Spot On

Here's a mini "treatise" on some characteristics that make great singing (and why American Idol, which forces people into one narrow mould, rewards unnecessary vocal pyrotechnics and embellishments, and induces contestants to put WAY too much weight on their vocal cords, is completely off the mark).

By music critic Gene Lees, in his sleeve note to Perry Como's 1968 album "Look To Your Heart":

Despite his immense popularity, Como is rarely given credit for what, once you stop and think of it, he so clearly is: one of the great singers and one of the great artists of our time. Perhaps the reason people rarely talk about his formidable attributes as a singer is that he makes so little fuss about them. That celebrated ease of his has been too little understood. Ease in any art is the result of mastery over the details of the craft . . . . Como got them together so completely that the muscles don’t even show. It seems effortless, but a good deal of effort has gone into making it seem so . . . .

The hidden work makes him look like Mr. Casual, and too many people are taken in by it — but happily so. I have of necessity given a good deal of thought and study to the art of singing, and Como's work consistently astonishes me. He is a fantastic technician. Listen in this album to the perfection of his intonation, the beauty of the sound he produces, the constant comfortable breath control. And take notice of his high notes. Laymen are often impressed by the high note you can hear for five blocks. Professionals know that it is far more difficult to hit a high note quietly. Como lights on a C or D at the top of a tune as softly as a bird on a branch, not even shaking it. And then there's his phrasing. A number of our best singers phrase well. The usual technique is to rethink the lyrics of a song to see how they would come out if you were saying them, and then approximate in singing the normal speech inflections and rhythms. This often involves altering the melody, but it is a legitimate practice and when done well can be quite striking.

But Como is beyond that. He apparently does not find it necessary to change the melodic line in order to infuse a song with emotion. A great jazz trumpeter once told me, "After fifteen years of playing, I’ve come to the conclusion that the hardest thing to do is to play melody, play it straight and get feeling into it." Como has been doing this from the beginning. Stylistically, he comes out of the Bing Crosby-Russ Colombo school. That was all a long time ago. Como has been his own man for many years now. He sounds like nobody else. And nobody sounds like him, either.

***He is hard to imitate precisely because his work is so free of tricks and gimmicks. There are no mannerisms for another singer to pick up from him. All one can do is try to sing as well and as honestly as Como, and any singer who does that will end up sounding like himself, not Como.***

Singing, allegedly

OK, so I was going to write some long diatribe about this, and I will probably still do that, but take a look at this article first and you will get a quick survey of everything that is wrong with singing today - or at least when people pretend / attempt / struggle to sing today.

http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/listoftheday/17793/the-ten-most-annoying-singers

When I read the entry on Michael Bolton, it was like, "Amen!" I am not alone.

Choice quote (again, about Bolton): "Who else can take a love song and turn it into a hernia? When a man loves a woman he doesn't do so by screaming in her ear--so why should it be acceptable for a man to sing a sensitive love song as if he's directing traffic for the hearing impaired?"

Quintessential Anita

Watch the fluidity of her movements and her overall body language. She barely had to move her feet - she conveyed everything with her arms, the slightest shifts in her upper body, her eyes, and her hands (in particular, pay attention to how she uses her fingers to great effect). There are just some things you can't pre-arrange or choreograph. Another person can do the same exact motions but still come out looking like an idiot.

It came out later that the choreographer had budgeted eight hours to show her everything, and thought filming might have to stretch into a second day, but she learned the entire sequence in two hours, and wrapped up all filming on the same night, within eight hours total.

Anita Mui - Heart Sutra

This is one of my favorites. In 1995, a bunch of singers banded together to put out a fund-raising CD to benefit a local Buddhist temple. They chose a famous prayer (I guess a "sutra"), set it to a tune, and produced 15 different arrangements, each to be interpreted by one singer or more. The results were, well . . . ahem . . . mixed. The words mean something, but many of the less gifted singers were so preoccupied with showing off their "personalities" and "style" (neither of which they truly possessed) that they completely neglected to express the meaning of the prayer. (I will discuss this general idea in a later post).

One commentator remarked, "The best was Anita Mui's version - you do get a sense of epiphany and understanding after listening to her. Prudence Lau made it sound like she was singing something about a one night stand; the Grasshoppers made it sound like a dance party." You get the idea.

So listen to how she made it her own, without sacrificing the purpose and meaning of the song.