The Baritone and I

In my recent listening to Hans Hotter, I've gotten to thinking about the baritone voice.  It is, I think, the quintessential American voice.  It is the most naturalistic of voice types, in the sense that it is the voice that most closely approximates the pitch of (male) human speech, and thus it can be manipulated in all kinds of ways:  think of Bing Crosby's crooning, for instance, and then think of the very different male vocal style that supplanted it: the revolutionary singing of Frank Sinatra, in turns swaggeringly declamatory and beautifully, evocatively conversational.  In its very naturalness, the baritone voice apotheosizes the frank, unadorned American aesthetic.  I suppose it's no accident that my favorite singers are baritones:  Thomas Quasthoff, Thomas Hampson, Thomas Allen (that's a lot of Thomases, come to think of it), Hans Hotter, Sinatra, Johnny Hartman.

Kurt Elling's is one of the most true and beautiful American voices I know.  He wrote his own preamble to a song made famous by Sinatra, "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning."  Listen carefully, and you'll hear that he makes even his breaths part of the expressive landscape of the piece.  He and his pianist, Laurence Hobgood, do the song as a slow, sad waltz, with the accompaniment picking out a resigned, lonely, late-night heartbeat figure.
 

Oh, and if you click on the Johnny Hartman link, be sure to listen past Coltrane's introduction.  The story goes that, in the recording session, Hartman was so enthralled by Coltrane's beautiful solo that he forgot to come in.