Polymusical Party

You know those friends you have who you hope never meet? The fun, foul-mouthed friends from university who would embarrass you horribly if you bumped into them while you were with your elegant socialite friend? The gorgeous but dim ex you couldn't introduce to your scientist friend? You know what I'm talking about. 

But don't we all go through our lives, meeting people from all walks, learning what we can from them all, tourists visiting other people's lives for a little while before returning to our own? We're sightseers, nourishing our curiosity with each contact, and though our destinations might be inclined to war with each other, they're still all interesting places to vacation.

That's how songs are.

In the same way that you'd call up a certain someone you haven't seen for a while, you might put on some music you haven't listened to for a while, and either would make you feel just the way that person or that song always made you feel. Everyone has a music collection, and I would bet that most people's collections have a variety of styles for different moods and different activities.

But do you often find multiple styles on one CD?

When a song forms in my head, it makes itself known in a certain way, and I feel I'm just translating it into existence. I don't have control over whether it wants to be a rock song, a country song, a pop song or a folk song. Of course I don't want them all to be the same, but sometimes it feels like these songs go out of their way to distinguish themselves from one another, like desperately non-conformist friends vying to stand out. So I've given in to the demands each song makes, and put them all down exactly as they've asked. Oh, yes, they argue with each other about the silliest things, and I've caught them rolling their eyes at something one of the others said, but generally, they get along pretty well for such an eclectic group. And I've decided on a name for them all, following up on my Life as Tourism theme. The full collection (still a work in progress) will be called "Sightseeing At Rush Hour."

So welcome, Sonny's Sightseers!

Listen to "Sightseeing At Rush Hour" so far here

Rococo vocals

Rococo was an 18th-century artistic aesthetic that took the rigid but ornate baroque style further into a freer, yet even more ornate direction. When I use the word to describe vocals, I'm referring to the modern practice of adding trills and runs to every long note in the song, something which has gotten out of hand in recent years.

Where did it all start? I think Ray Charles might have planted the seed, adding the occasional scalic warble to the ends of long notes to establish his signature style. Not many singers could even do that, so not many copied him until Stevie Wonder came along. He could sing anything, and I believe it was his influence that has resulted, second and third hand, in the epi-diva-ic of today. But Stevie always sang with taste, exploding into a little vocal arpeggio for only a moment before returning to the melody, just enough to make you stagger backward in amazement.

The habit of ornamentation as a standard part of every vocal performance crept in as Whitney Houston put out hit after hit full of runs, and that led to the Christina Aguilera school of adding arpeggiated frills at every possible opportunity. Nevertheless, both those ladies were capable of singing a recognizable melody in between the sixty-fourth notes.

Now I hear singers who bury the melody so far under a barrage of embellishment that it would take a trained musicologist months to discover it. My ears get dizzy listening to them, and if they ever had any emotional connection with the lyric, it's been lost in the quest for ever more showy technical proficiency.

It's worth remarking that not every new singer has fallen into this trap, and though perhaps capable of any run, the likes of Adele and Bruno Mars can still break your heart with a long uninterrupted note. Will it come full circle? Will the habit of ornamentation for its own sake be put in the rear-view mirror of musical history like the rococo period of visual art before it? Let's take a little trip down memory lane and hear how it's supposed to be done:

Rap or Microtonal Melody?

When I first started hearing about 'rap' music, I was puzzled - why would the element of melody be removed from music, and why would anyone want to listen to that?

I didn't really hear much of it (partly by choice) until I spent a day doing grunt location cleanup work at a movie location with a young (white) kid who told me at the beginning of the day that he liked to listen to hard-core rap while he worked and (with a challenging expression on his face) he hoped that wasn't going to be a problem. I heard a good deal of it that day, and although I understood the rebellious energy and the power of the rhythm, I had a great deal of trouble understanding most of the lyrics. I could get little snatches here and there, but it went by so fast and contained so much street slang I was lost most of the time.

For a long time I avoided rap, because every time I ran into it the song just seemed to be a celebration of bling, violence and macho chauvanism. The first time I heard a rap I actually liked was Tony M.'s contribution to a Prince song called "Live 4 Love," which I listened to over and over. I realized that a good rap could use the accented syllables to pull the rhythm of the song a little off the beaten path, and how pleasant that could be. I started listening for rap tunes that successfully did that.

And then Eminem started hitting the radio. His songs combined the offbeat rhythms with insistent rhymes that cascaded over one another like a prizefighter demolishing a weak opponent, hit after hit, rhyme after rhyme, each one coming earlier than expected. Somehow in all that technical artistry were passionate stories, and all shouted at a pace that I could still grasp as it went by, and no verses full of filler about bitches and n*****s. Oh, and when he had to sing on key, he could sing on key. That made me wonder about the pitch of the rap portion of the songs, and I realized that he was deliberately selecting a note a quarter tone away from the scale of the instrumentation to cue the listener that the part he was 'singing' was the rap. It brought a tension that a straight melody couldn't, and completely justified the enterprise to my ear.

Then he sealed the deal with this:

Let's put on a show!

There is a convention in musical movies, and now, musical TV shows, in which two or more of the performers decide to sing a song together. They jump up on the stage (there is usually a stage) and start singing, and a verse or two in, it becomes glaringly, embarrassingly apparent that this is no spur-of-the-moment performance. Without so much as a nod or a hand gesture, they trade lines back and forth, then break into perfect two or three-part harmony, to the delight of the assembled audience.

It always helps move the plot along, and we accept it as we watch, (in the same way we accept the dial-tone on the other end of the phone when the movie caller hangs up) but I've always found that it takes me out of the story. Does this happen to everyone, or just people who have experience performing music? Do non-musicians assume that real musicians are so talented they can just jam out a complex arrangement based on telepathy? Face it, the most realistic depiction of an impromptu vocal performance in the history of cinema is in "Spinal Tap" when the lads try to sing "Heartbreak Hotel" at Elvis' grave. And don't get me started on the band behind the singers...not only do they play every song in every key, they all know where that surprise modulation in the middle of the song is coming.

It happened in all the old musicals, you expected it when you saw Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby or Danny Kaye. But it persisted through The Sound Of Music, innumerable beach movies and right into the 90s, when musicals became almost exclusively the domain of animated children's fare, and the unacknowledged rehearsal ceased to be an issue. Now we have a slew of musical TV shows thanks to the technological breakthroughs that allow TV producers to bang off a half dozen professionally recorded and choreographed songs per episode, and the magically perfect improvs are back. (I'm going to excuse "Nashville" from this accusation, because outside of some over-perfect songwriting scenes, they've largely kept it pretty real)

So what would a real-life unpremeditated musical collaboration look like? A couple of weeks ago this circulated on social media, and we found the answer. There's no reason this couldn't happen, and it really looks like it probably did.

The Minority

There is a musical world out there that everyone knows about, but few frequent. In clubs with sparse, polite audiences, musicians of the highest calibre perform the most complex music. When one of the musicians steps into the spotlight and improvises for a verse or two, the audience applauds when the solo is over, even if the song is still going on.

Dictionary.com defines jazz as: "music originating in New Orleans around the beginning of the 20th century and subsequently developing through various increasingly complex styles, generally marked by intricate, propulsive rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, improvisatory, virtuousic solos, melodic freedom, and a harmonic idiom ranging from simple diatonicism through chromaticism to atonality." 

As definitions go, that's a start, but there are a couple of problems: not only is it a weak description of most slow jazz styles, it also could apply equally well to some kinds of rock, latin and even certain modern classical music. So what makes jazz different from those? I guess we know it when we hear it; there are some jazz traditions of substitution chords, and chords with remote bass notes, some instrumental cliches on piano, bass and sax, and some peculiarly 'jazzy' vocal styles. The definition gets even harder to nail down when you add in fusion styles, hyphenating jazz- primarily with rock, but also with latin and other world music elements.

I'm going to admit that I don't reach for jazz albums first when I decide to put on some music, and it's a world that, like most people, I haven't spent much time in. There was l little window, however, back in the mid-seventies when Jeff Beck put out back-to-back albums ("Blow By Blow" and "Wired") of instrumental jazz fusion and won over a huge audience of blue-jeaned rock fans, and I was one of them. (I would never have dreamed at the time that within the next few years I would be playing in a band that was opening for him)

Here's Jeff Beck playing a Mingus piece, a lovely example of the reasons jazz fans love it when it's good; the melody is seductive, the changes are emotional, and the playing is very, very superior. 
(I was amused that one commenter on YT claims that after hearing this song he threw his guitar out the window and never played again)

Psycho Lyricists

There are thousands of perfectly beautiful and valid sentiments expressed in song lyrics, and some have even inspired people to do great things.

A lot of the most heartfelt lyrics, however, tell darker stories and express human passions of the less pleasant or admirable sort. The lyrics to "Walk On By" or "Crying" depict a songwriter who is experiencing the temporary insanity of a breakup, and "Paint It Black" takes it further with a more permanent end to the relationship. We don't envy these characters, but we do empathize: I clearly remember welling up while listening to Macy Gray's "I Try" and the first time I listened to "She's Leaving Home" I almost broke down at the top of the stairs myself.

But there are some songs which sound innocuous enough as lyrics, but if they were expressed as prose could be cause for calling a psychiatrist, or even the police. The first group are the victim lyrics: songs where the story is told from the point of view of someone who has lost all self-respect. Some of these songs just sounded like nice tunes until you looked closer: in "Maggie May" Rod Stewart is apparently the helpless (and possibly underaged) boy-toy of an older woman; in "Chain of Fools" Aretha admits to her inability to leave a man who treats her badly, and Bonnie Raitt consciously embraces denial and gives herself anyway even though "I Can't Make You Love Me."

The second group are the ones that I find most insidious, though: cheerful little pop songs which turn out to be the dark thoughts of sociopaths and criminals. The groundwork for the misogyny of modern rap music was laid long ago with "That's What You Get For Loving Me" and "Don't Think Twice It's Alright." We all forgave John Lennon for his disaffected apathy in "Norwegian Wood," but if you think about it, the girl in question didn't really seem to deserve having her house burned down, did she?

I believe it's a form of lyric populism, where the lyricist appeals to the thoughts and feelings we may think, but dare not express. It's comforting to be allowed to imagine deflowering a virgin a la "Tonight's The Night" or carrying out a revenge fantasy like Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats."

But I think my favourite for blatant creepiness that apparently went largely unnoticed by the music-buying public is still this one, a controlling stalker singing to a woman who should, by rights, be terrified, disguised as a love song:

Major Minor

While I'm willing to concede that many of my readers are trained musicians and are therefore completely conversant with the difference between major and minor keys, indulge me a little. Isn't it fascinating how we innately understand the difference? How even when we were very small children we could 'feel' how a particular piece of music sounded happy or sad, and how the dichotomy is between happy and sad instead of, say, loving and hating or some other emotional split.

For non-musicians who are unfamiliar with the meaning, the technical difference between a major and a minor chord is a semitone, which is the smallest difference between two notes in western music. It's a small change, a half-step of the scale, but it makes as much difference to the sound of the music as playing it on an organ instead of a harp would.

A composer who wants a piece to be serious and maybe tragic would never consider writing it in a major key, and if he wanted a light piece, say, to celebrate a wedding, he would avoid a minor key in the same way. However, for an ambiguous, wry sound, it's possible to bend the third note of the scale from minor to major as part of the setting, and we hear that used in some blues music; the result is music that sounds like it's making fun of a miserable situation.

A couple of years ago I read about a new technology invented by an engineer at Celemony called Direct Note Access which would allow an audio engineer to go into an existing arrangement of multiple instruments and adjust a single note in a chord. It occurred to me that every album ever recorded might be fodder for manipulation, that well-known recordings could be modified so the singer changed the melody or the guitar solo played different notes. It did NOT occur to me that a whole song could be changed from minor to major or vice versa, but apparently it did occur to someone else. As an illustration of the importance of choosing whether to write in a major or minor key, I can not think of a better example. Here's The Doors' "Riders On The Storm" converted to a major key - remember, this is not a cover version, this is the original recording with the scale altered!



Major Scaled #3 : The Doors - " Riders On The Rainbow" from major scaled on Vimeo.