What Donny Hathaway Can Teach Those Singing-Show Contestants
If, that is, they stop preening long enough to listen….
If, that is, they stop preening long enough to listen….
His is an easy name to drop. Maybe that’s why, every few months on one of those gladiator-style TV singing competitions, some well-meaning young person with a blowtorch voice will yammer on about how much Donny Hathaway means to them. And then, of course, said hopeful will sing in a way that suggests extremely limited exposure to actual recordings made by Hathaway, the abundantly gifted singer, pianist and bandleader who committed suicide in 1979.
We’re used to this sort of namedropping by now. We expect the contestants (and, alas, the judges) to strive for hipper-than-thou references, invoking obscure or semi-obscure figures from the distant past whether they’re relevant or not. Hathaway is ideal for this because he’s a relatively blank slate – he’s known for a few singles and a few well-regarded albums (only three were issued while he was alive), as well as a series of sparkling duets with Roberta Flack that are tailor-made for Idol’s Duets week. He’s a quick way to score credibility points.
The arrival of a four-disc career retrospective, Never My Love: The Anthology, will likely increase what has seemed, at times, to be legacy abuse. At least Hathaway’s most significant recordings will again be in circulation, and augmented by a trove of intermittently interesting previously unreleased vault goodies. The compilation argues for Hathaway as a mesmeric singer, which he certainly was. But more significantly for those in the Idolsphere, it shows how his consummate musical aptitude – his jazz-based keyboard work, his skill as an arranger and orchestrator, his uncanny ability to construct crisp, streamlined, long-lasting funk grooves – worked together, coalescing into a type of persuasion that doesn’t come around much anymore.
Hathaway stands as an anti-Idol – a musician whose gentle, patient, carefully knit-together art is the polar opposite of the instant-on exuberance of those competitions. To discover him in 2013 is to encounter a voice with genuine “presence” even at a whisper. An artist capable of dramatic emotional extremes. A musician blessed with killer instincts and deep respect for the values of the old school. He was also one of the last of the great bridge-builders of black pop: Like towering figures like Ray Charles, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and later Prince, Hathaway developed his musical identity by being an omnivorous listener. Whether his tunes start as pop or gospel or R&B or jazz, they end up compelling, blended into sound that transcends generations, genres and factions – Hathaway electrified hippies and preteen Jackson Five worshippers, church folks and tavern dwellers.
Young singers who rely on current assembly-line hitmaking tactics might have difficulty appreciating the degree of integration present in Hathaway’s music. He didn’t outsource much — even the production is minimal. From the start of his career, he was comfortable handling multiple roles, and able to bring a spark of creativity to even the most routine string orchestration task. He put together a band filled with A-list authorities (the live disc showcases guitar from the masterful Cornell Dupree), and trusted them to follow him; as live-in-the-studio sketches “Latin Time” and “Tally Rand” show, he used crisp, jabbing chords to shape the overall sound from the keyboard. Sure, everybody in the room could shred, but they followed Hathaway’s example, chasing joyous, danceable improvisations instead of anything with too much showbiz in it. This particular tone-setting skill, akin to the role of a basketball point guard, is Hathaway’s secret weapon, audible throughout his career. Listen to him lead the band through “I Love You More Than You Ever Know” from the 1971 Bitter End show. After setting up the sparse groove, he sings as though in a blues trance, loose and free. Meanwhile, his accompaniment is in another place entirely: He’s engineering slight tempo changes and hitting important emphasis points just by the way he strikes the keys. He’s immersed in two distinctly different jobs at once.
Those who aspire to stirring people through the voice can learn a lot from Hathaway. He was devastating as a singer in part because he was so attuned to nuance at the keyboard, adding the essential framework and nothing more. What you get with Hathaway is the song, and his clear outline of its characteristics, as well as his conviction about how the song should unfold. His instrumental interludes sparkle. His chordal pads suggest new harmonic worlds. His introductions swivel your head around. His covers often completely reframe a tune: The Bitter End show from 1971 includes his version of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and James Taylor’s “You’ve Got A Friend,” two inescapable songs of the day; they’re conveyed with the same deep sense of purpose Hathaway brought to his original laments of inner-city life, like “Little Ghetto Boy.” You can’t help believing him when he sings. Just through phrasing and inflection (and, also, singing quietly), he drew listeners into the sadness he felt, the worlds he witnessed, the changes he hoped to see.
In the accompanying booklet, several prominent figures reflect on Hathaway’s impact, his career frustrations and struggles with mental illness. The producer Arif Mardin says that shortly before he died, Hathaway told him he only wanted to play piano – he was constantly dissatisfied with his vocal performances. Several others use the word “doubt” to describe his perception of his capabilities as a singer. This is interesting, because in current pop there is little space for any doubt: Contestants all know that they have to show up guns blazing, ready to knock out listeners from the first note, as though Job One is to sell one’s invincibility and/or supremacy as an artist. Hathaway hails from a pop moment when it was OK to be human. And he was not afraid to bring that humanity into his music – you can hear weird grunts and unexpected interior laughter erupting inside many of his most moving performances, like the single version of Paul Williams’ “A Song For You” that remains the definitive version. Hathaway wasn’t the perfect belter, but he understood that in music, perfection is limiting. He wove his doubts (and joys and troubles) into the fabric of a song, and this gave his every gesture, from sky-scraping shout to trembling sigh, the ring of truth.