Theorizing Sound Writing by Deborah A. Kapchan

Author:Deborah A. Kapchan [Kapchan, Deborah A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780819576644
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

PAYING TRIBUTE: TWO ELLINGTON RECORDINGS AND OTHER DEDICATIONS

A Morning in Paris ([1963] 1997)

Sathima’s first recording made after leaving South Africa was A Morning in Paris, recorded in 1963 with Ellington, Strayhorn, Svend Assmussen, and the Dollar Brand Trio. The songs Sathima sang in this recording session are largely the popular songs of the era, or those written by Ellington or Strayhorn. They were standards from what had come to be called the American Songbook, popularized by singers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. Each song is focused on the idea of love in some fashion—longed for, lost, found, or hoped for—and it is the subject of love and the loss of love, which are key to Sathima’s repertoire to this day. To showcase Sathima’s voice, Ellington urges the musicians to create a lean instrumental texture, first bowed then plucked violin playing from Danish violinist Svend Asmussen, with a spare bass line in much of the recording from South African drummer Johnny Gertze. The musicians leave considerable space within the instrumental frame for the singer to project her own style and to tuck the words into musical phrases that demonstrate a particular approach to pitch, modulation, and timing. From the start, we are struck by the sheer presence of Benjamin’s voice—never forced, often quite delicate and wistful—and words, which are impeccably enunciated. In this recording Sathima is the melody that everyone else has to work around.

The musicians, all men, are clearly listening to what she does, and responding to her musical calls with often extraordinarily delicate and beautiful melodic and harmonic materials. The music supports or overlaps with the richness of tone quality and timbral possibility in her own voice. While she intuitively grasps the complex harmonic language that underpins her jazz melodies, she conveys vulnerability. It is hard not to read the words as autobiographical.

What lacks musically in this session are three elements that become hallmark qualities of Benjamin’s voice as a jazz singer and leader of her own ensembles. First, there is little independence of line or function for the bassist.2 Once Sathima starts to compose her own materials, we discover that it is often a bass line that comes first, before other musical materials. And bass players are given enormous latitude to be playful and wickedly creative, “singing” their own countermelodies to Sathima’s voice—as she would hear in the freer playing of South African bassist Johnny Dyani. While the bass player becomes much more than the mere shape of harmonic progression, we have no inkling of that dimension of her performance in this earlier moment. Second, Sathima demands of her drummers a particular sound that is more percussive, some call it a qualitatively “African” feel—they bring brushes, use their sticks to create a dry woody timbre in the rhythmic outline of a piece, and often make the drums seem to “speak.” On occasion, she requires the drummer to sound out what is known in South African jazz as the Cape Town rhythm, or klopse beat, to mark place through rhythmic articulation.

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