A week in Jakarta for America's 'The Daddy of Vocalese'

By Paul W. Blair

JAKARTA (JP): The singer generally credited with popularizing the jazz style known as vocalese began a six-night engagement at the Jakarta Blue Note yesterday evening.

Jon Hendricks, sometimes called the father of the vocalese style, will be performing with three other members of his musical family, to the backing of a rhythm section they're bringing along from New York.

The quartet, billed as Jon Hendricks & Company, includes Hendricks' wife Judith, his daughter Aria and baritone voice Kevin Burke, who has been a member of this musical clan for seven years. Their Blue Note shows are likely to include a heady mixture of the jazz instrumentals for which Hendricks has crafted his own distinctively witty lyrics, as well as a standard song or two given the Hendricks treatment.

Jon Hendricks' most recent album Freddie Freeloader, released in 1990, featured guest appearances by an impressive array of other musicians: George Benson, Al Jarreau, Bobby McFerrin, Manhattan Transfer, Stanley Turrentine, Wynton Marsalis and the Count Basie band.

Yet despite the critical acclaim he has received -- almost from the moment he burst onto the musical scene in the late 1950s as a member of the award-winning jazz vocal group Lambert, Hendricks & Ross -- Hendricks' name is surely less well-known among the general public than any of theirs.

So what is vocalese? Basically, it's the setting of words note-for-note to an improvised instrumental solo previously recorded by someone else. Two American singers who came to prominence in the 1950s, Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure, were among the first to capture public attention with the style.

In fact, King Pleasure's 1952 recording of Moody's Mood For Love (in which he devised words to an improvised solo played on a record of I'm in the Mood for Love some months earlier by saxophonist James Moody) actually became a jukebox hit. George Benson and several other artists have since cut their own versions of the King Pleasure record.

Vocalese took a quantum leap forward with the release of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross' first album Sing a Song of Basie in 1958. Through a multi-tracking process, the three singers were able to recreate all the horn parts of the Basie band -- three trombones, four trumpets and five saxophones -- on ten classic Basie numbers, backed up by a rhythm section.

Even more exciting were the trio's recreation of the original instrumental solos (with Annie Ross usually handling the trumpet solos, Hendricks the saxophones and Lambert the trombones) with wry lyrics especially created by Hendricks. Each lyric told a hip little story, a kind of conversation among the various instrumental sections of the full band. In recognition of Hendricks' originality, a critic writing in Time acclaimed him "the James Joyce of Jive."

The musical precision the trio achieved, combined with its unrelenting swing, made the album a jazz landmark. And, unlike the rest of LH&R's subsequent output, you can probably find this one at some Jakarta music shops, since it's been reissued on compact disc by GRP.

For subsequent albums, LH&R dropped the multi-tracked approach and covered songs originally recorded by Duke Ellington, Horace Silver and other prominent jazz artists. Most of these albums are back in print again and reaching a whole new generation of listeners.

Annie Ross left LH&R in the early 1960s (she now acts in Robert Altman films) and was, for a time, replaced by a singer named Yolande Bavan who was of Javanese ancestry. The group finally broke up in 1964 and Dave Lambert was killed in a 1966 auto accident.

All of this is ancient history by now. What's far more important is that Jon Hendricks has brought the vocalese tradition into the 1990s with a group that reflects his wry sense of humor and his uncompromising musical taste.

"I don't work as a single anymore," he said in a telephone interview last week, "because the group is where I'm concentrating all my effort. And we tend to add new material slowly, because it takes lots of time to create new lyrics and then master the singing of them."

He does find the occasional moment for outside pursuits, though. He wrote and performed in an American TV documentary called Somewhere to Lay My Weary Head and acted in a long-running theatrical production called The Evolution of the Blues. He has worked as a journalist, a Berkeley professor and a creator of fresh new material for other musicians. All the songs on Manhattan Transfer's album entitled Vocalese, which won seven Grammies, were his. In fact, the whole package was a kind of Hendricks tribute.

The newest Jon Hendricks album, recorded live at the original Blue Note club in New York with the help of another batch of all- star jazz musicians, is scheduled for a February release. With any luck, it will eventually be available in Jakarta. But the man himself is available in Jakarta over the next six evenings.

Booking Jon Hendricks & Company is the closest that the Jakarta Blue Note has yet come to non-electric jazz. Listeners with an appetite for high musical spirits leavened with lots of mother wit definitely ought to take advantage.