Jarreau Explores What Makes ‘Jazz Singers’

What comes to mind when you hear the words “jazz singer”? Ella Fitzgerald? Billie Holiday? Sarah Vaughan?

Absolutely. All of them. Few jazz fans would deny the presence of those illustrious names in any representation of the jazz pantheon.

But what about Peggy Lee? Or Tony Bennett? What about Frank Sinatra? Or, to bring the query directly into the present, Diana Krall?

“The Jazz Singers,” a 13-hour radio series from Smithsonian Productions, which KCRW-FM (89.9) is broadcasting in a marathon Wednesday from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., provides a string of reasons why most of the above--and a lot more--can lay claim, to one degree or another, to legitimate membership in that exclusive club.

Singer Al Jarreau, who is himself an obvious choice for the category, hosts the show, offering pithy observations of his own between selections that reach from the earliest work of Bessie Smith to the latest efforts of Cassandra Wilson.

Jarreau has high praise for the work done by producer Jacquie Gales Webb and her staff in the complicated effort of pulling together nearly a century of material in a coherent historical overview. The 13 hourlong individual programs are all self-contained, each examining a specific style or period in segments bearing titles such as “Steeped in the Blues,” “Straight Out of the Church,” “Scat, Bebop, Vocalese and the Voice as an Instrument,” “You Are What You Sing” and “On the Road and in the Club.”

But recently, several months after he finished work on the project, Jarreau--who has a master’s degree in vocational rehabilitation from the University of Iowa to accompany his five vocal Grammy Awards--was still pondering the enigma of the art of jazz singing.

Seated in an Encino restaurant not far from his home, he leaned back for a long, pensive moment, his face moving through a series of puzzled expressions.

“Well, it’s really hard to figure it out--jazz singing--isn’t it,” he said.

When it was asked--since “The Jazz Singers” offers a brilliantly illuminating display of jazz vocal artistry of every style and manner, including a complete episode titled “What Is Jazz Singing?”--what could be hard to “figure out,” Jarreau chuckled. Actually, his chuckle is something more like a sotto voce cackle, his way of making a wry, nonverbal commentary. And his thoughts provided a fascinating counterpoint to the series, a kind of inside-the-process, singer’s point of view.

“Oh, nothing was left out, you can be pretty sure of that,” he said. “If there’s anything about jazz singing that doesn’t pop up somewhere in those 13 hours, it would be hard to figure out what it is.”

Jarreau paused again, wrestling with the thought before continuing. “There are a few other things that come to mind. . . . Take, for example, the fundamental difference between a jazz instrumentalist and a jazz singer. The desire to deal with words--in some respects a kind of commandment to honor a lyric--demands a different kind of approach. For a singer, there’s a greater commitment to simplify in the opening statement, to simplify rather than take the kind of liberties that an instrumentalist would do freely. When you lay the lyric out there, it has to be intelligible in a way that can be understood. And I think that can be a limitation in how you approach a piece. The singer dealing with a lyric typically can’t give himself as much latitude as the instrumentalist does with improvising.”

Jarreau referred to the segments in “The Jazz Singers” in which the generally acknowledged progenitors of the art--Louis Armstrong, Holiday, Fitzgerald, Vaughan--display their wares. In each case, he noted, there was great clarity in their expression of the words, regardless of variations in style.

But there were similarities to instrumentalists as well. And it’s not surprising that Armstrong’s enormous influence upon the singers who followed was associated with his capacity to invest his singing with the same imaginative sense of phrasing and rhythmic swing in his trumpet playing.

“Lemme show you how that works,” said Jarreau, starting to sing a line, delivering it with an unmistakable simulation of Holiday’s style. At a nearby table, a dinner patron nodded approval.

“It was apparent in how Billie laid out the melody,” he continued, “that she had been around trumpets and saxophones enough so that they influenced how she did her phrasing. . . . The thing that Billie could do was stretch the time and shrink the time, and stretch the phrase and sound very horn-like in her way. And it was amazingly simple; she actually had a very limited range as a vocalist. But it really struck a chord with people.”

Several of the show’s episodes deal with the historical timeline of jazz singing. Without specifically saying so, the material underscores the many differences between the past and the present. Jazz artists such as Carmen McRae, Holiday, Vaughan, Fitzgerald and others were functioning in a musical milieu in which their competitors were singers such as Perry Como, Doris Day, Dinah Shore and Jo Stafford. Today’s jazz singers are confronted by a vastly more complex pop music world.

“It’s a very different time,” Jarreau said. “The industry was very young then, and although there was some considerable difference in paychecks between the pop singers of the period and the jazzier ones, it wasn’t as drastic as it is now, I don’t think.”

Equally important, the material was different. The episode “You Are What You Sing” explores the search for material that is ever present. The difference, of course, is that in the ‘30s and ‘40s, the available material--now generally described as the Great American Songbook--was a treasure trove of material, poured out from the likes of Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin and Rodgers & Hart.

“There hasn’t been anything comparable to those songs since the late ‘50s,” Jarreau said. “Our public sentiments have changed incredibly during since the advent of rock. In the ‘30s and the ‘40s, in movies and in musicals there was a real stage, a forum, for the kind of brilliant writing that became the Great American Songbook.”

But both Jarreau and “The Jazz Singers” suggest that high-quality numbers of more recent vintage aren’t receiving the attention they deserve from younger jazz vocalists.

“The material that has come out of the rock era--Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, James Taylor, you know the names--hasn’t really been properly explored by the younger jazz singers of this period. And that’s a great oversight. It would bring a lot of freshness to the whole genre, to dig into that material.”

“The Jazz Singers” closes with a segment titled “Today, Tomorrow, . . . Forever?” asking whether jazz singing is “alive and flourishing” or “floundering and adrift.”

Asked about the segment, Jarreau lapsed into one of his long, thoughtful responses before offering a generally optimistic one.

“Well, I’m inclined to put the best face on things as I can,” he said. “I’m the eternal optimist, so I look at Diana Krall and Kevin Mahogany and a few others as real bright spots. But I’m not going to suggest there aren’t problems.

“But you know, every time I start feeling down about the whole state of the art, I seem to have one of these unexpected experiences. I remember running into Diane Schuur in Seattle a few years ago, right out of the blue, without warning. And, bingo, I was really impressed. And you just never know when that sort of thing is going to happen.”

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* “The Jazz Singers” marathon can be heard Wednesday, 9 a.m.-10 p.m. on KCRW-FM (89.9). Other area stations carrying the Fourth of July marathon broadcasts include KCRY-FM (88.1) in Mojave/Antelope; KAZU-FM (90.3) in Oxnard; and KCRI-FM (89.3) in Palm Springs/Indio.