In addition to the NCAA basketball tournament, I've been thinking about Jerrold Levinson's exciting paper, "Jazz Vocal Interpretation: A Philosophical Analysis" that appears in the current issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, pages 35 - 43. Before the basketball excitement, I expressed my hope in these pages that I'd have my own thoughts on matters Levinsonian published herein in a couple of days. Well it didn't happen. In the mean time I've written quite a bit, compiled notes, sources and listened and re-listened to quite a lot of jazz vocal and instrumental music. The listening has been exciting and rewarding. I've also done quite a lot of reading and re-reading in and of books, articles and interviews treating songs, song writing, singers, and vocal and instrumental jazz performance.
I've always considered jazz vocalists to be instrumentalists without horns, Young Woman Without A Horn. I still hold this view. Also I don't believe that jazz vocalists or instrumentalists (for that matter) interpret songs, in spite of the fact that we sometimes speak of the 'jazz interpretations' contrasted with 'straight interpretations' of songs, tunes, scores, &c. We may speak of a singer's interpretation of a song or of Charles Rosen's interpretation of Schumann's Carnaval (Op. 9). What we are comparing are performances with performances - not performances with a score. Let's take new music. Can one actually and meaningfully say that the first performance of Pierre Boulez's Le Marteau sans maître was an interpretation of his score? If we are talking about performances of music we say "The DSO will be performing Mahler's 3rd Symphony at 8PM" - not "There will be an interpretation at 8PM". In terms of sheet music 'jazz interpretations' are the same as a performance at a certain time. And one should be aware that jazz musicians learn songs and tunes, they don't learn sheet music; they use lead-sheets and fake-books; they learn what they need to learn in order to make music and improvise with other musicians. They are not interpreting sheet music from Tin Pan Alley. The good singers own the songs - Sarah Vaughan owned If You Could See Me Now and Misty (the same song actually); Billy Eckstine owned I Want To Talk About You and I Apologize. In fact there are published suggestions for singers who on rare occasions are permitted to participate in jam sessions - e.g., don't sing Misty and don't sing anything owned by Lady Day, Billie Holiday. http://www.phillyjazz.org/
Obviously, if one is attempting to impute meaning or a semantics to a page of music (a score), then talk of interpretation seems appropriate. But I don't think that one interpretes a page of music, one performs it. Remember: Composers of songs, melodies, symphonies most often don't have a 'straight interpretation' in mind until performances occur. Here's a page of music (a score); there is a composer of the page of music; there is (are) a performer(s) of the page of music (musicians); now we have music. When musicians perform music from a score there are always choices to be made about how to perform the notes, accents, and other suggestions set down by the composer. The composer, having heard a performance of her composition may say, "That's not my music!" or "We'll do better next time, I thought that I had it all there on the page, but alas...." Our composer can say, "I don't care for your interpretation", but she won't mean it!
I discovered Ethel Waters recorded vocal performances and was astounded - I had read of her, but never attended to her music. I've read most of Whitney Balliett's impressive book of portraits and interviews, American Singers, which was what I needed to go along with my re-reading in Gunther Schuller's Swing Era and André Hodeir's Toward Jazz. I think it was Balliett (or was it Andrew Porter?) who wrote somewhere that to criticize something one has to describe it. Whitney Balliett was a master when it came to describing music and musicians - his portrait of Coleman Hawkins in American Musicians is one of Balliett's masterpieces. His piece in American Singers, "The President of the Derrière-Garde (Alec Wilder)" is another of his masterpieces.
Wilder writes in his book, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 (Kindle Locations 5370-5372). Kindle Edition,
Am I Blue?, introduced by Ethel Waters in the motion picture "On With The Show" (1929), with music by Harry Akst, is dangerously interwoven with Ethel Waters' recording of it. And she made it sound like a masterpiece. It isn't that, but it is a good song, using a device somewhat similar to the one in April Showers.
So until next time, keep listening; and re-reading Levinson.
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