Soul Stirrers (featuring R. H. Harris), “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” (1946)
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lagniappe
When R. H. Harris, the renowned gospel tenor, died last month, I went back to the records he had made in the 1950’s with his quartet, the Soul Stirrers. Harris was the — founder is not too strong a word — of a soul singing that concentrated on supple phrasing and tonal sweetness. He could, as Tina Turner used to say, ”do it rough,” but there was a core of reticence, even melancholy in him. His roughness was strategic.
The Soul Stirrers set the mold for other outstanding quartets like the Swan Silvertones and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, and for younger soul singers, from Sam Cooke (trained by Harris) to David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks of the Temptations (Harris had mastered husky rhythm singing and falsetto), and Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye.
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The discipline required of a first-rate ensemble, vocal or instrumental, translates into the kind of musical discretion that comes only from intense on-the-spot listening. Not biding time or doing cute things onstage until your solo comes, but listening. Take melisma (one syllable stretched over many notes), the vocal weapon so battered and abused by pop singers today. Harris was a master of it. For him it was a musical resource, like dynamics or timbre, not a way of muscling listeners to the ground till they screamed and clapped, maybe because they were overpowered, maybe just to stop the madness.
The Soul Stirrers’ a cappella harmonies are deeply satisfying. And when Harris rises above them with his pure, true pitch (pitch is usually the missing element in today’s melisma mania), you will experience true bliss.
If you’re away from home, how good it is to find a musical sanctuary, as I have the last two Fridays at Harvard’s Paine Concert Hall; last night I heard this string quartet play, wonderfully, music by Brahms and two contemporary composers (Adam Roberts, James Yannatos).
Chiara Quartet, Jefferson Friedman: String Quartet No. 2 (excerpt)
Live, New York (Le Poisson Rouge), 2010
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Are we ever better—more focused, more receptive, more supple—than when we’re listening to live music?
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lagniappe
art beat
Edward Hopper, Room in Brooklyn (1932), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
We’ve always believed in singing, in expressing ourselves.
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Sometimes a song . . . is just as great as a sermon.
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A hurricane starts off slowly . . . and when she gets a certain speed, that’s when she’s dangerous. Most preachers . . . get their power going up . . . . [M]ost of my power is given by coming down, down, after I’ve gone up.
—Rev. Johnny L. Jones
Rev. Johnny L. Jones, live, Atlanta The Hurricane That Hit Atlanta (Dust-To-Digital 2010)
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
. . . music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
Here—with a shout-out to my brother Don, with whom (at the age of 15) I saw the MC5 in Chicago’s Lincoln Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention (when nobody outside the Detroit/Ann Arbor area [including us] knew who they were)—is an awfully good cover, from what might seem an unlikely source, of one of their “greatest hits.”
Jeff Buckley, “Kick Out The Jams,” live, Chicago, 1995
And here, courtesy, apparently, of the Department of Defense, is (silent) footage of the scene in Lincoln Park on August 25, 1968—the day the MC5 (who appear here fleetingly) played.
(Originally posted 9/7/09.)
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lagniappe
on the road
Last night, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I’ve been since Sunday, I heard a concert, on the Harvard campus, of contemporary music featuring two different groups (Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble and Ensemble SurPlus) and works by six different composers, including Morton Feldman and John Luther Adams (who was present). Virtually every time I hear live music—last night was no exception—I leave thinking that I really need to do this more often. I love recordings, but live music breathes.
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Tonight, in Boston, I’ll be in the front row for this production of Merchant of Venice. Tomorrow I’m seeing a series of short works by Samuel Beckett, directed by the legendary Peter Brook. So that’s three straight days of live music. (What’s theater, after all, if not musical speech?)
music clip of the day 