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Songs of experience
Carol Sloane’s lived-in jazz
BY JON GARELICK

There are maybe a handful of singers around these days who grew up with what’s come to be known as "The Great American Songbook" who are still plying their wares — cabaret artists like Bobby Short and Barbara Cook, jazz singers like Shirley Horn and Carol Sloane. Sloane, a Providence native, celebrates her "50th anniversary in jazz" at Scullers next weekend with tenor-saxophonist Harry Allen, pianist James Williams, bassist John Lockwood, and drummer Yoron Israel.

What makes it 50 years? "It’s a little bit over 50 years," says Sloane when I reach her at her Stoneham home. "I started making money singing in 1953 or ’54. I was very young, living in Rhode Island, and I sang with a dance band on Wednesday and Saturday nights. My uncle was in the band, so my mother let me do it."

Sloane sang with the Les and Larry Elgart Orchestra from 1958 to ’60, making a splash at the 1961 Newport Jazz Festival and debuting at New York’s Village Vanguard that same year. She eventually became a Vanguard regular, opening for the likes of Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen. Her career slowed almost to a halt during the late ’60s and ’70s, but beginning with Love You Madly in 1988, she’s produced a steady stream of recordings on Contemporary, Concord, and now High Note that are prized by connoisseurs, and she makes regular tour stops at the Vanguard and Scullers. (Boston-area radio listeners also know her for her stints a few years back filling in for Ron Della Chiesa on WGBH FM.)

It’s not difficult to hear why Sloane’s work is prized when you check out the new Whisper Sweet (High Note). Stephen Sondheim once distinguished between opera and Broadway musicals by pointing out that opera is primarily about music and Broadway is primarily about words. (In a similar way, rock tends to be operatic.) The American Songbook repertoire — which includes pieces by the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Harold Arlen & Johnny Mercer — is all about the words, and even those beautiful melodies are more often than not about text setting.

From the very first track of Whisper Sweet, Sloane makes you hear a well-worn lyric as if for the first time: "Maybe . . . I should have saved my leftover dreams/Funny, but here’s my rainy day./Well here is that rainy day/They all told me about/And I just laughed at the thought that it might turn out this way." You could conduct a master class in just the way she shapes these first lines of Johnny Burke’s lyrics around Jimmy Van Heusen’s melody — the pregnant pauses after "Maybe" and "well," the way her voice drops into "should have" and ascends to that bent interval of "leftover." Sloane knows about rhythm and swing, but she also knows how to float a note into her upper register and let it hang in the æther of her rich vibrato. When she sings, "It’s easy to remember/but it’s so hard to forget," the memory of that love affair lingers in the resignation of those last two syllables.

Sloane has always been a wonderful ballad singer (listen to the Ballad Essentials collection on Concord), but here she’s given special attention by producer Don Sickler, and arrangements that often favor a verse of her with guitarist Paul Bollenback or pianist Norman Simmons before the band come in. Whisper Sweet’s warmth and intimacy put her voice — which is capable of effects both rich and transparent — right up to your ear.

Sloane points out that aside from a wider vibrato and a broader bottom range, her voice hasn’t changed all that much over the years. She’s still able to hit her top notes, and she’s still singing songs in the same keys she’s been singing them in for 50 years. "It has nothing to do with me, believe me; I’m lazy. I don’t smoke or do things like that, and I do warm up before performances, but otherwise, it’s just the thing I was born with."

If her approach has differed at all, it’s in the way she sings ballads. "It seems that I have a better approach to the song if I want people to be weeping. I want there to be floods of tears when I finish singing a song. Or at least have people look at me for a moment and just go, ‘Oh my gosh, that was wonderful.’

"There’s no such thing as an easy song to sing. Because if I chose something I felt was really easy, then it’s no challenge. You sing a song because the melody is challenging, or the lyric is something you really want to express and you want people to be moved by what you’re singing and by what the composer and lyricist wrote."

Carol Sloane sings next Friday and Saturday, February 13 and 14, at Scullers, in the DoubleTree Guest Suites Hotel, 400 Soldiers Field Road at the Mass Pike; call (617) 562-4111.


Issue Date: February 6 - 12, 2004
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