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