scott, whose main income was from sheep-shearing and herding cattle, were a popular folk duo in town. 

Kate Wolf (born 1942) went on to achieve national recognition before her untimely passing in 1986 of leukemia. She was the first musician inducted into the NAIRD Independent Music Hall of Fame. You can learn more about Kate and her music on the official Kate Wolf website, http://www.katewolf.com, maintained by her family. You can also connect to 2012 festival information and tickets from the site. 

In June of 1996, the Kate Wolf Retrospective Concert was held to celebrate her music. It drew 1200 fans, a sold out event. The crowd had such a wonderful time that her friends and family decided to make it an annual concert. The Kate Wolf Memorial Music Festival started as a one day, one time event. Now in its 15th year, the festival has grown to a three day, three night camping event. This will be the 9th year it will be held at beautiful Black Oak Ranch in Laytonville, 3 hours north of San Francisco.

Dinah Chapman: Local Gospel Songwriter Rocks Unity Church

I played at the Unity of Walnut Creek worship Service on Sunday June 3, 2012, and accompanied special guest singer, Dinah Chapman, on the church’s beautiful Yamaha grand piano. I also joined in with the Unity musicians, drummer Scott Towne, and Neal on bass, to accompany the normally scheduled congregation singing. As well as being a dynamic vocalist, Dinah is a talented songwriter in the gospel tradition. The band rocked the house as she performed two of her original songs, Touching the Stillness, and Nothing But God in the service. The whole church stood and clapped in time as she sang, “There is only One Love, and One Presence, greater is that presence within me than anything in this world.”

Unity of Walnut Creek (California) now streams both the 9:30 and 11:30 am services live over the internet (there is a meditation service at 8 am). To listen in, go to: http://unitycenter.net/id82.html. 

Past services are archived so you can hear and watch Dinah’s performance anytime by going on line to Unity Center on U stream. http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/23062692 

Levon Helm Tribute

At Chester's, Berkeley, on June 29, we will pay tribute to Levon Helm, drummer/singer/mandolin player with The Band who just passed away April 19, 2012. 

I have a personal connection to this group. In 1969, after a period of traveling, I found a place to live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with friends who had a spare bedroom. I moved into their flat on Yonge Street up above a corner store. I had little else besides my record collection. I was listening to Big Pink constantly, the first album by The Band, a group of Ontario guys who got their start just down the street from us. The Band began as the Hawks, Ronnie Hawkin’s backup band at the Yonge Street club, Le Coq D’Or. 

The Big Pink record opens with the song, Tears of Rage. It moves dirge-like, not with a catchy melody like one of my other favorite tunes on the record, We Can Talk About it Now. “I want you to know that while we watched, you discovered no one would be true,” they sang. Bob Dylan and Richie Manuel, the Band's pianist who co-wrote Tears of Rage, must’ve already learned this hard philosophy from worldly lives spent traveling city to city. The Band had also been across the ocean with Dylan on that pretty rough 1966 tour through England, the tour where Dylan got booed for “going electric,” although Levon himself was not the drummer on this tour. 

These were men who were wiser than I. When I first heard the song Tears of Rage, I was a baby bird barely out of the hometown nest, naive about the duplicity of human behavior. When I found out about the lying, cheating world for myself, it was a discovery that hit me rather hard. 

Levon's most famous lead vocal performance on the Big Pink album is The Weight, "Take a load off Fanny... you can put the load right on me." It was a released "single" for the group. Although it did not chart very high, it is remembered to this day, covered over and over again, an integral part of the Band's legacy. The songwriter, Robbie Robertson, said about The Weight, refering to the filmmaker Luis Bunuel, "Buñuel did so many films on the impossibility of sainthood. People trying to be good in Viridiana and Nazarin, people trying to do their thing. In ‘The Weight’ it’s the same thing. People like Buñuel would make films that had these religious connotations to them but it wasn’t necessarily a religious meaning. In Buñuel there were these people trying to be good and it’s impossible to be good."

If there's a list of things to do somehow left behind, crumpled up in a dark, dusty corner of the apartment from my days on Yonge Street, the first item on the nearly illegible note would read, “Listen to Big Pink for words to ... ;” I was trying to decode it, looking for direction like in lines from Wheels on Fire, “Just notify my next of kin, this wheel shall explode.” Within a few months I was in a van, bound for California on the Great American Highway, Route 66. A second life opened out before me. From mountain to plain to desert, to mountains again, I was travelin’ on, leaving the pain of my first life behind, and I was singin’ my heart out.

(See http://www.amazon.com/voyages-ancestral-islands-poems-prose/dp/1448637279 for Dave Holt's book, Voyages to Ancestral Islands.)