Laurel Massé

Rare bird sighting in Riverdale

                                                                                                        Photo by Chris Cafiero

I am singing a cabaret concert this Saturday, February 18th, at 7:30 PM, at Christ Church Riverdale, located at 5030  Henry Hudson Parkway, Bronx, NY 10471. Tickets are available at the door are $20 for adults, $15 for students and seniors, and light refreshments are included. Parking is usually easy in this neighborhood. For more information, go to [email protected] or call 718‐543‐1011.

Accompanied by Tex Arnold on piano (a very nice Steinway!) and Jon Burr on bass, I shall be a happy songbird indeed.

The "cabaret" designation for this concert brings up something that's been on my mind for a while. I know jazz singers who are quite scornful of cabaret. I know cabaret singers who feel the same about jazz. It's all silly really, as there is - or should be - considerable overlap in the genres. I think the performance styles that have become common in the two forms are the problems. Jazz seems to be all about the sound. Cabaret seems to be all about the sense. Some jazz singers seem to emphasize connection with the other musicians, with little attention left over for the audience. Some cabaret singers ditch musicality, connecting with the audience rather than the musicians.

I think either/or oppositions are largely false and fruitless. Ideally, a singer can pay attention to the musicians while connecting with the audience and singing in tune and in time, with intelligence and emotional honesty. One is always going to be better at one aspect of this than another, but I do believe it all can be learned and improved (if I didn't, there's be no point in teaching).

For presenters, though, the distinction lies in where you place the derrieres of the clientele. Cabaret (or nightclub) seating = on chairs grouped around tables. Concert (or theater) seating = on seats in rows, facing a stage, or at least facing an area. That's the only either/or that really does have to be one or t'other. And it's good news for those who may have been dreading church pews.

You'll hear quite a few tunes from my soon-to-be-released CD, and something a capella, and perhaps we'll all sing to Mrs. Peel, on the occasion of her first birthday, a stirring, purring rendition of That Blasted Song, in Ailurin.

Please note: the concert is in Riverdale, not Rivendell. That booking is still pending.

 

 

 

To Sir, with love

A rose is a rose, even when it's a McCartney rose. It was many years ago today (or some other day) that not-yet-Sir Paul McCartney pulled a perfect rose from a table centerpiece and tossed it into my hands as I was singing Heart's Desire with my Manhattan Transfer colleagues at the Brit Awards. At least, I think the event was the Brits. I was completely focused on Sir P. I confess that I was singing right to (or perhaps even at) him, and he... well, the story is going into my memoir, which I had hoped to write this morning, but it's too darn hot.

On Sir's birthday, June 18th, I am going to be singing a few of his tunes in Beacon, NY. Not too many, though. I don't want to hurt Johnny Mercer or Willie Nelson's feelings. Cole Porter can be pretty touchy, too. With me will be Tex Arnold on the piano, and because we had such a good time in Washington CT last month, my sister Babette will again be joining me in a few songs, along with guitarist (and nephew) Alex Brown.

The Howland Cultural Center is a very interesting venue. Built in the "Norwegian" style in 1872 as a library, and placed on the National Historic Register one hundred years later, it is now a performance space and art gallery. It's geothermally cooled (which cannot be said of my apartment, alas). I hope to see some of you there. If you are planning on coming, please do make your reservation right away, so as to be sure to have a seat.

By the way, the McCartney Rose, shown above, is a hybrid tea rose, introduced in 1995. It is described as a hardy repeating bloomer (like me and my career!) with a strong and intoxicating fragrance. This pleases me. Though a rose by any other name would smell as sweet in Shakespeare's time, most of the cut roses one can buy these days have no perfume at all. One sniffs a bouquet, and there's nothing.

Heavy the heart that, via the nose, encounters the unscented rose.

JaLaLa tralala

Here I am, arriving at the Kennedy Center for the JaLaLa soundcheck, with our drummer Matt Wilson. It looks like an ECM cover, yes? Except, of course, for the presence of people in the shot.  I doubt the architect's original vision included the trash bin. In case you are curious, it's a cuppa tea I am holding. Not a very good one, alas, but that is one of the sorrows of being on the road. One endures, and carries on, hoping for a better cup tomorrow.

I don't know who the gent in the blue shirt is on the right. Perhaps he is a member of the Jazz Police, defending the nation against extra choruses of unnecessary scatting.

Those of you with sharp eyes (or good spectacles) may have already read the JaLaLa set list from the Kennedy Center performance on our Facebook page. Here are both the May 16 Birdland set list and the May 19 (DC) setlist , for those who - like me - save their squinting for identifying birds on the wing and dollar bills on the sidewalk.

Birdland, Monday May 16, 2011

1. Spring, Spring, Spring (That Old Mercer Magic)

2.It's You (Boswell Sisters)

3. You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby (Mercer)

4. Come to Baby, Do (Doris Day)

5. Moon River / Moon Country (Mercer)

6. solo -  Lauren - Avalon (full band)

7. solo - Laurel - I'm Old-Fashioned (voice and bass)

8. solo - Janis - Begin the Beguine (voice and drums)

9. Crazy People (Boswells again)

10. Unsquare Dance (Brubeck/Kerchner)

11. Killer Queen (do I have to tell you?)

12. Honeymoon Suite - medley

13. It's Sand, Man (Lambert, Hendricks and Ross)

Encore (dedicated to Phoebe Snow) - Dream

 

In Washington, DC, at the Kennedy Center, we had less time, and decided to forego the solo turns. That set was:

And now the truth is out: we admire our brothers and sisters in the accordion community.

The following day, we were back at the Kennedy to teach a jazz vocal master class for ten very talented high school students from four area schools. The singers were delightful, as were their accompanists. I particularly love teaching in the master class format, because magic invariably happens.

And I love magic! Why else would I be a singer?

 

 

 

Introducing...

 

There is something special about the sibling bond, and when sisters, brothers, or sisters and brothers sing together, you not only sense it, you hear it. I am thinking of the McGarrigles, and the Roches, of the Boswell Sisters, of Ann and Nancy Wilson, of the Taylor clan (James, Livingston, Kate, Alex). And, of course, the Everly Brothers. The blend of their voices comes not only from practice, but from their blood and bones.

My career has included a hefty portion of group singing - in choral groups, The Manhattan Transfer, Moxie, and now JaLaLa, but it is only recently that I have become one-half of an authentic sibling duo. My sister Babette and I started singing together a month or so ago, and we did our first public performance during my concert at St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, Connecticut this past May 14th.

Ladies and gents: The Massé Sisters, with Tex Arnold at the piano.

 

 

Coming up for air

 

The past few days have held delight and stress and a lot of rain. RIght now, it is raining so hard that I cannot see the building on the other side of the street, and am glad to be living on a hill.

I have been very busy - singing a wonderful concert in Connecticut with my sister, Babette, performing with JaLaLa gig at Birdland. Tomorrow I travel (much earlier in the morning than seems possible) to Washington, DC's Kennedy Center, where JaLala is part of the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival, and teaching a master for students of the Duke Ellington High School.

But once I'm back home (and after the predicted end of the world on Saturday), I expect I'll have fewer distractions. I'll brew up a pot of tea, and tell stories.

 

Sweet Baby James

James Taylor has always been so identified with the "singer-songwriter" genre (in which the singing is sometimes not as good as the writing) that not everyone notices that he is an extraordinary vocalist. But if you listen to any one of his many recordings, you will hear an exquisite combination of intelligence, wit, simplicity of style, honesty of expression, great intonation, impeccable time, and heart. Taylor has been singing in tune and serving the lyric for a long time now, and he gets better with every passing year. In my mind, he is one of the very best singers of my generation.

In this clip he talks about singing. Enjoy!

 

P.S. He and his then-wife Carly Simon attended a Transfer show in the early 70s, and dropped by our dressing rooms. It was like a visitation from the gods, not in a You're So Vain kind of way (they were both very sweet), but rather because they were both so much taller than us. Built on a more glorious scale, really. Makes me stand up very straight whenever I remember it.

A vast many-wingèd conspiracy

Annunciation is a word one hears a lot in liturgical church circles. By The Annunciation, we mean Archangel Gabriel's announcement to Mary that she would bear God's son. That's the big one.

But there are others, little feathery ones, ongoing, whispering to us all the time. They can be extremely inconvenient in their timing and message. We try not to hear them.

                                                       Now? Are you nuts? I'm trying to get ready for a gig!

Sometimes we seem to succeed, and they go away, But they return, and in some more insistent form. It can feel as if there is a vast conspiracy afoot in the realm, designed to insinuate (and failing that, to knock) something into one's head. 

Proof? You say you want proof?

Here's what I read this morning:

On Twitter: The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms. Muriel Rukeyser wrote this, a friend tweeted it.

On Facebook: If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story. Someone else, quoting Orson Welles.

 And in a real book, Love Wins, by Rob Bell : Hell is our refusal to trust God's retelling of our story.

To all that, I must add that this morning I can't get Irving Berlin's song Let Yourself Go out of my head.

Come, get together/Let the dance floor feel your leather/Step as lightly as a feather...

Uh-oh. Feathers...

 

 

 

 

Sailin' Shoes

A long-time-dream came true when, after knowing the gents in Little Feat and loving their music for many years, I sat in with them in - gosh, when was it? 2000? 2001? I may have forgotten the date, but I'll never forget how it felt to lay back against that fat, sensuous groove.

I don't have that moment on film. However, thanks to Chris Cafiero (Feat's archivist), we do have this clip, filmed when band members Fred Tackett and Paul Barrere toured as an accoustic duo in 2002, and I joined them on a few dates in western Massachusetts and upstate New York. This video is from the Towne Crier, in Pawling, NY. The song is Lowell George's classic Sailin' Shoes.

 

Turn the radio on

I had a lovely time this afternoon being interviewed by Sandra Lee Schubert of Wild Woman Network. You can listen here.

 

A word in your ear...

Grammy awards were given out last night, and I didn't watch. Anything I want to see from that event will be on YouTube; this freed up my evening considerably for practicing and chatting with friends and Thinking About Things. I do want to make one comment on this year's music biz love-fest: Esperanza Spalding is very good, and I am very happy that a female jazz musician/singer of her caliber also has the good looks and the good industry support to take the award in the Best New Artist category. This meant, among other things, that an actual living jazz artist was on the televised part of the show, and not relegated to the pre-ceremony announcements. I can't think when a jazz artist - jazz, not jazz-y, jazz-like, or jazz-lite - won that award, and I find it quite remarkable. Let's hear it for the girl! None of the other awards surprise me.

Because of Esperanza's Grammy, I predict a surge in enrollments at Berklee College of Music and in high school jazz programs (if any are left after the horrifying cuts in education that seem to be on the way). Several years hence, the surgers will graduate with jazz degrees and impressive tuition-induced debt. But there aren't now, and won't be then, enough venues in which to play. Wait - there are venues, but most of them don't pay enough to bring musicians within riffing distance of the poverty line, much less allow them to crawl over that low bar. Same thing is going on in theater education: more and more graduates, fewer and fewer theaters. 

Nevertheless, we are going to be singing songs forever, whether we are paid or not, and therefore I have something important on my mind, something I think about every time I teach a master class, or attend a singer's performance. Coaches and critics talk often about the necessity of commitment when singing (and acting. Non-singing actors reading this can substitute "scene" for "song", and "line" for "lyric", because they're the same). No matter how beautifully or convincingly it is done, when a someone sings a song, or even a single word in a lyric, that he or she does not completely understand, I can tell.
Furthermore, the whole audience can tell. We can tell that you don't know what you're talking about. Even though your listeners might not be able to put their fingers on how they know this, and what exactly is amiss, their exquisitely sensitive bull-detectors will ring a tiny alarm. Ring that alarm often enough during your performance and, though your audience members may be sitting in their seats, they will be emotionally and intellectually gone, thinking about the laundry, or the events in Egypt, or the likelihood of being downsized, all of which they could be doing at home in a much more comfortable chair.

We singers especially can be a lazy lot, but don't be lazy about this. Get help. If it's a word you don't understand, look it up. In an ideal world of my designing, I would send you to your personal copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, but for heaven's sake, who can even lift the thing, much less afford it? You all have computers. Google away. Type "distingué: define", and discover what Strayhorn really meant in Lush Life, and why he chose that word over others that mean roughly, but not exactly, the same thing. Learn how to pronounce it, too. And if it's the meaning of the whole song that's eluding you, do some homework. Dig deep into it. Ask a director. Ask a coach. Ask an elder. FIgure it out. If none of that helps, and you have the choice, put it on the shelf and live a little longer, and then try it again. Meanings matter. If you know what lyrics mean, your audience will, too, even if they didn't before you sang them. Until you have experienced this a few times, just trust me on this. It's magic. And it's true.