Ever So Divine: The Persistence Of The Sounds Of Sarah Vaughan

The American jazz singer, Sarah Vaughan, known as "Sassy" and "The Divine One," performed for almost fifty years. She was not only a singer but also a magician who could wring a full spectrum of rmotion from a song with her warmth and three-octave range. Indeed she was a symphony of sound. The introductory paragraph of her Wikipedia entry quotes the music critic, Scott Yanow, as saying she had "one of the most wondrous voices of the 20th century." When coupled with the greatest of songwriters from 1930 on I think she could be matched only by Ella Fitzgerald for her vocal magic in popular music and jazz. Thirty-two years after her passing fans still wait for a singer who can approach her amazing voice. I must say that Jane Monheit has done a fine job of blending the Vaughan recipe with her own spices to bring us much of the magic we remember so well. Here is Sassy performing the signature song from late in her career, Send In The Clowns:

That is performance in song. It was recorded twenty years before Auto-Tune and other pitch correction and vocal tuning software could turn tone deaf studio metrosexuals and assorted hotties of any sex into so-called stars. We've come down a long way in what passes for both talent and popular music over the past generation. Of course, there are exceptions but for the most part real singing has become subordinate to other aspects of presentation, performance, and spectacle. And once more I ask the question, "Where is jazz, a genre birthed in the United States?" It is alive in many small markets across the country but it remains a small portfolio in the financial departments of our corporate music industry.

So as the Jane Monheits, Diana Kralls, Jazzmeia Horns, Samara Joys, and others keep jazz alive let us honor the memory of one of its greatest interpreters, Sarah Vaughan, who was born on March 27, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey. For another taste of her magic, here she is near the close of her career performing Misty.

A three octave vocal range, no Auto-Tune, singular perfection.

Vaughan passed away 35 year ago but her music and its legacy remain very much with us.

Sources


Photos and Illustrations:
opening photo, William P. Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Woodstock: A Mass Of Talent For A Massive Audience

Woodstock was billed as an Aquarian exposition featuring three days of peace and music. Indeed it's remarkable that the event proved relatively peaceful in spite of a continuing deluge that turned the venue into a sea of mud and logistical chaos. And there was the music, now legendary. Although a vast mythology enveloped the event over the years, there was the music, and it will always stand alone. 

And, no, I wasn't there but the music of a generation and more was there, and in many cases is still with us. So who graced the stage at the festival we have come to know as Woodstock? Here is the list according to the Woodstock Wikipedia page: 

Richie Havens 

Swami Satchidananda 

Sweetwater 

Bert Sommer

Tim Hardin 

Ravi Shankar 

Melanie 

Arlo Guthrie 

Joan Baez 

Quill Country 

Joe McDonald 

Santana 

John Sebastian 

Keef Hartley Band 

The Incredible String Band 

Canned Heat 

Mountain 

Grateful Dead  

Creedence Clearwater Revival 

Janis Joplin with The Kozmic Blues Band 

Sly and the Family Stone 

The Who 

Jefferson Airplane and Nicky Hopkins 

Joe Cocker and The Grease Band 

Country Joe and the Fish 

Ten Years After 

The Band

 Johnny Winter and his brother, Edgar Winter 

Blood, Sweat & Tears 

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young 

Paul Butterfield Blues Band 

Sha Na Na 

Jimi Hendrix 

The festival opened on August 15 and attracted an audience estimated at 400,000 or twice what the promoters expected. In 1969, the rock critic Ellen Sander said this about the festival's significance: 

No longer can the magical multicolored phenomenon of pop culture be overlooked or underrated. It’s happening everywhere, but now it has happened in one place at one time so hugely that it was indeed historic .... The audience was a much bigger story than the groups. It was major entertainment news that the line-up of talent was of such magnificence and magnitude (thirty-one acts, nineteen of which were colossal) .... These were, however, the least significant events of what happened over the Woodstock weekend. What happened was that the largest number of people ever assembled for any event other than a war lived together, intimately and meaningfully and with such natural good cheer that they turned on not only everyone surrounding them but the mass media, and, by extension, millions of others, young and old, particularly many elements hostile to the manifestations and ignorant of the substance of pop culture.

The Woodstock Preservation Alliance has this to say about the event's long-term significance to the American experience:

 

Woodstock was the culmination of a transformation in American popular music that had begun with [the] Monterey [Pop Festival]....Woodstock introduced the same wide diversity of talent, albeit on an expanded scale, to a truly mass audience....A subsequent documentary film...and several sound recordings helped establish what only two years before had been underground or avant-garde musical styles and ushered them into the mainstream. Participating musicians, industry insiders, and rock critics and historians concur that Woodstock changed the way that popular music was programmed and marketed. Festival promoters noted the large numbers of fans who were willing to put up with often inadequate facilities....Promoters saw opportunities to improve their profit margin by more efficiently organizing festivals....They also understood that increased ticket prices would need to be offset...by moving the festivals from pastoral settings into sports arenas and convention centers and limiting the shows to a single-day or evening.... [Such changes] altered the festival-going experience... and thereby diminished the sense of community that many commentators considered the sine qua non of the Woodstock experience. The development of "arena rock" marked the end of the rock "vaudeville circuit," and led to the demise of the smaller concert hall venues....The arenas also gave the upper hand to the style of music called heavy metal, represented by loudly amplified guitar based and blues-inflected bands composed almost entirely of white male musicians, whose aggressive style of playing was ideally suited for filling the audible space in arena settings. After Woodstock, musicians apprehended the seemingly insatiable demand for their music and began commanding higher fees. It thus soon proved to be no longer economically feasible to book several major bands on the same bill....This in turn led to the segmentation of the fan base....In the years fol1owing Woodstock, however, fans were channeled into attending concerts that featured fewer acts, typically representing one or two musical styles. Part of the Woodstock Festival's enduring legacy is the continuing efforts to counteract this trend by replicating the multi-performer/genre concert experience. Over the past three decades various parties have staged or attempted to stage successors to Woodstock, either by that name at different sites or else on or near the original site under a different name. [These efforts have had mixed success over the decades.]

 

Some impact I'd say. 

If you watched the opening you learned Joni Mitchell didn't appear as scheduled but she penned an extraordinary description of the event. She released the version you heard above on her album, Ladies of the Canyon eight months after the festival. A month earlier, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young featured the song on their album, Deja Vu. Their version proved to be a #1 cover hit revered to this day by audiences young and old.

Well I came upon a child of God, he was walking along the road 

And I asked him tell where are you going, this he told me: 

Said, I'm going down to Yasgur's farm, going to join in a rock and roll band. 

Got to get back to the land, set my soul free. 

We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon, 

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. 

Well, then can I walk beside you? I have come to lose the smog. 

And I feel like I'm a cog in something turning. 

And maybe it's the time of year, yes, and maybe it's the time of man. 

And I don't know who I am but life is for learning. 

We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon, 

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. 

By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong, 

And everywhere was song and a celebration. 

And I dreamed I saw the bombers jet planes riding shotgun in the sky, 

Turning into butterflies above our nation. 

We are stardust, we are golden, we are caught in the devil's bargain, 

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

If you want to remember this historic Aquarian exposition or imagine it for the first time you can choose among several original recordings. Better yet watch the director's cut of the documentary, Woodstock. The film, an outstanding example of documentary film making, is a perfect capture of the concert as well as the pivotal national experience that created it. 

Sources 

Photos and Illustrations: 

wikipedia.com 

Text: 

quotations: woodstockpreservation.org/SignificanceStatement.htm 

azlyrics.com

Tonight's Harvest Moon

The moon, like a flower in heaven's bower, with silent delight sits and smiles on the night.

                                                                   from William Blake's poem, Night

Georgia Sea Island moon rise over McQueens Island east of Savannah, ca. 1950 

This bright harvest moon

keeps me walking all night long

around the little pond

                                                                          Basho


The full Harvest Moon casts its shadow across the planet tonight. As the orb emerges from the sea, coastal residents experience the sublime event precisely as it has been viewed by humans for thousands of years. There at land's end under a star-filled dome the timeless sound of surf captures and commands our consciousness and wraps us in mystery and wonder. Add a moon rise and all reason flees.

The moon, like a flower in heaven's bower, with silent delight sits and smiles on the night.

                                                                           William Blake

It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes 

And roofs of villages, on woodland crests 

And their aerial neighborhoods of nests 

Deserted, on the curtained window-panes

Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes 

And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!

Gone are the birds that were our summer guests, 

With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!

All things are symbols: the external shows 

Of Nature have their image in the mind, 

As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;

The song-birds leave us at the summer’s close, 

Only the empty nests are left behind, 

And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.

                                                                            Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
Lowcountry moonrise, Fort Pulaski National Monument Handbook, 1954

Text:

William Blake quotation, from Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1789
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Harvest Moon, public domain, www.poets.org
Basho haiku, gist.github.com, originally from wed.archives.org