Music For Your Road, no. 3: Cherish the (non-Classical) Ladies, Part 2

This is a continuation of a long essay. But I think the subject matter deserves thorough coverage.

In Part 1, I examined the hard-wired neurological, and the (apparently, universal) cultural reasons why everyone responds strongly to women’s singing voices. I then recommended five albums of female vocals that have not been played-and-replayed to the point that, for most people, they have become wallpaper.

Here are the rest of the 12 female-vocal records I want to recommend.

6. Roberta Flack: First Take (1969)

I recall Roberta Flack’s once telling late-night television talk-show host Johnny Carson that her young ambition had been to be a concert pianist. She certainly started out on the right track. She played piano in the AME church her family belonged to (and she also visited a local Baptist church, to hear contemporary Gospel music). Flack was accepted as a piano student on a full scholarship at Howard University—she entered at age 15.

But then, as she later drily told Johnny Carson, she looked around, and she saw that there were no African-American woman concert pianists; and especially, there were no overweight African-American woman concert pianists.

That being the case, Roberta Flack taught high-school Music, and English; and she began seeking gig work as a pianist. She started out at a restaurant, accompanying similarly-under-employed opera singers. Then she began playing, and herself singing, standards, folk music, and pop songs during the “opera-bits” intermissions.

Not long after, she was hired as a regular act in her own right by a nightspot on Capitol Hill, and her reputation quickly spread. Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, and Ramsey Lewis were among her fans. Les McCann arranged an audition for her at Atlantic Records. Roberta Flack’s first album was reportedly recorded in only 10 hours. Perhaps that is why it is called First Take. Well, she had been practicing those songs for three years… .

Roberta Flack remains the only singer to have won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year (meaning for a single, not an album) in two consecutive years. In 1973, for “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” and in 1974, for “Killing Me Softly with His Song.”

The same year Roberta Flack won Record of the Year for “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” she also won Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group, or Chorus, for a different song, “Where Is the Love,” with Donny Hathaway. I don’t think anyone else has done that, either. Moreover, in 1974, in addition to 1974’s Record of the Year, she won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female.

7. Bonnie Raitt: Give It Up (1972)

Bonnie Raitt’s father was the legendary musical-theater singer John Raitt. He was famous for singing the handsome, virile lead roles in Broadway Golden Age classics such as Carousel and Oklahoma!. At age eight, Bonnie Raitt received a guitar as a Christmas present. Her main musical influences were the Folk Revival of the 1950s and 1960s; and, believe it or not, Beatnik culture.

She was accepted at Harvard’s then-”sister” college Radcliffe, but later dropped out to pursue her music career. Unusually for that time, Bonnie Raitt could play lead guitar and slide guitar as well as rhythm guitar. And obviously, she could sing very well, with a voice that was natural and “untrained,” rather than sounding like a Broadway wannabe.

Bonnie Raitt achieved mainstream marketplace success (and the Album of the Year and Best Female Rock Vocal Grammy Awards) only with her tenth album, 1989’s Nick of Time. In 1989, Raitt was an “overnight success.” However, as is often the case, it usually takes 13 or more years of hard work for an artist to get to his or her particular “night.”

Despite Nick of Time’s Grammies, I think that Raitt’s second album, released in 1972, is her most interesting one. It’s a hybrid of the emerging acoustic folk-rock genre (there’s one Jackson Browne song) crossed with Blues, Rhythm & Blues, and ballads. And very well recorded. It’s “under-produced,” not over-produced.

I was told, some time later, that the album Give It Up had been recorded almost entirely “location live” in a large space, because the musicians could play that well together. The opening track starts out as a slide-guitar-driven Blues complaint, but it then quickly takes on a jaunty Dixieland feel, with a tuba doubling the bass line. Guest musicians include “Freebo,” Dave Holland, Paul Butterfield, and the British Blues legend Jackie Lomax.

8. Jane Olivor: First Night (1976)

Jane Olivor (birth name Jane Cohen) came from seemingly out of nowhere in the mid-to-late 1970s, reviving for a wider (but not quite mainstream) audience the nearly lost genres of chanson and cabaret. I say, “not quite mainstream,” because the big winners in American music in 1976 were ABBA, Queen, Captain and Tennille, Paul Simon, Judy Collins, and Natalie Cole.

Olivor attracted a hard core of committed fans; but even with some support from public television, her career struggled. The music-business parts of it, as well as the very act of public performance, were hard for her. On top of that, six months after they married, her husband was diagnosed with a cancer that soon proved fatal. All of which is to explain why many of you might not have ever heard of her.

Which is a shame. I have been to quite a few concerts, and the one time I heard Jane Olivor live was one of the most remarkable and memorable ones. My girlfriend and I just kept glancing at each other, marveling at Olivor’s range, depth, and total commitment.

We had arrived at the venue almost late, and the place was surprisingly full. The quick thinkers in the box office sold me the tickets for the front-row-center seats usually reserved for the Mayor of Providence.

I, of course, had no way of knowing that.

Therefore, I was baffled when, at the very end of the concert, Ms. Olivor came to the edge of the stage and gestured for my girlfriend and me to come forward. Ms. Olivor then gravely bent down and shook hands with both of us. A priceless memory.

One listen to Jane Olivor’s at-the-edge-of-the-abyss rendition of Don McLean’s (he’s famous for having written the song “American Pie”) “Vincent,” an elegy for the suicidal painter Vincent van Gogh, will tell you whether Ms. Olivor’s one-of-a-kind art is your cup of tea.

By the way, it is claimed that Don McLean’s performance of “Vincent” was a particular favorite of the rapper and actor Tupac Shakur; reportedly, it was played to him in the hospital, just before he died.

The only recognition I can find Jane Olivor’s first album’s having received was a Record of the Year award (I recall that they handed out twelve of them each year) from Stereo Review magazine.

Those with vast discographic memories may remember that the year before Jane Olivor recorded “My First Night Alone Without You,” that song had been recorded by Bonnie Raitt, for her Home Plate album. Small world.

9. Julia Fordham: Porcelain (1989)

U.K. songstress Julia Fordham’s second album Porcelain was her only album that made any kind of a dent in the U.S. record charts; and it was not that big a dent, either (No. 74 on Billboard’s Top 100 album chart).

Which is too bad. Fordham’s voice has great range and suppleness. Her rather astonishing low notes would be the envy of many a female classical “alto” singer. Her arrangements are inventive, and she has a great feeling for wry nuance about the complexities of modern love.

For one example of that, the opening couplet of the title track is:

I am very, very much in “like” with you,
I hope that it’s enough, ‘cuz it’s all I can do.

Somewhere in Heaven (doubtless, wherever they are pouring Martinis at the moment), Cole Porter is smiling.

Therefore, what we have here is a great voice, possessed by a talented and intelligent singer, enviably recorded, and wonderfully produced.

Back when there were high-end audio shows, I would visit various display rooms, and from time to time I would pull Fordham’s Porcelain CD out of my briefcase, and ask the exhibitor to play a track such as “For You Only For You,” which is Fordham’s take on the breathless chanteuses of the 1940s and 1950s. People would then ask why they hadn’t ever heard of Fordham before.

By the way, on at least some of Porcelain’s tracks, the bass player is Pino Palladino, who went on to substitute for the recently departed John Entwhistle on The Who’s 2002 world tour. Palladino later formed a trio with Steve Jordan and John Mayer.

10. Mary Black: No Frontiers (1989)

Mary Black was born to a musical family in Dublin. She had a long apprenticeship in Traditional Irish music. No Frontiers was Black’s breakthrough crossover album (that is, crossing over to modern singer-songwriters). It spent more than a year on Ireland’s Top 30 album chart.

Julia Fordham’s voice is of the nightclub or the bedroom, while Mary Black’s is more of the pub or the country lanes. Still, Black’s voice is hauntingly evocative, and her material is, at times, superb. The commendably ungimmicky production job is true to Black’s Celtic folk-music roots.

My favorite track is the haunting “Columbus,” which has nothing to do with the historical figure of recent controversy. The song addresses a person who retreats from other people, and eventually, even retreats from reality. To that person, the real world is where “Things can get twisted and crazy and crowded/You can’t even feel right.” Therefore, that person retreats into the contemplation of “maps and beautiful charts.”

Only at the end, we learn that the singer is addressing herself. A very powerful short story.

11. Patricia O’Callaghan: Real Emotional Girl (2001)

At one point, it seemed to the young Patricia O’Callaghan that her life choices boiled down to being either a rock star or a nun. She escaped from that dilemma by studying to become an opera singer. It’s a commonplace to say that a woman has a voice of “crystalline clarity,” and O’Callaghan does indeed have a lot of that; but there is also color and depth and, when called for, plaintiveness, or a gentle sweetness.

O’Callaghan has spent a lot of her career in modern opera and modern vocal art music, but she has also given in to the temptation to approach modern popular music (including all sub-genres, from singer-songwriter to all flavors of rock) with a cabaret sensibility.

Of course, Patricia O’Callaghan is a renowned interpreter of the music of Leonard Cohen; but she has also recorded songs by Bob Dylan, Kurt Weil, Randy Newman, and Pearl Jam’s Eddy Vedder.

O’Callaghan’s 2001 breakthrough CD Real Emotional Girl has withstood the test of time, extraordinarily well. In terms of the kind of repertoire that some of the songs on the album represent, songs such as “Attendez que ma joie revienne” (made famous by the French singer known as “Barbara”), “Je rêve de toi,” and “Mon manège à moi,” there is a bit of genre overlap with the kind of songs Jane Olivor sang.

However, between those two singers, there is a huge stylistic or interpretative difference. Jane Olivor would sing a torch song as though her world actually was on fire.

Whereas, Patricia O’Callaghan somehow manages to achieve a degree of detachment, as she explained to me in a telephone interview (about 20 years ago):

I choose songs because they are poetic and slightly more detached … enough detachment so you can see that the song has something to do with your life, and that you can change things, rather than just purely indulging in the emotion of the performance.

Another under-appreciated gem.

12. Jane Monheit: Taking a Chance on Love (2004)

We started this survey in the 1950s Twilight of the Jazz Age; we end it in the 21st century, with the green shoots of a Jazz Revival (at least of sorts).

Jane Monheit is another product of a “musical home.” Her aunt and her grandmother were professional singers. Little Jane is said to have begun singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Honeysuckle Rose” at the age of two years. Her mother played records to inspire her; Little Jane thereby developed a strong affinity for Ella Fitzgerald. Monheit later studied voice at the Manhattan School of Music.

As a singer, Jane Monheit really has it all. Her rich, somewhat dark voice has timbral voluptuousness, and surprising compass and dynamic range. Her transitions are effortless—unless there is a musical reason for giving a little growl. Her pitch security is a wonder to behold, and along with that security, comes amazing agility. Her diction is classy without being schoolmarm-ish, and her phrasing is elegant. Her sense of rhythm is both exact, and playful.

Two must-hear tracks are the opening sizzler, “Honeysuckle Rose,” and “Embraceable You,” which Monheit recasts into a Bossa-Nova ballad, accompanied by guitar.

I suppose that that brings us nearly full circle—back to Duets with the Spanish Guitar.

Here’s a Qobuz link where you can listen to albums six through twelve:

Thanks for reading; and I hope you enjoy your listening.

So near, yet so far … I also considered these singers, as I compiled my final list:

Sarah Vaughan (with Clifford Brown); Nina Simone; Joan Baez; Judy Collins; Fairport Convention (ft. Sandy Denny); Janis Ian; Linda Ronstadt; Anita Baker; Sade; Basia Trzetrzelewska; Cassandra Wilson; Eivør Pálsdóttir; Sarah McLachlan.