Critics: A Critique

I went to see Kurt Elling's 10 pm set at Yoshi's on Thursday night. His chops are amazing, and, as I commented to the table mates I had just met as I was finding a seat to watch the show, the most uncanny thing is that he sounds exactly like his recordings! Elling's pitch is unerring, and the unusual timbre and resonance of his voice were powerfully present, not buried in the mix as so many of us singers end up. I ended up buying a "digital download" for $15 (too steep!) of his latest album, Nightmoves, which consists of a jewel case with everything but the disc--perhaps it has to do with the album's April 3 street date. He's been touring extensively to promote this, his maiden effort on the Concord label. I can't say enough about how creative and masterful he is as a poet and singer. The Rumi-influenced vocalese lyric on Ellington's "I Like the Sunrise" is based on Von Freeman's improvisation in a 2002 recording--check out these words (here's where you can find the entire lyric):

Don’t worry about saving this music
or be scared if the singing ends or the piano breaks a string
for we have fallen to a place where everything is music and singing
everything is recovered and new
ever new and musical and even if the whole world’s harp should burn up
there would still be hidden there
the spirit of song there to linger on

I also loved his cover of Betty Carter's composition Tight. I've never done vocalese, but he inspires me to try in the future.

So here's where the critic comes in: The day before, I read a review of Elling in the paper that essentially said he was slick and technically flawless, but would never be considered among jazz's greats because he has no heart or soul. Ouch!! And the drag is, having read that, it lingered in the back of my mind during the performance, as I evaluated his moves based on this one critic's comment, wondering if they were too calculated. Ultimately, I discarded this notion, blown away by the depth of poetry and the Sinatra-to-Stevie Wonder-like range Elling displayed. The next day, my singer/writer friend Emily pointed out that they used to level the same charge at Ella Fitzgerald, a criticism that has always annoyed me terribly. What, do you have to be a heroin addict to have feeling? Isn't the joy in Ella's voice a feeling? "I think they tend to say that about singers who are really skilled," Emily said. "Sometimes people want to hear something rough."

All this got me thinking about how critics frame our response to the arts.

Criticism is necessary, or if not necessary, instinctive. We all judge. Critics, of course, are paid to have opinions, and I again speak from journalistic experience when I say it's easy to sound opinionated, but hard to fully support your statements with evidence. As critical as I am of myself and others in daily life, I try to avoid criticizing musicians and singers publicly--why punish my peers for making themselves available and vulnerable on stage? And I especially avoid the "you asked for it" backlash that writers often employ, stooping to cheap psychoanalysis of all performers as attention-seekers. Few call writers, dentists or executives attention-seekers, but anyone who takes pride in their work seeks the attention of others in the form of readers, patients or customers, right?

The other aspect of criticism is the cloak of legitimacy it weaves--granted, a legitimacy those of us with nascent careers are actively in search of. A wonderful example of this came to light the other day in the New York Times: A little known British pianist, Joyce Hatto, recorded more than 120 CDs of the classical piano repertoire from 1989 until her death in 2006 at age 77. "Intriguingly, she gave to the music a developed although oddly malleable personality. She could do Schubert in one style, and then Prokofiev almost as though she was a new person playing a different piano — an astonishing, chameleon-like artistic ability," writes Dennis Dutton. She was revered as a "prodigy of old age."

Turns out, after reams of critical praise, it was only last month that the British magazine Gramaphone discovered that she and had ripped off every last recording from other pianists' recordings. The moral, according to Dutton? "Music isn’t just about sound; it is about achievement in a larger human sense. If you think an interpretation is by a 74-year-old pianist at the end of her life, it won’t sound quite the same to you as if you think it’s by a 24-year-old piano-competition winner who is just starting out. Beyond all the pretty notes, we want creative engagement and communication from music, we want music to be a bridge to another personality. Otherwise, we might as well feed Chopin scores into a computer." He finishes with the observation that, to his surprise, there are young pianists toiling in obscurity of whom he should be aware.

Look, I understand the whole problem of being overwhelmed by the volume of recorded material out there, but to assume that only a handful of pearls lie at the bottom of the vast musical ocean leads to the emporer's new clothes syndrome, where critics follow each others' lead and lavish praise on one safe bet (who turns out to be a fraud) while ignoring others who would require them to risk their reputations (and test their own technical knowledge) by evaluating the unknown.

It's like velvet paintings. When I, raised in an intellectual Berkeley family, married Emilio, from a small town in Mexico, we spent years battling the taste issue. Early on, I was forced to explain why velvet paintings were kitsch. Only I couldn't, other than to say I just "knew" velvet paintings were in poor taste. Now, with all the TV shows I admittedly love to watch, is there an epidemic of uniform "good" taste defined by the critics who police fashion, home decor, child rearing, food and music? I'm all for beauty, but I want to absorb the arts first, and judge them later--according to my own criteria, not the standard checklist of pedigree, hipness, branding, looks or popularity.

Enough opining, I'm off to view the YouTube editor's picks (they have editors?) in the humor category...