The Jazz Ballad Wasn’t Made for These Times

Listening to Sarah Vaughan Stretch the Air, One Lingering Note at a Time

Here’s another old-fashioned skill that’s at risk in the mindshare economy, where every millisecond is tallied and every diversion monetized: Ballad singing. At tortoise-race tempos.

These days, in the jazz realm anyway, ballad singing happens mostly at medium tempos – perhaps because singers recognize that slowing things down to a contemplative crawl can create fidgety listeners. Five minutes in that vibe is a big ask.

It’s probably good business for singers to adapt to prevailing attention-span conditions in this way. An entirely reasonable survival strategy.

I held that view until last night at midnight. When I encountered Sarah Vaughan singing Sammy Fain’s evergreen “I’ll Be Seeing You” on a 1963 live record from Copenhagen called Sassy Swings the Tivoli.

It’s five minutes and thirty one seconds of Sarah Vaughan, then 39, stretching the air and reconfiguring the space between phrases. And it’s pure slow-cooking singing-to-sing-not-to-impress genius that would not be nearly as compelling at a slightly more moderate tempo.

Vaughan and her trio begin by agreeing on (and sharing responsibility for) this dramatically slow, almost majestic gait.  As she tells about all the old familiar places that conjure memories of a vanished lover, Vaughn’s delivery is sometimes precise (to honor the long-beat time alignment) and sometimes impulsive and daring – to take full advantage of that vast playground between those slow-tempo downbeats.

Later in her career, Vaughan shuffled vocal personas and tactics with each line of a lyric, reducing singing to a kind of rococo parlor trick. Here, she is never showy; each bit of her conjuring is aimed at deepening the song, tightening the emotional wrench.

The takeaway from a performance like this – or “Poor Butterfly” or “Polkadots and Moonbeams,” two equally transfixing performances from the Tivoli engagement where she was opening for Count Basie – is first just outright awe at Vaughan’s command of nuance and cadence, the way she threads little improvised strands of singing into a masterwork. That’s followed by a gasp where you look around and wonder what happened to this specialized knowledge. Where did this particular skill go? Gregory Porter has it, and a few others. Ever since Shirley Horn left the planet, it’s seemed to be endangered. It’s not practiced regularly, perhaps for the abovestated reasons. Hear this entrancing five minutes and you can’t help but mourn that loss.

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