Chnason To Torch
May. 27th, 2024 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzy_daveI have been reading an article in The Wire magazine this morning. Specifically , the June 1993 issue online version. Alas, I do not have the physical edition anymore. The like between chanson and torch singers was Edith Piaf. Her life was tragic and it showed in her moving songs whether you understand French or not. The sorely-buffeted and tragic lives lived - it seems - by so many torch-singers have helped:for anyone forced by circumstance to live a secret, repressed or even vicarious existence, the torch singer becomes an ideal focus for identification. They embody love's capacity for sadness (surely the reason the torch singer has historically found her most enthusiastic and loyal audience in gay culture). In this respect, both Barbara Sreisand and Shirley Bassey cones to mind.
At her best, Judy Garland was a supreme torch singer: listen no further than the soundtrack of A Star ls Born for a definitive version of "The Man That Got Away", as evocative a cry of sexual longing and the despair of desertion as there is. That's all", she told Dirk Bogarde (Snakes And Ladders, Chatto and Windus, 1978).With simple clarity, she probably summed up the secret weapon of torch. Indeed, the cult of Garland the diva centred at first not on the luminous film performances, nor the glowing legacy of her recordings,nor even on her Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz(where most of us encounter her for the first time). It is a more macabre and distanced phenomenon,one which has only grown up since her death. Infact, by the time the Garland legend began to form, long after the cinematic triumphs and euphoric concerts, her voice was less than a shadow of its former self. Her ghoulish public weren't turning out to hear a golden echo of the past, but to see if each wavering vibrato would be her last.
Infact, "My Man" started life in 1920 as "Mon Homme",in the repertoire of the great French music hall star, Mistinguett (today it is probably better remembered as sung by Barbara Streisand in Funny Girl, the biopic of Brice's life).The link between the torch song and the chansan realiste has remained strong down the years (stuck for away of describing Edith Piaf to an English-speaking audience unfamiliar with her emotional technique and style, her recording company would often call her a 'torch singer' in sleeve notes.)
Through the 1940s and 1950s the old Broadway standards were revived and reworked by some of the great vocal stylists of the century - Peggy Lee, Holiday, Garland, Lena Horne,Julie London, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan. Inevitably, the sophisticated jazz- and blues-inspired techniques of some of these artistes carried the material a long way from its raw, vulgar, intimate roots and it developed in a variety of sophisticated, not to say self-conscious, directions. Now at the very heart of the Retro Boom in the nineties, their recordings were being repackaged for a new generation, and singers like Lee and Holiday are giving torch material 'respectability',even though actual torch songs formed a very small part of their repertoires.
The torch song was revived in the sixties, but this was anticipated in revealing ways by the all-too brief ascendency of Patsy Cline. Country & Western is also fixated on unrequited love, the errant lovers seperation,and Cline's own tragic life and early death (in 1963) have boosted her re-incarnation as a pop diva (with a dissident cult following this time strongly lesbian).The chain here, which includes Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton, concludes with Kd. Lang, whose voice has the Cline vibrancy. Already an icon of sorts, Lang eludes easy categorisation, but 'torch' is a word some criiics have already reached for.
Also, Dusty Springfield, a great pop diva and a great white soul voice (with a gay male and lesbian following),linked up with the Pet Shop Boys and produced some great tracks, introduced her to new
fans as well.
While much of Annie Lennox's work deals with the difficult relationship which the icon must conduct with her following, the age-old torch themes of isolation and personal loss are always present. And even she couldn't resist a retro touch with her authentic, throw-away version of "Keep
Young And Beautiful".
The true torch singer is defined by a capacity to touch us, regardless of sexuality or age, and that camp is a disguise for deep, shared, ordinary emotions, the kind we all experience, but may be too sophisticated to admit. As soon as we ignore such facts, or undervalue the music that lives by them, we begin to miss something of enormous importance.Something even Whitney Houston would have known.
So, in essence, that is a long diversion to mention that I was listening to a CD called L'immirtelle by Edith Piaf, collection of twenty four songs.
At her best, Judy Garland was a supreme torch singer: listen no further than the soundtrack of A Star ls Born for a definitive version of "The Man That Got Away", as evocative a cry of sexual longing and the despair of desertion as there is. That's all", she told Dirk Bogarde (Snakes And Ladders, Chatto and Windus, 1978).With simple clarity, she probably summed up the secret weapon of torch. Indeed, the cult of Garland the diva centred at first not on the luminous film performances, nor the glowing legacy of her recordings,nor even on her Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz(where most of us encounter her for the first time). It is a more macabre and distanced phenomenon,one which has only grown up since her death. Infact, by the time the Garland legend began to form, long after the cinematic triumphs and euphoric concerts, her voice was less than a shadow of its former self. Her ghoulish public weren't turning out to hear a golden echo of the past, but to see if each wavering vibrato would be her last.
Infact, "My Man" started life in 1920 as "Mon Homme",in the repertoire of the great French music hall star, Mistinguett (today it is probably better remembered as sung by Barbara Streisand in Funny Girl, the biopic of Brice's life).The link between the torch song and the chansan realiste has remained strong down the years (stuck for away of describing Edith Piaf to an English-speaking audience unfamiliar with her emotional technique and style, her recording company would often call her a 'torch singer' in sleeve notes.)
Through the 1940s and 1950s the old Broadway standards were revived and reworked by some of the great vocal stylists of the century - Peggy Lee, Holiday, Garland, Lena Horne,Julie London, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan. Inevitably, the sophisticated jazz- and blues-inspired techniques of some of these artistes carried the material a long way from its raw, vulgar, intimate roots and it developed in a variety of sophisticated, not to say self-conscious, directions. Now at the very heart of the Retro Boom in the nineties, their recordings were being repackaged for a new generation, and singers like Lee and Holiday are giving torch material 'respectability',even though actual torch songs formed a very small part of their repertoires.
The torch song was revived in the sixties, but this was anticipated in revealing ways by the all-too brief ascendency of Patsy Cline. Country & Western is also fixated on unrequited love, the errant lovers seperation,and Cline's own tragic life and early death (in 1963) have boosted her re-incarnation as a pop diva (with a dissident cult following this time strongly lesbian).The chain here, which includes Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton, concludes with Kd. Lang, whose voice has the Cline vibrancy. Already an icon of sorts, Lang eludes easy categorisation, but 'torch' is a word some criiics have already reached for.
Also, Dusty Springfield, a great pop diva and a great white soul voice (with a gay male and lesbian following),linked up with the Pet Shop Boys and produced some great tracks, introduced her to new
fans as well.
While much of Annie Lennox's work deals with the difficult relationship which the icon must conduct with her following, the age-old torch themes of isolation and personal loss are always present. And even she couldn't resist a retro touch with her authentic, throw-away version of "Keep
Young And Beautiful".
The true torch singer is defined by a capacity to touch us, regardless of sexuality or age, and that camp is a disguise for deep, shared, ordinary emotions, the kind we all experience, but may be too sophisticated to admit. As soon as we ignore such facts, or undervalue the music that lives by them, we begin to miss something of enormous importance.Something even Whitney Houston would have known.
So, in essence, that is a long diversion to mention that I was listening to a CD called L'immirtelle by Edith Piaf, collection of twenty four songs.
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