The Proof Is In The Jam - Part 4: The Audience?

On occasion she [Billie Holiday] sang a song straight, without much variation; then she might be an interesting and even moving singer, but she was not a great one. Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition, p. 71

I've heard that Haydn, Brahms and some of some other Viennese cats jammed in clubs. I once asked the tenor-man David Murray if noisy, inattentive club audiences bothered him personally or affected his music-making, his performances. He replied, "Not at all." I heard in interview with a string quartet recently (on WKCR, where else?) that was promoting its forthcoming appearance at a Manhattan club featuring 'serious' composed music (mis-called "Classical music"). The quartet's members were asked the same question that I posed to David Murray. Their response was, "If the music's good, the crowd will be quiet." Crowd control is often a matter of a club's tradition - no smoking during a Blossom Dearie set. What about a singer's audience? Does she sing to or for her audience? In spite of her audience? Does a singer attempt to communicate something to her audience? Does a singer communicate certain of the details of the song she is singing, music that she's performing? In performing music, not just the tune, but in a performance-context, interacting musically in a group of musicians; does the singer communicate with the other musicians? Does it matter who is leading the band, whether it is the singer or an instrumentalist? - of course in the cases of Louis Armstrong and Billy Eckstine, it did not matter.
  Jerrold Levinson in his Jazz Vocal Interpretation advances a view that jazz-singers convey meaning to their audience; that the words of the songs they sing in performance have meaning; and the singer conveys the meaning of the words of the song to the audience. So in 'interpreting' a song a singer might be thought of as decoding a text (the song), in a similar fashion as a literary critic might do. A singer's phrasing, for example, imparts (conveys) meaning, as found in the song by the singer, to her audience. "Sometimes I'm Happy" might mean one thing what when sang up-tempo, as Betty Carter might do; and mean something else when sung very slowly, in a Schoenbergian sprechgesang way, as Jeanne Lee might have done. Members of Sarah Vaughn's audiences might have believed that she was communicating with them, that she was letting them in on a song's meaning, but I think such beliefs would have been in error. Sarah Vaughan and Betty Carter certainly spoke with their audience, made them feel appreciated &c.; but they were about creating and re-creating music, often in spite of the words. Try singing "I Cried For You"; it's not easy. The meaning of this tune, if any, was in the beauty that resulted in Billie Holiday's 1936 recorded performance; beauty that resulted also in the context of the musicians performing in Teddy Wilson's band on equal terms with her - Miss Holiday, Mr. Wilson and the horns each get one solo chorus. When Miss Holiday became a band leader, she would take two choruses whilst the other soloist(s) at most got one - rather like 'sideman' Miles Davis on Cannonball Adderley's Somethin' Else disc.
  I don't believe that text (song qua sheet music), singer, audience meaning triangulation occurs in jazz-singing performance. A jazz-singers' audience may feel that it does; but they would be mistaken.