Phonology

At last - The Parsonage are News!

Straight up soul, electronica trickery, le funk, the ability to sing like Prince or Sam Cooke, and he's a skinny white boy. If you've not got it already, please go out and purchase Multiply. I'd give it 10 out of ten, 5 stars, and Jamie can get a big smooch from me.

There's a marvellous club peopled by men with brillcreamed quiffs and spider web elbow tattoos, ladies with perfect eyebrows and fringes. And the music is proper Rock and Roll with a bit of old fashioned R&B. Sometimes there is jiving and lindy hopping.

It's called All Tore Up. And it's great.

We all came to the conclusion that the 50s were great because:

You were allowed to be fat
You were allowed to be old
You were allowed to be ugly
You were allowed to be happy
You were allowed to be short
You could wear your shirt tucked in
You could wear high waisted jeans
You could wear curtains as a dress or skirt
You could wear bobby socks
You were allowed to be uncool
Men were allowed to dance with each other and enjoy themselves.

I'll let you think up the negatives. Goodnight.

Giuseppe Di Stefano, Opera star of the 50s and 60s is critically ill after being attacked in Kenya.

I can honestly say that his voice is the finest tenor I have ever heard. You can keep your Pavarotti. Di Stefano is the real deal. If you have any interest in operatic music and haven't heard him sing, you're missing out.

    Tuva is a small Republic on the Siberian border of North-Western Mongolia. Most Westerners have never heard of it. But in that tiny country, the most incredible vocal technique has flourished and is now becoming more accessible to Western ears.

    The tradition is often called Khoomei, which roughly translates as "throat singing". The sound is unearthly, and to naïve ears it might not be recognized as song, or perhaps not even as human. It's so different from the western idea of singing that it might be mistaken as a groan combined with a whistle.  

    In the animistic religion of the region each waterfall's, each cliff's spirituality is associated with its sound, or the sound which a human being can elicit from it. Khoomei is sometimes referred to as harmonizing with a waterfall.

    What actually happens when someone sings in this unique style is that they are able to produce two (or more) notes at once. If you listen carefully to the voices of jazz singers Louis Armstrong or Cab Calloway, perhaps even occasionally Icelandic prima donna Bjork, you might hear a growl accompanying the melody. That's as close as you come to the incredible vocal harmonizing of Tuvan throat singing.

    The technique is produced in a number of ways, but each manipulates vocal overtones to create a second (or even third) sound. The basic technique consists of the singer singing a root note (usually a bass note), holding it, tightening the throat, and moving the tongue, jaw and palate around in order to manipulate harmonics (or overtones). Try it. If you can hear some higher pitched sounds moving about as you move your tongue and jaw about you've got the basics.

    What the Tuvan experts do, however, is manipulate this in such a way that the bass note is softened and the overtones (the higher pitched tones) come to the fore. They sound very much like a whistle or flute in the recordings I've heard. It would appear that men find it easier to do due to the fact that their root notes are deeper and richer in natural harmonics, but on investigation into the technique, we have a female expert here in the UK.

    Jill Purce, a pioneer of the style says  "I pioneered overtone chanting in the West after working with Stockhausen in 1971-2. David Hykes ,Tran Quang Hai and I were the first to do it and I was the first to teach it. Overtone chanting makes audible the natural harmonic spectrum of the voice in its pure rainbow colours, so that unearthly, angelic and bell-like tones are heard floating above the deep voices of the chanters".

    Purce states that singers with classical training are the most afraid of the technique as it is so different from anything they have been taught before. However, she adds "It is fundamental to the nature of voice, and so all singers should learn about it. Speech and Language Therapists should also know about it as it is essential for the understanding of speech."  The technique presses down on the larynx, something that trained singers are not used to, but Purce affirms that it has enormously improved her classical singing voice because it is based on a profound understanding of resonance. "It is also an excellent warm up for all singing styles or vocal work".

    In Tuva the tradition was not one that was taught formally, boys picked it up as they went along, learning it from their fathers. Women, until very recently were forbidden to take part as it was thought to cause infertility or bring about miscarriage by tightening the throat.

    Inuit women, however, have a similarly named technique, which instead of singing seems to be more of a rhythm and breath game, performed by two women facing each other, mouths almost touching. The winner of the game is the first one to laugh or lose their breath or rhythm.

    Although this is throat singing in that the throat is tightened there's no real melody to the resulting overtones. The sound is more like a series of rich rhythmic grunts and can be heard on Bjørk's ambum Medúlla. There are also reports of the Xhosa of South Africa having a similar tradition, and of Sardinian sheep herders using overtones although extant examples are more difficult to come by.

    A somewhat incongruous example of overtone singing comes from Texas in the 1920s. A cowboy singer, Arthur Miles (of whom very little is known) recorded a few songs which display fine examples of overtone singing. The usual variation in the cowboy music of this time was that of yodelling, but what Miles did was completely different, with a drone root note and high flutelike melody over his simple acoustic guitar backing. It would certainly be interesting to find out what the listeners of his era thought of his unique style.

    Despite the relative obscurity of throat singing it would appear that it is beginning to become better known through associations and collaborations with western music. If you own the KLF's Chill Out album (an ambient electronic classic) you'll hear it about half way through along with some goat bells and cries. Celtic Connections stars from two years back, Angelite (a Bulgarian female choir) have recorded with Tuvan artistes Huun Huur Tu and American folk singer Nina Nastasia toured the UK with them earlier this year. This year's Scottish music festival, Triptych, had a live improvisation by Yat Kha, a modern group from Tuva, who fuse traditional singing and instrumentation with rock music.

    Hearing these singers on record is a strange enough experience but actually watching a human being making this unearthly sound a matter of metres away is something you are likely to find yourself wanting to repeat. The focus of Yat Kha's sound is a rhythmic bass drone, hypnotic and driven by the instrumentation. When the vocalisation begins it's like being split apart by sound. The root note sung by Albert Kuvezin is unbelievably deep and rich, and when the overtones begin they are so clear and bright in tone it's almost impossible to believe they are being produced by the same person.

    Even vocal experts are puzzled as to the exact mechanics of the techniques despite an investigation by Scientific American. Classical singers and voice teachers have limited awareness of how to do it although they are aware of the existence of overtones in creating the tone or timbre of the voice. What makes throat singing unique is the way the singer manipulates the overtones to create a harmonisation with his own voice. Perhaps the next step is to take one of Jill Purce's workshops, held throughout the year in the UK, Europe and North America. Or maybe a journey to the heart of Asia, to Tuva, in the middle of nowhere.

    So here I am, quite innocently listening to a preview copy of the new Björk album Medúlla, when I realise that the track Ancestors has a very fine example of that peculiar phenomenon, Inuit Throat singing . This technique doesn't employ the rich overtone technique found in the Central Asian styles discussed previously, but is a completely different method, based on rhythms of breathing and grunting. This is usually performed by two women standing close together, and originally their mouths were touching, using each other's oral cavities as resonators, although this has largely died out.
    Very refreshing to hear this on a mainstream artist's recording. Once I have the sleeve notes I'll be finding out more about the performers.

    When listening to music, I regularly go through short lived obsessions. As a person of "catholic" tastes, these may take the form of some obscure electronica, rare disco, morbid choral music or something even more indescribable. I often have a few obsessions on the go at once. At the moment I'm still enjoying female vocal jazz more than anything, (apart from my obsession with the solo works of David Sylvian, and Caetano Veloso's amazing Cucurruccu Paloma).

    So, about these jazz ladies, all amazing, all unique, and all very different. This week's number one is Betty Carter . Until a few weeks ago I'd never even heard of her and now she's top of the pile. Listening to her has taught me a whole lot of things I didn't even know I needed to learn. The thing that amazes me most about her is her incredible tone. Great sounds in her voice, like an alto sax. The only other person I've heard sing like that is Joni Mitchell, on Herbie Hancock's Gershwin's World . There's a whole lot of breath in her voice, but it's not weak or tired sounding. It's full, and round and reedy and rich, and unearthly strange at times. Her phrasing sounds a little lazy and late, but quite obviously she's in control of the whole shebang. What she's inspired me most with, though, is her pitching. Listening to her interpretation of Lonely House is like listening to an alien sing. The woman is howling, she doesn't pitch one single note straight, and yet it sounds absolutely amazing.

    Blossom Dearie . With a name like that, what do you expect? Yes she's cute and kooky and absolutely adorable, but she gets away with it. Despite the fact that she often sounds like a girly little girl, she stamps her mark on it and makes it her own. Other than that I love her songs, (and her piano playing too). Ridiculous lyrics and knowing references maybe, but like her song says, She's Hip.

    Lazy, bluesy, and sultry, with a lot of breath in her voice, we have Miss Anita O'Day . When you listen to her voice in isolation, cutting out the instrumentation, there's something completely without ego there, a naturalness you very rarely hear, even in jazz. Even in her later recordings, there's an unaffected girlishness in her voice. And she has fine taste in hats. 


   

    After my recent foray into the world of jazz singing, I'm now making an attempt at putting some of my new skills into practice. In the space of five days I learnt a lot about singing, music, telling stories and most of all, about myself and the way I see things. I have the blessing (or perhaps curse) of perfect pitch. A pitch fascist if you will. I cringe when I hear microtones out of tune. And my voice is nearly always very very slightly flat. Now that doesn't mean it sounds bad, but I am highly aware of it and hypercritical of it, probably because I can hear it so acutely. I was brought up learning classical music, where one is tied to tempo, prescribed dynamics, pitch, note length, phrasing. Everything is played straight, as it is written on the page.

    As I'd always enjoyed non classical singing, and have always sung along to pop songs, I ended up in pop/rock/dance bands, but with my pseudo classical attitude glued onto that. Do not waver from the melody. Never change the phrasing or tempo. When I'd write music, I'd be locked into something I'd created and there was never any room for adapting, improvising. I'd never learnt how. It was an alien concept. When I was younger, I'd go to gigs and be quite uptight about the fact that someone might forget words or change a melody line. In my heart of hearts I'd think they were getting it wrong.

    So when learning about and listening to jazz, I realised that my understanding of music was rather inflexible. I stuck to the phrasing I knew. I chose a melody and stuck to that. I never improvised. It wasn't that I couldn't, but that I thought it was safe to stick to what I knew. In the first couple of days of tuition it was pointed out to me that that rigidity concerning my musicality led me to be in a scary place. If I were to fall off the melody, not do what I intended, I saw it as a mistake. Doing something wrong, as it were. So I tried it out. Sliding about notes can sound great, just listen to Betty Carter. Relaxing the phrasing of a song, even my own, makes it sound more natural, and makes my voice sound more relaxed.

    I'm not so frightened of making a mistake now. I recorded Black Coffee tonight, it sounds lazy, but I trusted my ability  to do it my own way for the first time. And it sounds great.

    A few months ago - 4 to be precise - I somehow got myself into helping to organise a live music night at the lovely sub club. It was a rather strange experience to start off with and it's still rather alien to me to be searching out bands and asking them to play in one of Scotland's top club venues.  It's early doors, with no door charge except a donation in the ice bucket, tables and chairs, candles, good company and fine music.

However, we've managed to pull off three rather successful wednesday evenings, with a variety of acts taking part.

The next one's on the 21st July - here's the flyer, do come along, it promises to be mighty.