>I've watch about four hours of it. It's okay, but... It's like anything
>to do with the arts, it always takes the superficial turn, and there
>is not enough music in it. I mean complete, solid, beginning to end
>pieces. You know with a careful selection and a few hints, the music
>will tell the stories.
>
>The other problem is that I am not that crazy about Winton
>Marsalles. I like his voice, I like what he has to say, but he is
>stuck on New Orleans. I like how he describes music and am glad to
>hear about the technical details, and I especially like it when he
>explains something by playing it, but... It's his taste that bothers
>me a little. It's not just that New Orleans is old, and more than a
>little corny, which I can get over---but something else. WM has
>sophisticated and developed his taste into a particular kind of
>refinement, and that refinement is just not the direction that jazz
>took in the move from swing to bebop---which is exactly the point that
>I like. WM didn't make that turn, and because of that he isn't quite
>cued into how that works (at least for a listener).
***** The New York Times December 31, 2000, Sunday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section 6; Page 32; Column 1; Magazine Desk HEADLINE: Things Are What They Used to Be BYLINE: By David Hajdu; David Hajdu is the author of "Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina," which will be published in the spring by FSG.
I have been trying to remember the night I first saw Jane Monheit, but a synaptic gremlin keeps switching on my childhood memory of watching the Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show." The reason, surely, is their hair, so startling in both cases that it distracted me from the music. Monheit was about 20, and she was sitting in with a small jazz combo at an Upper Manhattan nightclub called Augie's. Dressed for comfort like the undergraduate she was, casual at the microphone, she sang a romantic Tin Pan Alley ballad in a voice I can scarcely recall. Her face and most of the top half of her body were covered by a fishing trawl of curly brown hair. Nothing occurred to indicate that I might be watching anyone but another of the countless talented young women serving their apprenticeships in New York's clubs, cabarets and piano bars every night. Besides, I already knew who the Next Thing in jazz singing would be: Dominique Eade.
An impossibly versatile vocalist, composer, lyricist and instrumental arranger, Eade also happened to be delicately attractive and blond. Entertainment Weekly had named her the jazz artist "most likely to be tomorrow's star," and her picture had appeared on the cover of Billboard, which named her debut CD one of the best jazz albums of the year. She wrote her own sinuous, poetic songs. How could she fail?
Two and a half years after that night at Augie's, RCA Records has dropped Dominique Eade, and Jane Monheit has become one of the most talked-about singers around -- not only for her lush voice but also for the story her music and career tell about the state of jazz today. Monheit, who has emerged as a young siren in the tradition of a swing-era chanteuse, seems to embody mainstream jazz's wholesale submission to nostalgia. Absorbed with the glories of its past and tentative about its future, jazz has grown content to revel in the conservative pleasures of ennobling sentiment. The musical environment that has made Jane Monheit a phenomenon is a jazz world George W. Bush would understand.
Like Eade, who has not only written her own music but also toured while she was pregnant, many young women who have dared to challenge the conventional roles for female jazz singers have been losing their battles with the record industry. Judi Silvano, a singer and composer who often uses her voice like a trumpet in venturesome pieces with no words, has found her contract with Blue Note lapsed and now records for her own label. Nora York, who likes to experiment with jazz and pop music by, say, combining the standard "You Go to My Head" with Jimi Hendrix's "Manic Depression," records for prominent labels in Japan but must record for small independents here. "Every time I talk to anyone at a major label," York says, "they tell me they have no idea what they would do with me."
Exceptions like Cassandra Wilson and Dianne Reeves have generally set creative courses outside of the jazz establishment. "My expectations from the beginning were not to be a quote-unquote jazz star," says Wilson, who has virtually created her own genre of vaguely jazz-styled world pop. "I came up through a system that was much more under the radar, the independent labels. I've done most of my work in that context, so I had no one standing over me saying I had to sing the standard repertoire in order to record. You have people like Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln, even Billie Holiday as examples of that ability of a jazz singer to pretty much set her own tone. But you also have the other side of that, the kind of singers who are dependent upon the standard repertoire, and that seems to be back in vogue."
Indeed, almost every top-selling jazz vocal album today is a collection of standards sung with traditional instrumentation, and not merely because the jazz charts are riddled with compilations tied to Ken Burns's soon-to-be-broadcast documentary homage to classicism, "Jazz." Diana Krall, Tony Bennett and Harry Connick Jr., for example, sing virtually nothing but standards. Even the composer, pianist and singer Patricia Barber recently released her first album of standards, "Nightclub," after four CD's with provocative original material, and she has had her first major hit with it.
Amid all this, says Will Friedwald, longtime vocal-jazz observer and author of "Jazz Singing," Monheit has become "the Retro Princess." Just 23 (and just barely), Monheit has recorded only one CD, an album of vintage tunes released only eight months ago. But the record, "Never Never Land," is a hit, doubling in sales in one week's time to make the Billboard jazz Top 10 in mid-December. What's more, she has given several high-profile performances in New York -- the details of which signal the extraordinary support she is receiving from within the music industry.
In July, Monheit played a week at the Village Vanguard, a place of pilgrimage in jazz, where singers are rarely granted the stage, and then more likely as a valedictory than a coming out. "When everybody in the jazz community heard that she was playing the Vanguard, it was shocking," says Silvano, who has performed in the club only as a member of the saxophonist Joe Lovano's ensemble. "It was like, 'What?!' I mean, the last time I heard a singer at the Vanguard, it was Abbey Lincoln or Shirley Horn. For the Vanguard to book this young woman was pretty strange."
Following that Vanguard run, Monheit did two shows in Lincoln Center's Great American Songbook series. The program's director, Jonathan Schwartz, was impressed by both the singing on Monheit's debut CD and by the distinguished (and expensive) musical company she has kept. Players enlisted for the recording included the pianist Kenny Barron, the bassist Ron Carter, the guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli and the saxophonist David (Fathead) Newman -- a band that, like the Village Vanguard, confers instant legitimacy to the jazz cognoscenti. "The musicians who inhabited the album are the top-drawer people working in this country," Schwartz says.
Over the next month, Monheit will be fully embarked on a career trajectory closer to that of a pop star than a jazz singer. This evening, she'll do the New Year's Eve show at the Blue Note in Manhattan, and she'll be in the club through the end of this week (in another exception to the jazz rules; the Blue Note and the Vanguard are known to discourage all but their top attractions from appearing in the competing venues). By the end of January, Monheit will have given a recital at Steinway Hall with the pianist Tommy Flanagan, one of his first performances of this sort since his tenure as Ella Fitzgerald's accompanist decades ago, and she will have begun recording a new CD with designs on expanding her audience beyond the jazz world.
But why has she, in particular, attracted such attention so quickly? How could a young, middle-class woman from Long Island be so successful performing music of her parents' and grandparents' times?
Jane Monheit is a jazz singer whose personal history is practically an inversion of "The Jazz Singer," the 1927 movie that set the narrative mold for popular singers' life stories: independent-minded young artist rejects the music of the older generation to blaze a provocative new path, the plot of virtually every music biopic from "The Benny Goodman Story" to "The Buddy Holly Story." Monheit, a family-oriented young artist, has rejected the provocative music of her own generation to follow her elders' direction.
"I grew up in Oakdale, a completely average suburban town, aside from the fact that it's all on the water, which is really neat, because I had a canal in my backyard," she says in a light, sweet voice. A girlish woman, she is soft and round-featured, and she hunches over a bit when she talks, as if she were sneaking to avert a school teacher's gaze.
"My parents rule!" she exclaims. "When I was growing up, we kind of did everything together. We're still the same way. I totally love it." Monheit goes home to Long Island at least once every couple of weeks, she says, and she and her mother talk a few times daily. She mentions this without piety or shame, much as she sings the old-fashioned love songs of the 30's and 40's without inflated sentiment or contorting irony.
Monheit is a warm, open person, on and off stage. At her Lincoln Center performance, she chatted about her parents between songs and dedicated "Over the Rainbow" to her father, who was beaming a few rows from the front. (David Monheit, who owns a machine-tool business and plays bluegrass guitar and banjo for pleasure, so bursts with pride in his daughter that he's known in the family as Puff Daddy.)
She has a playful sex appeal; when she sings, she holds the microphone in her right hand and massages the hub of the mike stand with her left. Yet the essence of her personality and her music is pure warmth. She sings in the color pink. There is none of the cynical grit and detachment -- the rock-and-roll attitude -- of her recent predecessors in vocal jazz, Diana Krall or Patricia Barber. Monheit has a prerock style. She sings and acts a great deal like a sexy, young, white Ella Fitzgerald.
In early December, she went to visit her maternal grandparents in Bellmore, less than an hour from Oakdale, and I tagged along. When we arrived at her grandparents' house, a meticulously tended shingle cottage, her family was waiting in the living room, which has been the home base of Jane Monheit's musical education. It looks like a cross between Good Housekeeping's model parlor of 1960 and a recording studio and, in fact, has served as the latter for Monheit since she was a toddler. Lined along one wall are a xylophone, a drum kit, several guitars (one electric with an amplifier, for Jane's only sibling, David, 19), a good home recording system and hundreds of CD's and albums (shelved alphabetically but cross-categorized by computer), mostly jazz of the swing era.
Here, Jane Monheit has been learning songs and making recordings since the age of 28 months, largely under the tutelage of her grandfather, Ernest Newton, a retired high-school science teacher. She grew up calling her recorded voice "the Other One Jane."
I got to listen to a few highlights of Monheit's mammoth home recording output, including a lovely, pitch-perfect rendition of "Over the Rainbow" made when she was 3 years old. She is thinking of doing the song on one of her next albums, which might be her 50th or 60th, counting all the tapes she made with her grandfather. "I heard most of the jazz I ever heard in my life, until college, in this house," Monheit says. Her grandfather's taste, however, wasn't overly adventurous. "I didn't know what Coltrane sounded like until I went to college," she says.
At Connetquot High, Monheit was the school theater star. "I played the lead in all the plays, and I loved it," she says. "Musical theater -- I mean, don't even get me started. The first time I saw 'The Music Man' on Broadway, I could hardly stop crying through the whole thing, because I was just so overjoyed to be sitting in a theater watching a wonderful production of that show. Rebecca Luker has been one of my idols forever."
When she moved to New York for voice study at the Manhattan School of Music, Monheit gravitated to the cabaret scene, belting show tunes in Village piano bars -- a world apart from the insular society of jazz purists. "I don't really do any kind of musical theater-y things right now, things that haven't become standards, but I would really like to," she says. "I used to spend so much time hanging out at piano bars like Eighty-Eights. I loved that place! Oh, my God -- I was such a little theater freak!"
It was her college boyfriend, Rick Montalbano, a jazz drummer, who steered Monheit away from cabaret and toward a serious concentration on jazz. She began singing with a group he played in, a hard-swinging quintet featuring the tenor saxophonist Joel Frahm and the pianist David Berkman. They did a tour of New England colleges together and gigged a bit around Manhattan, mostly at Augie's uptown, where I found myself captivated by her hair.
Music legend teaches us that Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records, figured he would make a billion dollars if he could find a good-looking young white boy who sang like a Negro, and he found Elvis Presley. In the fall of 1998, Carl Griffin, the head of artists and repertory for the multimedia company N2K (and now the president of its spinoff record label, N-Coded Music) was absorbed with a quandary posed by a growing trend in jazz: more and more of the best-selling CD's had been made by performers who were dead.
After generations of being an adventurous, exploratory music always probing forward -- an avant-garde art of the American street -- jazz flipped backward, focusing on its past. Starting in the 80's, a repertory movement led in New York by Wynton Marsalis elevated the status of jazz in the formal hierarchy of the performing arts and institutionalized the music. At Lincoln Center, Marsalis's jazz program finally gained acceptance as a full constituent, officially equal in status to the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. A repertory movement needs a repertory, of course; hence, institutions like Lincoln Center and the Smithsonian Institution culled from the past a canon of creators and interpreters -- Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis -- that became increasingly iconographic.
"Too much of the industry's attention is being lavished on the seminal figures, and the consequence of that has been dire," explains Jeff Levenson, a former vice president for jazz at the Warner Brothers and Columbia labels. "Problems have come from the desire to get the culture to legitimize this music so that it can become a packageable idiom that attracts corporate dollars."
For established jazz labels with extensive holdings of vintage recordings, the battle between "catalog product" and "roster talent" is no contest. It is, self-evidently, far more economical to fold fresh wrapping around old recordings than it is to sign, nurture and market new artists. "It stunts the development of new artistry," Levenson says. "In very practical terms, if you're not among the uninitiated, you go into a store and you are confronted with a decision of the complete Monk on Blue Note for $12 or the new Eric Reid or Brad Mehldau. The dice are loaded. You're going to go with the seminal figure at the expense of discovering new artists."
And so a recent college graduate who wears his hip taste in music as he wears his Campers might give a party and fill the CD tray with Beck and X and Nelly and, oh, one Ella and one Billie Holiday. Yes, musical juxtaposition can be fun, and most jazz (Dixieland and fusion notwithstanding) has a timeless cool. Still, one can't help wondering if said party-giver might not have played a smart, young jazz singer -- perhaps Paula West -- if he had a better chance to see and hear one.
Though the raging classicism in jazz has hurt more probative singers, it has helped Monheit. She was discovered by Carl Griffin on Sept. 25, 1998, at the Thelonious Monk competition, the prestigious annual contest that had previously introduced young jazz stars like the saxophonist Joshua Redman and the trumpeter Ryan Kisor. The winner in the vocal category was Teri Thornton, the 64-year-old singer and pianist who announced during her performance in the finals that she was battling cancer. (Thornton would die 20 months later.) Monheit, at 20 the youngest finalist in the competition, performed after Thornton in the finals, singing "Detour Ahead," and won the second-place title.
In Monheit, Griffin found his Elvis: a good-looking, young white woman who sings like a black jazz master of the past, specifically Ella Fitzgerald. "I heard the element of Ella that struck me -- very unusual for a girl 20 years old, especially a white girl," recalls Griffin, one of relatively few African-American executives in top positions at American jazz labels. "I said, 'O.K. -- she's in touch with the tradition, and she's young and beautiful. She's the best of both worlds. This is it!' "
Griffin introduced himself to Monheit at the reception after the Monk competition and offered her a record contract when she finished college. At the same reception, the personal manager Mary Ann Topper -- a figure of somewhat fearsome repute in jazz who has launched the careers of Diana Krall, Joshua Redman, Christian McBride and Michel Petrucciani -- scratched her mark in Monheit, next to Griffin's. Monheit graduated in June 1999, then signed with N-Coded Music (for two records with an option for three more) and with Mary Ann Topper's agency, the Jazz Tree (on undisclosed terms).
To establish the 21-year-old unknown instantly -- or "skip a few grades," as Topper, a former teacher, puts it -- Griffin made an estimable financial commitment to surround Monheit with premium jazz musicians. "I wanted to satisfy the jazz gods -- the critics and the opinion makers, whatever it took," Griffin explains. "So we made sure we had a Ron Carter, who has the respect of the industry, a Kenny Barron, who has the respect of the industry, Bucky Pizzarelli, Hank Crawford. You could not dispute those musicians. If you know anything about Ron Carter and Kenny Barron, they're not going to play behind anybody. That's not what they do. So, you automatically say, 'Hey, there must be something here if these guys are going to play behind this girl.' "
In fact, Carter ventured into the project tentatively. "Mary Ann had to work on him just to get him to listen to her," Griffin says. Once Topper took him to hear Monheit at the C-Note, however, Carter joined Barron as an enthusiastic participant.
The resulting album, an elegantly produced collection of standards released in May, bears out the musicians' confidence. Monheit took on the classic repertory with aplomb, blithely navigating the treacherous harmonic territory of such sophisticated compositions as Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Dindi" and Duke Ellington's "I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)." She is somewhat less assured with the rhythm numbers, but she makes only one jarring error -- mispronouncing "analyst" as "anal-ist" in Annie Ross's lyrics to "Twisted" -- and she employs her youthful theatrical experience to devastating effect on the ballads, especially "Detour Ahead" and "Never Let Me Go." Such is the market for a new Ella that Jane Monheit has become a major headliner with a Top 10 jazz album in the course of a professional career spanning just about six months.
Jane Monheit, who will be appearing at the Oak Room in the Algonquin in March, had never been to the hotel, so I took her to see the cabaret singer Susannah McCorkle on a recent Tuesday evening. At points during McCorkle's elegiac performance, I glanced at Monheit in approbation, and she scrunched her head down a bit as she does and whispered, "Awesome!"
After the show, I asked her if she thought she might approach performing at the Algonquin differently than, say, doing a set at the Village Vanguard (where she'll be returning in May). "I don't think so, no," she said, nodding. "I don't like to plan too much. I'll see how I feel.
"I just want to be true to myself," she said deliberately. "I just want to sing. I don't feel any big responsibility to do something different. I just want to sing great songs as well as I can. I'm not very worried about who did them before or how they did them or any of that.
"I like to do standards. They're so great, and you can sing them just everywhere. They're the best."
I found myself nodding back. The standard repertory is serving Monheit bountifully; she does exquisite justice to the material (again with the exception of some uptempo numbers, since she hasn't fully absorbed swing time); and she's performing a cultural service by carrying on the great American songbook for a new generation.
Or is she? Some singers see dangers in the au courant classicism. "It takes a lot of courage to develop yourself fully and create your own sense of who you are," says Judi Silvano. "Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of expectations from the industry to be conservative. I think it's really hard for all creative musicians, especially vocalists, because they're expected to put on a show. Of course, it's easier for the record companies to sell music that people are familiar with. It's just human nature for people to be comfortable with what they know. For all artists, it's very difficult to present something new to your audience. That takes an enormous amount of commitment."
"Jazz," says Dominique Eade, "is just shooting itself in the foot, because if every singer has to be the same or a vixen -- if that's a prerequisite, there are some very important people who you're not going to hear from, and the music's going to suffer. I don't begrudge Jane Monheit. Do what you want to do. But I do lament the fact that it makes the entire environment so much more conservative for singers. That then becomes the model, and I think that's too bad."
Will Friedwald has the same concern. He says: "The future, and even the present, has to be about performers who are doing something new. It's not enough just to sing the great American songbook in a swinging, jazzy, fashion. The singers who are going to matter in the long run are those who have a sound and style and approach of their own, like Cassandra Wilson. Monheit is off to a fabulous start, but it'll be up to time to see if she can develop an individual style and sound."
Before Monheit left for Europe, Carl Griffin called a meeting with the producer Joel Dorn, their new star and a couple of record-company administrators to plan her second album. "This one is critically important now," Griffin said, standing behind his desk alongside a portrait of Malcolm X. "What can we do that's a little different but not too different, if you know what I mean?"
Dorn went over a list of songs they were planning to record: "I'll Be Seeing You," "I Was Doing All Right," "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most," "Nobody But Me."...Another page from the great American songbook.
Monheit piped up. "There's a tune by this band Bread, a 70's band" -- the tune was "If," a Muzak staple. ("If a picture paints a thousand words/Then why can't I paint you.") "I think I'd like to record that." Dorn seemed about to say something until Griffin eased him off with a pointed glance.
Retreating somewhat, Monheit suggested a haunting jazz ballad by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. "I'd like to do 'Something to Live For,'" she said. "Nobody does it, and it's great. That would be a little different." Silence, again. (According to the song's publisher, "Something to Live For" has been recorded at least 35 times over the past five years.)
"I'll tell you what I think we should do," Dorn interjected with brisk authority. A no-nonsense recording veteran, Dorn has produced Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Jimmy Scott, Roberta Flack and dozens of others over the past three decades. "Let's go with the classic material, but bring in a new crew (of musicians) a little younger -- younger versions of the classic players, younger people doing the old things."
That, everyone agreed, seemed the right course, a natural progression of Monheit's aesthetic. To accompany the young heir to Ella Fitzgerald, they would employ the successors to Tommy Flanagan, Ray Brown and Herb Ellis. The discussion shifted to various up-and-coming musicians and the jazz elders they sounded like.
Monheit, perhaps wisely, seems content to defer most important career decisions to her handlers. "Joel is awesome," she says. "I go into production meetings, and my brain is going all over the place, and I walk out and everything's falling in a nice, even straight line. And Mary Ann is amazing. She could take this little snail from the backyard and make it a big star. I said to Mary Ann, 'We're going good, right?' She was like: 'Oh, dahling. It's unheard of.'"
Personally, Monheit is hanging her dearest hopes on the distant future. "Jazz is a really good starting point for me," she says, "because it establishes me as a musician, and that is really important to me. I'm just hoping that I can grow from here and eventually become a lot more. The term 'jazz singer' defines only part of who I am. One of my greatest dreams in life is still to be on Broadway. I don't care how corny it is, it's so true."
In the meantime, she is finding her golden-scooter ride through the top of the jazz world a thrill. "I really love the glamour of it -- the fact that I get to sing and sign some autographs and, you know, have people come do my hair and makeup and put on some extravagant gown," Monheit says. "It's like playing dress-up. And when I go home, I get take to a check with me. It's like, come on! How lucky am I?" *****
Yoshie