Music Feedback
New This WeekAround TownMusicFilmArtTheaterNews & FeaturesFood & DrinkAstrology
  HOME
NEW THIS WEEK
EDITORS' PICKS
LISTINGS
NEWS & FEATURES
MUSIC
FILM
ART
BOOKS
THEATER
DANCE
TELEVISION
FOOD & DRINK
ARCHIVES
LETTERS
PERSONALS
CLASSIFIEDS
ADULT
ASTROLOGY
PHOENIX FORUM DOWNLOAD MP3s

  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
Not just Norah
Susanne Abbuehl and Luciana Souza also make their own kind of music
BY KEN MICALLEF

In Ken Burns’s monumental documentary series Jazz, Wynton Marsalis suggests there are only two ways for a woman who sings to swing: Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. " You can’t top that old-school swing " was the message behind his conservative version of jazz history. And it’s had an impact on jazz labels. Diane Krall and Jane Monheit have emerged as stars: talented, beautiful, and beaming with swingability, they’re standard bearers for the Marsalis school. But they haven’t eclipsed a new breed of more adventurous jazz singers — artists influenced by everyone from Willie Nelson to the Monkees to Tony Bennett. These are women making jazz on their own terms.

Thanks to the unprecedented breakthrough of this year’s Grammy darling, Norah Jones, it’s clear that Marsalis isn’t running the only game in town. The daughter of sitar master Ravi Shankar, Jones makes no apologies for her love of pop and of sad songs. " I like being intimate, " she says over the phone from her Brooklyn home. " That is what I do best. It can get too mellow for some audiences, so we add upbeat stuff, but the reality is I don’t like it as much. I would rather do all mellow songs that I love. "

Jones’s Come Away with Me (Blue Note) is the kind of crossover hit jazz labels dream of. The secret of its success, however, is that it isn’t really jazz — at least not in the traditional sense. Rather, it’s a jazzy amalgam of Texas twang, early Joni Mitchell moodiness, and folky atmospheres that translate the adventurous compositional clarity of jazz-and-more guitarist Bill Frisell to the piano, topped off with Jones’s sultry swoon-and-croon vocals. Jones may be capable of churning out piano-bar standards, but she prefers songs sung blue to burning bop and snappy swing.

" I lost interest in doing small jazz gigs, " she recalls. " People didn’t listen when I played in New York. Then I started writing songs, and I noticed they sounded nothing like jazz. Come Away with Me is kind of country. That is funny. I was just hearing a lot of songwriters; I was not going out to hear jazz much anymore. Anyway, who needs another version of ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’? "

Infusing old standards with elements of Indian music and contemporary poetry, Rotterdam’s Susanne Abbuehl brings a sculptural approach to jazz on her new April (ECM). Her hypnotic, almost ghostly rendering of Thelonious Monk’s "  ’Round Midnight " is a standard set free of jazz convention. Her clarinet-piano-drums arrangements, which include interpretations of Carla Bley’s " Ida Lupino " and " Closer " (with Abbuehl’s lyrics), bring an air of mystery even to an old workhorse like "  ’Round Midnight. "

" It comes from seeing the movement of singing as part of the circle of breathing, " Abbuehl explains over the phone from Rotterdam. " There is a certain time to inhale the new phrase. I have been working a lot with the dead point in the cycle of breath, to really go until the next point and to resist doing too much. " But there’s magic in Abbuehl’s method — she taps into soft, hypnotic grooves. " I see words as entities or sculptures in the acoustic room. There are many things that cannot be expressed by language. But in music those things get some kind of room to live in. I want to sing with a voice that is very close to the ear, as if somebody were singing right into your ear. "

Another singer skirting convention is former Berklee teacher Luciana Souza, who works with orchestras worldwide performing the music of controversial Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov. Her second album, Brazilian Duos (Sunnyside), offers interpretations of Tom Jobim and Dori Caymmi. Although she often sings in her native Portuguese, she’s still capable of creating an intimate bond with her listeners, and indeed the arrangements on Brazilian Duos are stripped down to voice and guitar. " It is scary, but there is a tradition there, " she says from her Upper Manhattan home. " I think of the great duet albums like Bill Evans and Tony Bennett. I didn’t want to do my first record in the States covering only Brazilian repertoire, so I purposely sang jazz and original music on [1999’s] An Answer to Your Silence. I wanted to establish that I was going to write my music whether people liked it or not. "

Souza has found powerful friends: the New York Times placed Brazilian Duos on its best-of year-end list. And she’s been invited to perform at classical venues around the world, including Brooklyn Academy of Music. " There is an expectation of what a classical-music singer should look like. But I don’t change a thing. It can be deceiving at first, but I am really giving my heart and soul to the music. Even when people complain that I don’t have that classical sound, inevitably the music, not me, wins them over. "

Issue Date: March 27 - April 3, 2003
Back to the Music table of contents.

  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

home | feedback | about the phoenix | find the phoenix | advertising info | privacy policy | the masthead | work for us

 © 2003 Phoenix Media Communications Group