Earlier this year, Will Friedwald donated his vast collection of 14,000 jazz and popular music albums – perhaps the largest such collection in New York City — to two major music archives. The shelves of his floor-to-ceiling apartment in East Harlem may now be empty, but Friedwald has packed his sprawling knowledge and reasoned judgments about vocalists into A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers. Librarians will regard the book as “reference material” and indeed it is perfect for quick look-ups. But every entry in this 811-double-columned-page gem speaks with enthused immediacy and intelligence. Story moves effortlessly to evaluation.
“Songs were the essential criteria by which artists were or were not included,” he writes in the introduction. “Of the thousands of artists of the last hundred years or so who could be described as either jazz or pop singers, my first consideration was to focus on those who primarily sang the American songbook, and, even more so, to concentrate on those artists who made a vital contribution to the way the songbook is sung.” The book’s jazz bias may crowd out some Broadway singers, but Friedwald chose to emphasize singers with significant recording careers. Featuring mid-century performers, the book includes only a few singers born after 1950 such as Cassandra Wilson and Dianne Reeves, and “even fewer born after 1970.” For instance, you’ll find essays on Diana Krall, Kurt Elling, Audra McDonald and Harry Connick, Jr. (included at the last minute, presumably for his tireless output of 24 albums in 20 years). After writing 150 core essays, Friedwald added chapters on five non-songbook stylists in genres not covered here – Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan.
Friedwald’s powers of brainy compression and phrase-shaping are prodigious, and his essays bristle with pointed analysis. The tone, scope and format of his Guide are patterned after David Thompson’s invaluable New Biographical Dictionary of Film (its fifth edition was just published by Knopf). Friedwald is the kind of critic-aficionado who asks (and thereby figures out) why Julie Andrews, immortalized by My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Mary Poppins and their respective top-selling LPS, flopped as a recording artist. He is, above all, a lover of pop culture – a discerning passion for identifying the crucial moment in a major singer’s career (if it occurs at all) when the work affects the age’s style. For instance, you can download Peggy Lee’s greatest hits from iTunes – but to appreciate her influence, Friedwald will lead you to her album “Lover”:
“‘Lover,’ conducted by Gordon Jenkins, who followed Lee’s guidelines for the arrangement, was considered somewhat shocking in 1952. The resulting hit was publicly dismissed by both the composer, Richard Rodgers, and by musicologist, Sigmund Spaeth, among others. It was polytonal (starting in F, then modulating to G and finally to A flat), polyrhythmic, polycultural, polyeverything. This ‘Lover’ is indeed a very mad affair, boasting a satanically cacophonic instrumental orchestration as well as the male chorus in the background, wordlessly holding the tonic note of each chord, and even further-out fever-pitch phrasing from Miss Lee, who all but breathes flame.”
Friedwald wants us to know that both Frank Sinatra and Gene Krupa had recently recorded their own versions of “Lover” – thus making Lee’s accomplishment an act both of liberated creativity and courage. “This wasn’t the first time anyone had taken a standard song and given it a whole new feeling,” he continues, “a new time signature, a new cultural context. But it was the first time that a major artist created such an impact with such a reinterpretation.” Peggy Lee anticipated the decade’s trend to “transform all kinds of standards into sambas.”
Although this book announces itself as a “biographical guide,” it proceeds with a trans-artists sense of tradition. Friedwald listens to Dean Martin’s voice and remarks if you, “apply a little more vibrato to it, you end up with something that sounds suspiciously like Elvis.”
Friedwald not only describes careers but also critiques them, often pointedly. On Aretha Franklin: “Like Sinatra, she is the undisputed leader in her field, yet while Sinatra lived long enough to claim the privileges of legend status, Franklin persists in acting as if she’s just another ephemeral pop star of the moment. Both the music industry and the media support this misconception … Does it make any difference, this concept of labeling, in terms of an artist’s self-identity? In her case, yes, because in identifying with Whitney Houston rather than Sarah Vaughn, Franklin has habitually denied herself and her fans the benefits of her stature – which is not to have to worry about charts and hits and MTV. She should be making great music. Instead, ever since the seventies, Franklin has been singing almost nothing but ephemeral junk.”
His nine pages on Streisand capture her outsize ambitions and the sonic and dramatic flair of her persona – but he can’t repress his prickliness about her inflations:
“After Sinatra has been singing for an hour or so about love for another human being, it’s collectively understood that he has earned the right to sing about self-love, to do a song that says, ‘Applaud me, you bastards, applaud me!’ … And even when Sinatra sang ‘My Way,’ he went out of his way to undercut its egocentric message by telling audiences that he hated the song, never enjoyed singing it, and, in fact, was only doing it because we, the audience, liked it. The message was clear: he was only glorifying himself because we wanted him to.
Streisand knows better than anybody that an audience loves self-aggrandizement, that once they’ve accepted you as a sacred monster, it’s simply impossible to lay it on too thick, to exceed the limit. Instead of starting with songs about love for others and then moving on to self-love, Streisand concerts typically begin with what seems like a dozen ‘My Way’ clones of the crassest sort.”
Friedwald’s essay on Tony Bennett focuses on the competitive nature of his career, striving against changing tastes and the business of music itself; he zoomed to the top quickly, but struggled mightily to stay there. I would never have expected a whole chapter on Chet Baker’s singing, but there it is: “As a singer he seems to have no technique whatsoever, and yet this state of being completely natural I something he had to carefully cultivate.” Some other representative names, alphabetically: The Andrews Sisters, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, Rosemary Clooney, Perry Como, Sam Cooke, Bing Crosby, Blossom Dearie, Ella Fitzgerald, Eydie Gormé, Johnny Hartman, Mahalia Jackson, Al Jolson, Abbey Lincoln, Julie London, Gordon MacRae, Johnny Mathis, Helen Merrill, Patti Page, Lou Rawls, Dinah Shore, Mel Tormé, Rudy Vallee, Margaret Whiting, Cassandra Wilson, Nancy Wilson.
There is no Barry Manilow – but there is Michael Bublé. There is no Neil Diamond – but there is Michael Feinstein. There is no Bette Midler – but there is Cleo Laine. Nat King Cole, yes, of course – but why Natalie? Friedwald stuck to his main requirement: the mid-century American songbook is the star.
But no one has written more incisively than Friedwald about Anita O’Day’s stylizations and her influence on succeeding generations – poignantly integrated with her life story, her stage persona, and anecdotes about the several sides of her personality.
It took Friedwald ten years to write this book. Open it to any page and read.
[Published by Pantheon on November 2, 2010. 811 pages, $45.00 hardcover.]
Of interest: Ron Slate on Neil Diamond