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.

It's Frank's World (We Just Live in It)

I'm grading my Music 101 class's first exam. In the last question, I asked them to name the piece heard so far this semester that they most enjoyed. For about eighty percent, it was Frank Sinatra's 1955 recording of "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning" (some of the music they've heard so far includes Gregorian chant, flamenco, Yiddish ballads, chain-gang songs recorded in Georgia in the 1920's, Benny Goodman playing "Body and Soul," songs from Elizabeth Mitchell's album You Are My Little Bird, and excerpts from Die Zauberflöte). One student, a young man from Ghana, preferred the Kurt Elling version of "In the Wee Small Hours," writing (quite movingly) that Elling's "take on the song is filled with verisimilitude as he uses elements of silence, rubato, and deep emotion to portray the realism that I believe the song calls for . . . . For a moment, I felt as if I were the singer, and that I too was longing for my beloved to come back in the wee small hours." Another student's preferred class selection was "Sylvie" by Leadbelly, because, as he put it, "the blues is the backbone of rock, which is my favorite type of music." He closed his essay with what I took to be instructions to myself: "Rock on."