Saturday 9th November 2024, 18:00 – Vocal Jazz.
Not only the genre, vocal jazz, connects all the pieces in this programme. They also have the year of publication in common: 2024. A new harvest!
You will hear music by Norma Winstone, Alexis Cole, April Varner, Samara Joy, Anna Serierse, Jazzmeia Horn, and Michael Mayo. We zoom in on this 32-year-old American, Michael Mayo. Mayo (photo) grew up in a professional musical family. His father played sax with Earth, Wind & Fire – mother was a backing singer with Diana Ross, Beyoncé and Whitney Houston. He studied at the Thelonious Monk Institute, where he was taught by Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.
His elastic voice has a more than average range. His vocal possibilities transcend boundaries. All for the benefit of creative expressiveness. After Bones, from 2021, Fly is his second album. His choice of standards is striking. He breathes new life into well-known compositions. The arrangements have their own signature. He piles layers on top of each other, sometimes taking care of the bass line in walking bass form. This piling can really thicken up.
I Didn’t Know What Time It Was is a song from 1939, composed by Richard Rodgers. This standard has hundreds of versions. Mayo starts with a minimal, 3-layer texture: he sings the melody with lyrics, and accompanies himself with a vocal bass line. Finger snapping on the 2nd and 4th beat is the third layer. In the following chorus he improvises without lyrics in a high register, polyphonic vocal lines join in harmoniously and colorfully. The complexity then gradually increases until the end. All this takes no longer than 2’20”.
In Speak No Evil, a composition by Wayne Shorter, Mayo uses a broader sound palette with keyboard, bass guitar and drums. He sings completely without lyrics, in a high register, and here too he deviates considerably from Shorter’s original. Rhythmic/metric relationships are more complicated. Halfway through the tempo slows down, not much happens anymore, which does not benefit the tension curve. At two minutes it is a piece of very short duration.
The authorship of the standard Four is disputed. Miles Davis is generally considered the composer, but according to saxophonist Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson the piece is his. (There are a few other compositions that, according to the ‘real’ creators, have been wrongly claimed by Davis.)
The theme, with lyrics, is sung straightforwardly by Mayo. But bass and keyboard go against it. If we – for the sake of convenience – assume a four-quarter time signature, their accents sound like this: 1 2 3 4| 1 2 3 4| 1 2 3 4| 1…, every three beats. Then a regular hand clapping is added, on every 3rd beat of the four-quarter measure. The second chorus is a scat improvisation. The third is for the bass player. Then Mayo concludes with the theme. That theme is respected 100%, note for note. The fingerprint is also in the arrangement here.
For the complete programme, see the Guide.
Vocal Jazz – Ineke Heijliger
