Degrees of late night music
A long read guide to the music that sounds better late at night.
As much as I love, get obsessed and philosophise about music, I get equally irritated by the trappings and trash associated with the industry. Especially the categorisation of music: the mania to put all genres and types of music in their respective boxes — for ease of consumption, marketing and profit-projection. And for ease of shelving no doubt. File under AOR, MOR, EMO or other youth-oriented rock. World, folk, roots, rock, acoustic, country, minimal, metal. And all those weird rages for cross-genre taxonomies: alt-country, math metal, jah swing. The Wikipedia has an hilariously exhaustive list of musical styles available [note 1]. The end result of which is the realisation there's probably as many categories as performers of music, further multiplied to the nth power by genre crossovers and combination and packaging. Which can then be further graded and analysed according to career phases, solo directions, collaborations. Which underlines the superfluousness of the whole enterprise, the nastily shallow criticism inherent in over-categorisation. And which is a pale whiff of the nobler truth underlying it all: that there are no musics plural but only the true expression of Music singular. Hang your criticism.
A related branch of this silliness is the habit of choosing music for mood. Or what I like to call the Soundtrack Theory of Life, where every moment and experience has its appropriate musical backdrop, just like the calculated soundtracks of commercials with their pushing of emotional buttons. This band is great for driving (or just better in cars), this album for shagging, and this recently-deceased soul-disco singer for conceiving babies. This band for romantic dinners, these ones for breakups female and breakups male. This one for drinking beer, that one for Wild Turkey and all those for getting stoned (with a copious footnote on reggae). This mix for getting ready, that one for partying, these ones for coming down. Here's a pick-me-up band. That one for hangovers and these for aerobics, that band for bedwetters. This one's also great for driving but in the ghetto with the windows down low. Again — the net result, before I really start to labour the point — is it's all meaningless — as fickle and arbitrary as our moods, changing as fast as you can flick through an iPod. But again, great for the industry eggs and their monetised categories.
Which is not to say that music should be listened to arbitrarily, on permanent random and as jaggedly inappropriate as possible. Free jazz at funerals and heavy metal at bookclubs. I mean that an art which can reach intensities of passion and expression shouldn't be levelled to an act of consumption, spatchcocked to some sullen teenager's mood or mental soundtrack. It's not just about doing justice to a musician's art by affording complete listening attention, or by staying true to the spirit and context of that music's creative intent — it's about that underlying continuity, the thread of magic uniting all music, that we have to keep a hold on as participating listeners. It's what links heart to humanity, the communication of feeling and soul to all. Music is community after all. Such an idea of music is the natural enemy of categorisation and it's cheapened by mood-listening — which in itself is not such a bad thing. That soulful underlying thread will always be at the heart of music no matter where it sits on the spectrum.
Having said that, I'm going to shoot all this lofty guff down by talking about the category of Late Night Music. It's a special space for music because it's the only (or ideal) time-related genre — there's no mid-morning, pre-brunch category of music [note 2], no 7:45 in the pm sing-along — although there is a Thursday Afternoon music. Late Night is a peculiarly subjective timeslot, a frame of mind that reflects the close of day, the quietened surroundings and the potential for long dark nights of the soul.
Late Night calls for a music of solitude and reflection and low sporadic conversation — the kind where secrets and intrigues are hatched and revealed. It's private communion and mellow mental downshifting; a gentler and soulful time without the harried attention of daylight demands. It begins mellow and peaks with a state of communion, with hearts talking and listening across the musical spaces. It's music for when the city sleeps and the sleepless burn their private oil. It's anywhere from ten in the pm to around four in the morning.
It's also a time better suited to listening to improvised music, and jazz — the late night music ne plus ultra.
Now, everyone has their favourite bit of Late Night music, and this isn't going to be a prescriptive list of must-listens or essential jazz cuts. Late Night is really a private affair, a subjective mindset. But I am going to do something different in the annals of music categorisation and collation, and that is to provide a program based on time-slots for the Late Night listening experience. Late Night is no generic genre but a different climate and timezone of music altogether, and either side of the midnight hour call for a different approach and tack. So let's go by the clock.
10 pm
To my mind, there's no better way to kick off a late evening's festivities than with the mellow rolling rock of the Grateful Dead. The Live in Europe 72 disc is the best representation of their early 70s swing and groove in action. There's innate musical interplay and amazing chops, pure Americana rock and that wonderfully dynamic group mind — all with an improvisational edge that pips them ahead of other 70s AOR stylists like The Band. There's songs about gambling, trains, sharing the women and wine — all sung with group harmony and poetic ambivalence. There's such a coherent vibe to the music, and such a distinctly American tenor to proceedings (open roads, mobility, freedom) in addition to the intimate sparkle of Garcia's voice — that there's only one listener conclusion: This is Good Shit. A good event, a good jam, a great slice of musical life from the golden age of the early 70s.
We used to play for silver, now we play for life.
And musically, instrumentally, historically, the Dead are an important chapter in what can be expressed through a band — its vision and choices. Just to hear that shared sensibility... of all the players there for the jam and the band mind growing into something larger and more precious than the individuals combined (hence their sense of community) — that this directly affects the sound — that is something important for modern bands to hear and aspire to. Jerry's lead locks in with Bob Weir's rhythm guitar, underpinned by the stealth melodicism of Phil Lesh on bass. Bill Kreutzman's spacious swing and Keith Godchaux's startlingly precise piano accompaniment — and everyone playing almost continually in complimentary grooves — and this band could easily knock off a six hour set — creates such an uncanny gestalt. Such an easy rolling rumble that never tires, and varies itself in manifold ways the next night. This makes them worth following around everywhere; inspiring weird devotion in fans searching for that magic buzz across the nights.
At this stage the Dead were into folksy songs and vocals. If you want to dilate night time even further and sample the dark silver backing of the Dead mirror, then download a bevy of classic "Dark Star" performances from '68 to '74 at Archive.org and contemplate the intransigent nightfall of diamonds. Which is Dead code for bending time and space in a nicely profound manner.
11 pm
Eleven o'clock is the jazz turnpike; the multiple avenues and tributaries of true jazz await. Let your heart dictate direction — go bold and rounded with Dexter, ruminative and accessible with Miles, exploratory with conscious-traveler Sun Ra; take the dervish swirl of Coltrane or trapdoor wizardry of Monk, or tune in the milder stars of Mobley, Blakey, Adderley, Mulligan and Baker in any guise. Are you comfortable yet?
To my naturally biased ear, it seems everything in the development of jazz lead to the great 50s period. Eleven pm is the hour for any 50s-era jazz. It was a unique bubble in time of course, floated by the twin-horned engine of Bird and Dizz, by a sound and scene and an amazing confluence of talent. The 50s aesthetic is the template by which we measure jazz today — the cerebral focus on solos and virtuosity, the smoothed-out swing and of course the suits and deadly serious musicianship. Everything that happened after is part of the future fallout and breakdown of jazz: free jazz, fusion, retro.
But, the stars of that period are so intense you could navigate by any of them to reach a deep appreciation of the art.
Let's keep the 'up' mood with Dexter Gordon. First I'd like to digress about horn players. There's a truism told by musos that any one instrument sounds completely different in another's hands. I always thought this obvious with guitars, where attack and physical style drive the sound. But with saxophones, even with the same brand and model (as well as the reed factor, whose importance I had previously underestimated) — there are still major differences in sound between players. Unlike trumpet embouchure, the individuating elements of timbre and total sound are more restrained on the sax, or so you'd think. But you can immediately differentiate Dexter from Coltrane, or even Coltrane from John Gilmore on the tenor. I mean this beyond chops and playing styles — the same note on the same sax will sound completely different depending on who's blowing it.
This is because the great jazz players are great personalities of sound. All those years woodshedding and marking time in lesser bands is in aid of developing the individual sound (although it could be argued that some rare geniuses arrive fully formed — they are few indeed). Now, Dexter arrived in the bop era of the 50s — think chops and speed and urgent agility — but his sound and note structure are supremely mindful, deliberate and solid. Almost slow-brewed. His notes are full like vessels to the brim, full of dark depths. The whole note matters to Dexter, because every note matters. In the flurries of bop this may seem at odds with pyrotechnic speed and virtuosity. Even in his faster runs, Dexter is the master of every note he creates — he never sounds rushed or clipped. Every note is Dexter.
His bold and confident nature carries clearly in his sound and phrasing — because of this attention to the whole note. The proof is in his slow playing: Dexter's best solos are low and slow, and there's few other players that mine the lower depths of the tenor as richly. Even fewer have the same generous precision with the execution and length of a note [note 3]. It's a sense of informed sustain and seriously advanced melodic punctuation. His every comma, his every caesura matters. If he trims, bends or slurs a note, it's for a reason. Along with his timing and pace, the rhythm and stretch of his notes become deeply, personally expressive. Almost all his slower blues pieces are singular studies in note and phrase length — and instructive for any musician. Singers could learn mountains from this man; and he must be intimidating as hell for developing saxophonists.
It goes beyond attention to detail, beyond pure jazz chops — it's right in with the mysteries of personality and expressed identity. And humour. Dexter never blew a run of clichés, but loved musical quips and references. He's the most optimistic sounding, buoyantly positive and solid tenorman from the era as well as a superb technician of notes and lines.
What I love about albums like Go! is the sheer subjective dominance of his sound, without unbalancing or falsely listing the band. And though this album could be filed under Hard Bop, it has neither the cold exhibitionism nor abstracted swing of some labelmates. His phrasing is effortlessly upbeat and the way he sets up and pitches those great sustained notes is full of torque and vim. His control of variety is total — he knows which notes to scatter staccato, which to round off with buttery vibrato and which notes to blow long for the band to vibe on. 'Phrasing' doesn't do justice to the sheer poetic command of his meter; and 'leadership' doesn't equate with the reactive interplay of his style and ensemble swing. It's uncanny.
The night never sounds as optimistically long as when Dexter blows low and slow.
12 am
Midnight means Miles — of course — he immortalised the moment with the famous Monk tune. He embodies the style. But I want to delay that connection for a spell; I'll come back to it.
12:00:01 am
I'm going to interject with a major cut. Even though Miles is Midnight, there is one Sun Ra track that begs insertion. It's the gamely well-titled "Blues at Midnight", off the superlative Jazz in Silhouette album. It follows perfectly the forward optimism of Dexter and hurtles the Arkestra towards and beyond the new day.
Bop and big bands never made an easy marriage despite Gillespie's brief experiments; but Sun Ra approached the issue from a purer, arranger's angle. After an album's worth of offbeat and canny-colourful arrangements — all given full band pomp — Silhouette closes with a free 12-minute jam with only the most basic arranger's bookends. And it is incredibly fast. Bassist Ronnie Boykins injects so much pace and volition to the track it's a wonder his heart didn't stop. For bass chops and speed he's running the whole marathon at a sprint. It's the last mad rush of day's energy.
Like in bop, everyone gets to lay a fine solo over Ra's persistent backing: the stablemen Gilmore, Patrick, Allen, Dotson — all with a freedom rarely seen outside of bop. Thinking about the word Bop nowadays I think of Pat Patrick on the baritone, dropping his ridiculously funky Bops in the low register while soloing. Spinning-out-some-crazy-lines-BOP-gonna-run-back-up-for-a-higher-line-BOP. He's definitely the Harry Carney of the Arkestra.
By Ra standards, Silhouette is an incredibly well-recorded album — the clarity and the mix are all right on. "Midnight" is a song I love cranking at any time of the day to pick up the mood and send the mind on a fast little ride. Even though it's just a series of solos, the big-band weight of the performance (especially on the outro line) gives the jam an affect not usually felt in bop or larger ensembles. The sheer momentum and drive of the rhythm section propels it into stellar jazz, which was Ra's intention.
It's also pleasing to note that Ra's later sonic experimentation and sci-fi escapology was seeded and grounded in such solid jazz and band arrangement — this is where and how his vision of freedom germinated.
12:12 am
Now it's back to Miles.
Miles represents the obvious but significant choice in Late Night music because he is Late Night cool. The spare and introverted sound of his muted horn defines the midnight moment. Effortlessly hip, subtly rhythmically tuned, and yet aching, thoughtful and tender in ballad, boppy or musing long solo form, Miles is the man.
So then, where to begin and lay the selective finger? His catalogue is huge and uniquely varied; you might as well pick a single Rembrandt or Picasso to ramble on. There's the smooth coolness of Birth of the Cool or Blue Haze. The easy group vibe of Workin'. The painterly sass of Miles Ahead and Sketches of Spain. The perennial wonder of Kind of Blue. The austerities of the later quintet (ESP etc). The expected Round About Midnight. Where to begin...
Well, a personal fave is Miles Davis And The Modern Jazz Giants — not because it's a great album (it's rather haphazard to be honest) but because of the palpable vibe in the studio. You can see the thick smoke and the single light on Miles, hunched and muted at the mic. He leans in and into the notes. He's supported by a baffled Monk and the ringing beauty of Milt Jackson on vibes (Milt is one of those low-key magicians of jazz, brightening any recording). Miles' inward musing and long notes sound congruent with those dark shots of the New York skyline by night. It's music for tall buildings overlooking the streets and streetlights — the parquet uptown apartment with gins and cigarettes, the man at the window looking down and across the horizon, thoughtful. The movement of tiny cars below.
Modern Jazz Giants also marks Miles' tone at its very best — quietly beautiful, dramatic and wholly clear, singing and sustained.
At the time these cuts were recorded there was still a lingering expectation of song structure and length, no doubt inherited from the era of short 78s — and here Miles gave everyone the freedom of a double-long or even triple-long solo just as they were doing live. Interestingly, on the opening track ("The Man I Love") Monk seems to literally wander off — words are spoken off-mic, and a crotchety Miles horn brings him back to the piano to finish his solo. Words were spoken throughout the session it seems, but the results are still hyperbolic. The version of "Round Midnight" here is also one of the more lyrical of Miles' recordings, if only for the sheer breathy underscores of Coltrane's horn under Miles.
It's a short record, but continues on from the optimistic bent and colour of Dexter, stretching well into the night. Time is unwinding, expanding.
1:00 am
Unlock The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions box set and play it all the way through.
In a Silent Way marks the true magnetic north of Late Night. This is it: the essence, the quiddity of dark night. It's a brilliant {but executively flawed — note 4} study in establishing complex musical setups and drawing art from them. It showcases one of the singular qualities of Miles' style and effect, a quality difficult to triangulate in writing — his thoughtfulness, cerebrality and introspective nous on the horn.
It's far away from ambient music but still close in spirit — it's funky even, circular and funky — and the soloists play for bare essentials rather than maximal chops. The spatial canvases are wide and open. There's barely a progression or complex harmonic movement and yet beautiful melodies unpack from the ornaments. Chord functions are spread over the whole band, not just the piano(s); all instruments play for atmosphere and texture through the warp and weft of the groove.
Miles is still the subject, the leading idea, and with Teo Macero at the helm they were working out new ways of weaving music. Long jam sessions were mixed and cut and collated with others, much like modern producers lift the best performances from multitrack tapes to create a final mix — just here it's more structurally radical and musically-minded. The joins are clear, the repeats sometimes obvious and things are deliberately faded out and away, but the emergent picture is a lifetime away from the original sessions. The method seems to work best with really simple ideas (and solos) stretched long and then spliced onto and over others. Like sculpting with sound, but there's still a sense of the loose and stretched intent of the music. More sonic experimentation was on the way with Bitches Brew.
The key to the creative process used here is reduction by mixing, the boiling down of musical ideas to their essential spirit — that much it has in common with ambient music. Ambient could be described as the sounds left over when all the regular music is taken away. You can hear Miles begin this exploration with "Mademoiselle Mabry" ('68) and follow it though all the way to "He Loved Him Madly" ('74) — probably his most bare-boned and effacing tracks. You can hear how strongly the concept of mixing for space becomes. Hear it in the way he picks and pitches musicians for their combined and spatial effect, much like Ellington before him. His leadership choices are also artistic & structural choices.
And from another point of view In a Silent Way is an important act of fusion in ways completely unrelated to the cap F Fusion we've come to groan under since then — some of it promulgated by the players on this album. There's a respect for time and space and funky hi-hats but none of the superficial busyness of simple-o fusion, where the funk is disturbingly meaningless and the solos even more so. I'm convinced that Miles would've been thoroughly indifferent to the definition and received concept of fusion — but then Miles was always looking for a bigger vision of music.
This is jazz music broken down to its simplest elements in a spatial equation. Yet it's still group-interactive and driven by concentrated listening — all the players sound supremely mindful and considerate of each other — which with three keyboard players would be a necessity. This is the genius of Miles: such music could only grow under his direction and guidance. His sense of arrangement and spacing works on a uniquely modern level — part painter, part film editor and casting agent and director, part visionary insight. And yet always wholly collaborative, sharp, attentive and focused.
And of course it's inwardly exploratory music — meditative, illuminating — which makes it supreme Late Night music. The album ends with Miles erecting a searingly beautiful rendition of Zawinul's title tune that fairly crackles with electricity. It's like a memorial to something... something humane and quietly profound. Something aurally symbolic. The affect of Miles' horn here (as with some of the box set extras) — is nakedly thoughtful. This is no longer a musing, lyrical Miles, this is Miles thinking with and through the horn. It's the sound of the process of cognition, yet thematically close to silence.
Miles hails the non-voice of solitude, calls it to account and cancels the implied negation of death {for what does one think of on these deep dark nights of the soul? Politics, gossip, regret? One thinks of existence. One takes on a degree of darkness and depth; there's a small but personal test of endurance, a desire to come through. One confronts the void and might be shocked or relieved — to paraphrase a wily German philosopher who counselled us to beware of studying the void, for it might examine us in turn}. Miles offers a consoling rumination... of a mind with the essential night. Neither declamatory nor melancholic or sentimental, this is (musical) thinking stripped of clutter and fanfare, on a mainline from the midnight mind. Subtly radical in its brotherhood. Another mind, at work somewhere far in the night.
Why is the experience of late night time different? To cast a hypothetical: because that’s when we experience time purely. The day is marked by changes and gradations of light, all the established habits and routines of living; whereas the night could be an endless dark, uniformly deep. To pass through it is a different form of endurance perhaps, which lends to every dawn a revelatory trace of metaphysical wonder.
2:30 am
At this point in the morning one is done with instrumental exploration and hungers for the comfort of a voice. The deepest, darkest and quietest moment of the night calls for a supra-human voice, or more poetically, a voice that's not quite of this world. Some people might reach for Nick Drake or the angelic lacrymatics of Orbison, but for sheer and soulful comfort in a world of confusion, loneliness and heartache there is none that holds a candle to the Legendary Jimmy Scott. And he is a pure enigma, a contradictory ambivalence of a different order. He is a man for whom deep soul and directness have come at great personal cost. His voice is astounding in its beauty, reach and control, and his every nuance seems to speak of heartache and loss, and yet...
OK maybe some context is in order.
Jimmy Scott was born with Kallman's syndrome, a hormone deficiency which if untreated means the body doesn't undergo puberty. As a consequence, Jimmy's voice didn't break but stayed high and strong like a castrato. He had an early break singing with Lionel Hampton in the late 40s, and recorded a great album with Ray Charles in the producer's seat, but his career nosedived due to legalities, and didn't fully revive until the early 90s when the confluence of a David Lynch cameo and the funeral of Doc Pomus brought him back to fully recorded glory.
His voice is a wonder. Piercing and possessive, it cuts through paper and skin. Neither Lennon's wail nor Wilson's falsetto approach Jimmy in terms of distinctiveness and instant attention-grabbing. It sounds like a woman's voice — maybe an irrepressible aunt's voice, striking fear and discomfort into relatives gathered round the piano. There's a degree of the masculine in it, just a shade; but its high register is definitely beyond the ordinary [note 5]. For musical ears conditioned to regular gender-vocal norms and the occasional high-pitched male, Jimmy cuts through with otherworldly power.
The voice of a vulnerable, youngish-seeming man singing with a well-aged soul, an experience beyond years — though of course he is that aged soul, that wise old man. This unchanged voice is at variance with time somehow, in seeming to have escaped it. It has matured differently, experientially; it stands outside of time and yet is timeless in the most direct, unambiguous way.
Jimmy sings about death, loss and suffering simply by style and inflection. Once you've heard him sing (the word is too light) a ballad or jazz standard, you'll realise the power of interpretation in soul, of truly owning a lyric's content. And strangely — this must be the calling card of true soul music — his ballads make you feel better, more hopeful.
Listen to his outright ownership of "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child", or the way his "Angel Eyes" carries naked emotion and broken despair to a level Sinatra could only dream of. This is a man who has been through the depths of loneliness and loss. For Frank, singing 'scuse me while I disappear' was a cue to back off the stage; for Jimmy it's damn near an existential act.
He strikes a near-absolute grace of sincerity — so total there is no space for irony or sniggering camp. Jimmy is absolutely believable; he occupies the subjective zone so completely you can't imagine him singing anything but aching, soaring ballads.
And if you thought Sinatra was a legend for his timing and phrasing, listen close. Jimmy is the master of delayed pacing: timing every enunciation to fall waaay behind the beat, drawing it to uncommon length, pitching it around his vibrato without ever once seeming delayed or dragging the rhythm. It's a technique that serves to focus listener attention solely on the words and soul of the voice. Hence he's most comfortably at home in the slow ballad where there's room to set up these subtle gaps for the attention to fall into. Technically, it's all sewn up and connected: the effeminate voice, the freakishly skilled technique, and the soul import of heartbreaking balladry.
If you're investigating his records I'd suggest working your way backwards from the pristine modern albums like All the Way, to the solitary 70s masterpiece The Source, and then the (thankfully reissued) Falling in Love is Wonderful, which is 50s Jimmy at his most penetrating and incisive.
With his nurtured phrasing and complete immersion in a song, with that sublime androgynously clear voice, you might still miss out on the visual magnetism and intense focus of his performing style. So personal and performative, singing from the deepest, private heart, with everyone in the audience hanging on to every note.
Such rare genius, such rare and total feel for the material, such faultless execution.
Jimmy's heartbreakingly simple lesson: it all comes from the soul. The broken, suffering, but hopeful soul. And his humble beauty as a person comes, partly, from an intelligence born of that suffering: an articulate, moving, generous man who has been to the ends of suffering and still maintains an absolute grace in singing it.
Jimmy makes conversions. From heartbreak, for hope. That's gotta be true spirit.
[...]
Now, after about 4 o'clock, my attention and coherence start to waver. Music can end here for now.
Good night.
Notes
1. I was inspired by a discussion to find out exactly how many genres, sub-genres and lesser orders of Metal music there actually are. Now, I'm no musical taxonomist, and I've left out a lot of cross-genre classifications, but this basic Wikipedia starter-list is totally out of control:
Heavy Metal, Black Metal, Death Metal, Thrash Metal, Progressive Metal, Viking Metal, Speed Metal, Power Metal, Hair Metal, Glam Metal, Nu Metal, Doom Metal, Electronic Metal, Folk Metal, Gothic Metal, Traditional Metal, Orchestral/Symphonic Metal, War Metal, Electro Metal, Industrial Metal, Death 'n Roll, Dark Metal, Ethno Metal, Grindcore, Horror Metal, Mathmetal, Ambient Metal, Atmospheric Metal, Chaoscore, Cyber Metal, Dramatic Metal, Epic Metal, Experimental Metal, Fun Metal, Groove Metal, Indie Metal, Medieval Metal, Pop Metal, Skaldic Metal, Sludge Metal, Stoner Metal, US-Metal, Wave Metal and Western Metal... just for starters.
Are these guys serious?
2. Bear in mind my arbitrary haste: Indian classical music, for instance, is closely aligned with the times of day. There are morning and evening ragas, appropriate and incorrect times to play them etc. But at least they don't get finicky about musical categories and segmentation.
3. To strike an aside: I keep coming back to the force of long
notes — because in a small way the control over timing and sustain seems to imply control over cap T Time. And especially in Late Night music, where the sense of time dilates — this effect has become the signature of genuine and moving musical craft to me.
4. Teo Macero was pretty pissed with this and the Bitches Brew box set treatment and remixing. The Silent box covers material used on three albums (actually, technically: four), so it's a grab-bag. The Brew boxset (I imagine) is like publishing a dead writer's every rough and ready first drafts. The value of these for their artistic insight and process is significant, but there is an element of profitable exploitation; especially when the usual practice in remastering jazz albums is to tack on maybe one or two, sometimes three alternative takes or extras from a session depending on space. The Silent extras and out-takes make the final album look slightly anaemic and well, short; or maybe that's a latent desire for more in this vein. I think a box consisting solely of interesting extras (and not the final mixes) and clearly indicated as that, would've been better. Slots in better with the randomised iPod generation too.
5. In a sense, Mr Scott is the gender-corollary of Cape Verde's Cesária Évora — whose distinctive voice has an ambivalent-to-masculine timbre. Both sing with a passionate melancholy, let it be noted. Which leads to a distracting speculation about gender-ambivalent singers and their access to deep wells of sorrow and sodade; is it just a trick of the ear and technique, do they play on certain emotional buttons related to gender and identity or... does such greatness come naturally to those at the physical periphery of regular norms and talents? They pursue a different orbit of life, methinks. Such talent feels and perceives life differently, perhaps.
[Note: this essay was originally published in Song Logic in 2011]