Ward Swingle (1927-2015)

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2001: A Space Odyssey, a cappella, Also sprach Zarathustra, BBC Northern Singers, BBC Symphony Orchestra, big band, Blossom Dearie, Christiane Legrande, Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, counterpoint, Duke Ellington, Fulbright Scholarship, George Malcolm, Glenn Gould, Grammy Award, harpsichord, jazz, Jazz Sébastien Bach, John Barbirolli, Les Blue Stars, Les Double Six, Luciano Berio, madrigal, McHenry Boatwright, Michel Legrand, Mimi Perrin, Mobile, musicology, New Orleans, New York Philharmonic, Paris, Phyllis Hyman, piano, Pierre Boulez, popular music, radio, Roland Petit, Royal Albert Hall, Royal Festival Hall, scat, Sex and the City, sinfonia, St. Paul Cathedral, Stanley Kubrick, Stockholm Chamber Choir, Strauss, Swingle Singers, Swingle Singing, Ted Fio Rito, television, tenor, The Art of Fugue, The Times, Tony Bennett, Walter Gieseking, Ward Swingle, Yehudi Menuhin

Ward Swingle in 1975

Ward Swingle, who died on 19 January 2015 at age 87, was the founding father of the Swingle Singers, the a cappella group that blended jazz rhythms with Baroque and classical music in a distinctive, easy-listening style. The group made its name with scat renditions of Bach: lots of “doob-a-do” and “bah-bah-badah” substituting for the keyboard strokes more commonly heard in works such as The Art of Fugue (BWV 1080).

Critics could be wary. “The history of pop music is littered with jazzed-up versions of the classics,” sniffed The Times after they packed the Albert Hall in April 1965, before conceding that some people “truly find that the music’s enjoyable qualities profit by being brought up to date”. Others believed that in the same way that Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey introduced many people to Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, so Bach with a swing was an enticing introduction to Johann Sebastian’s carefully knitted counterpoint.

Not only did Swingle and his minstrels receive endorsement at the box office, major classical names such as John Barbirolli, Yehudi Menuhin and Glenn Gould offered their backing. George Malcolm, the renowned harpsichordist, shared the stage with them at the Festival Hall in 1966 in a program entitled “Jazz Sébastien Bach,” which was also the name of their first album.

Meanwhile, contemporary composers came calling. Luciano Berio wrote his colorful and noisy four-movement Sinfonia for the Swingle Singers, which they premiered with the New York Philharmonic in 1968 and performed at the Proms in 1969, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer.

Ward Lemar Swingle was born on September 21 1927 in Mobile, Alabama, where, he once said, the sounds of New Orleans float along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. He took to the piano from an early age and with his older brother, Ira, played lunchtime concerts in the school cafeteria, garnering sufficient popularity to be elected as president and vice-president respectively of their student council. By the time he left school, Ward, Ira and one of their sisters, Nina, were touring with the Ted Fio Rito Orchestra.

He studied music at the Cincinnati Conservatory, where he met his future wife, a French-born violinist, and won a Fulbright scholarship to pursue his musical studies in postwar Paris, taking lessons there with the celebrated pianist Walter Gieseking. Soon he was working as a rehearsal pianist for Roland Petit’s Ballet de Paris at a time when Petit was exploring jazz rhythms in his choreography.

Swingle’s first singing work – his voice was a mellifluous tenor – was with Blossom Dearie’s Les Blue Stars, a French vocal group whose members included Christiane Legrand, the sister of Michel Legrand, the composer. From there he joined Mimi Perrin’s Les Double Six, which won acclaim for its electronic treatment of jazz standards.

As Perrin’s health deteriorated in the early 1960s, Swingle, Legrand and other members of the group began singing privately, experimenting with jazzed-up Bach arrangements with the aim of improving their collective vocal agility. By 1962 the eight-member group was performing in public as Les Swingle Singers. Their concerts proved to be great hits with audiences, especially in Britain, and their early recordings won five Grammy awards.

By the early 1970s Swingle felt that he had exhausted the repertoire possibilities with his Parisian singers. He also wanted to experiment with other techniques, including close-mic singing. Crossing the Channel in 1973 he set up Swingle II, or the New Swingle Singers. The traditional swing music remained, but listeners were now regaled with jazz renditions from a wider selection of musical traditions, ranging from Baroque to big band. As well as looking forward, the Swingle Singers now also began looking into music’s back catalogue, releasing a disc of madrigals with a jazz twist in 1974.

Britain proved to be fertile ground. There were invitations to music festivals around the country as well as plentiful radio work. In 1982, for example, the Swingle Singers appeared in a televised concert from St. Paul Cathedral performing the sacred music of Duke Ellington with Tony Bennett, Phyllis Hyman and McHenry Boatwright.

After recording the Berio Sinfonia under the baton of Pierre Boulez in 1984, Ward Swingle stepped back from frontline singing to return to the United States. He remained the group’s musical adviser, while also running vocal workshops and publishing his many musical arrangements. He was often invited to share the techniques that he had developed for the Swingle Singers with established groups, such as the Stockholm Chamber Choir and the BBC Northern Singers.

A decade later Swingle moved back to France, and latterly was living in Britain. His book Swingle Singing, published in 1999, tells not only the history of the group, but also takes a musicological look at the techniques that he developed.

Today the Swingle Singers, now a seven-member ensemble, continue to push the boundaries of vocal music while also making recordings for television programs and films, including Sex and the City. Around seventy alumni keep in touch regularly, many of them gathering to celebrate Ward Swingle’s eightieth birthday in 2007, when the Berio was heard once again at the Proms.

He is survived by his wife, Françoise Demorest, whom he married in 1952, and by their three daughters.

– The Telegraph

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Red Hot + Bach

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AIDS, amiina, Antônio Carlos Jobim, app, application, Cameron Carpenter, Chris Thile, Cole Porter, Daniel Hope, Duke Ellington, Fela Kuti, Gabriel Kahane, hip-hop, Icelandic, iPad, jazz, King Britt, Kronos Quartet, mandolin, Max Richter, organ, PR Newswire, Red Hot, Red Hot + Bach, Ron Carter, Shara Worden, Sony, violin

Red Hot + Bach, from Sony Music Masterworks, is charting a new pathway into the musical universe of Johann Sebastian Bach. Through the collaboration of performers, producers, DJs and artists from around the world and across the spectrum of contemporary music, different facets of Bach’s centuries-old masterpieces are transformed with fresh energy and modern virtuosity.

The creators of Red Hot + Bach embrace Bach as a living artistic force, as real and as vital today as he was when he lived (1685-1750). They range across nineteen freely-imagined tracks from mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile (Nickel Creek, The Punch Brothers), singer/songwriters Gabriel Kahane and Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond), jazz legend Ron Carter, DJ/producer King Britt and the Icelandic band amiina, to imaginative classical artists such as the Kronos Quartet, composer Max Richter, violinist Daniel Hope and organ virtuoso Cameron Carpenter.

Red Hot, a not-for-profit production company, has been shaking up great music in just this way for twenty-five years with projects that celebrate the musical geniuses as diverse as Antônio Carlos Jobim (Red Hot + Rio), Cole Porter (Red Hot + Blue), a meeting of jazz and hip-hop artists (Red Hot + Cool), Duke Ellington (Red Hot + Indigo), and Fela Kuti (Red Hot + Riot). The work of Red Hot continues to serve a social purpose: raising awareness and money in the ongoing fight to stop AIDS.

Red Hot + Bach is available both in a special expanded digital edition and as an iPad app designed to lead you to discover new ways to interact with the timeless energy and beauty of Bach’s music.

– PR Newswire

Cameron Carpenter Plays Strathmore

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Berlin, Cameron Carpenter, Chopin, digital organ, Duke Ellington, Grammy Award, Hood College, Leipzig, London, manual, Moscow, Music Center at Strathmore, North Bethesda, North Carolina School of the Arts, organ, Paul McCartney, pedal, pneumatic action, Revolutionary Etude, Rodgers Instruments Corporation, San Francisco, showman, silent film, Solitude, The Juilliard School, Wayne Wold, Yesterday

Organist Cameron Carpenter will perform at the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda, Maryland on 12 April 2013. His concerts are different, drawing on classics by Bach and Chopin but also featuring his own passionate arrangements and compositions. “I’ll be playing a wide variety of music, all of which is infused with ecstatic [feeling],” he says. “It’s a very personal ecstatic music.”

The musician is known for pushing the limits of the instrument. “I’ve studied all of the classical repertoire as one would expect, but I’ve also incorporated a revolutionary departure. I’ve mastered my own style, and I’m also composing.”

Critics have described the controversial Carpenter as “flamboyant,” “an exorbitant virtuoso,” “an ambitious radical,” “a game changer” and “a smasher of cultural and classical music taboos.”

Wayne Wold, who heads the music department at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland said he has seen and heard Carpenter perform twice. “He truly has a phenomenal technique at what he can play, and he’s a real showman,” Wold said. “He always causes some folks to take sides in saying he’s not doing an authentic performance because he’s very showy, but he’s doing great things to bring more attention to the organ and the organ word.”

Carpenter was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Solo Instrumental Performance category for his 2008 Revolutionary album, which took its title from his interpretation of Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude, but he also draws on orchestral pieces, movie music and songs like Duke Ellington’s Solitude and Paul McCartney’s Yesterday.

At Strathmore, Carpenter will perform on a Rodgers 361 digital organ, an electronic instrument that he believes is every bit as good as, if not better than, the traditional pneumatic organ with its ranks of pipes reaching to the ceiling.

One reason Carpenter advocates for digital organs is because they make it easier for musicians like himself to pursue a career. “They’re not the best for an organist’s commercial future,” he said about the traditional pipe organ, which isn’t portable and which requires traveling musicians to adapt to whatever is available with little get-acquainted time. “Every pipe organ is different, there’s no consistency,” he said. “You have to start from the ground up, with only five or six hours of familiarity.”

Carpenter acknowledges that when digital organs first emerged in the 1970s, they deserved the criticism they got for being “cheap imitations” of pipe organs, but he said the technology has improved and that he plans to unveil one of his own design in 2014.

Carpenter was four years old growing up in rural Pennsylvania when he saw a photo of someone playing the organ in an encyclopedia from the 1920s, when musicians used organ to accompany silent films. “It was incredibly glamorous looking,” he said. “Something was really happening [in the photo]. It ruined me for anything else,” said Carpenter, who learned over time to play the organ keyboards with his hands and the pedal board with his feet, a sound that can equal the sound of a full orchestra.

After studying music in high school at the North Carolina School of the Arts, he moved on to Juilliard in New York, where he earned a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree in 2006. That year he also began traveling to perform in cities such as San Francisco, London, Berlin, Leipzig and Moscow.

Although he plays some of the classic organ music originally written for churches, Carpenter said the multi-faceted instrument need not be limited to religious music. “I’m bringing a perspective to the organ that is God-free,” he said. “What many people hear in church is a handmaiden to religious practice.

I want to free the organ,” he said. “The music can be violent, it can have profundity, color and wit and sensuality.”

Deliberately and creatively unconventional, Carpenter hopes his performances will encourage audiences to rethink what they know about the organ. “By shattering the stereotypes, we can look at the organ and at each other in new and very interesting ways,” he said.

Virginia Terhune – The Gazette

As Simple as Bach

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Alfred North Whitehead, bass, birthday, blues, cantata, cello, Charles Mingus, concerto, Copernicus, Dante, Dave Hibbard, Duke Ellington, Einstein, Galileo, Goethe, golden ratio, guitar, Herbie Hancock, improvisation, jam session, jazz, Mendelssohn, Mozart, organ, Parthenon, piano, pitch, Pythagoras, Roger Bacon, Shakespeare, Slam Stewart, string bass, Stuart Isacoff, Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, temperament, The Beatles, Thomas Aquinas, trumpet, violin, Voltaire, Weimar

For the past forty years at my jam sessions, I’ve told the audience and musicians that we are professional, spontaneous co-arrangers. Describing our musical efforts simply as “jazz” doesn’t convey enough. We should someday create an organization or club or music society called “Spontaneous Co-arranging Universal Musicians,” better known as S.C.U.M.

Developing the ability or knack for spontaneous co-arranging takes time and study. There are rules and laws surrounding the music we play, and no one was more important in creating (or is it discovering?) these rules and laws than Johann Sebastian Bach. Even a general study of Bach will reveal much valuable music acumen.

Charles Mingus said, “Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird – that’s easy. [I call this ‘originality through incompetence’] What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple – awesomely simple – that’s creativity.”

So how “simple” is Bach? For $139.98, the Collector’s Music Catalog will send you everything Papa Bach ever composed – chamber works, concertos, cantatas, vocal works, keyboard works, organ works and orchestral works – all on one hundred fifty-five compact discs. Most of these can be played on any kind of instrument. To listen to and digest the entire canon would take a long, long time (The Beatles wrote three hundred tunes; Duke Ellington, nine hundred – that’s relatively few compared to Bach!). But volume does not equal quality, so volume of work aside, we should try to realize Bach’s importance to and influence on every single musician – ever – in the whole world that uses the Twelve-tone System.

How the piano looks – with eight white keys per octave and five black ones (two, then three) – and how frets are placed on a guitar are a direct result of the Twelve-tone System derived from the overtone series of any given sound. Bach realized that perfect or “just” tuning produced unpleasant or unharmonious (and, therefore, much of it unusable) combinations of tones. In order to play in different keys, and in different octaves, the tuning must be tempered or adjusted.

This required ratios between pitches to be used rather than simple math. In construction of the Parthenon, the Greeks used what they called the “Golden Ratio,” which came about through Pythagoras’ experiments with a vibrating string. The science of mathematics and the science of music both began with Pythagoras. For more about this complex subject, I suggest a book by Stuart Isacoff entitled Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization.

Johann Sebastian Bach (born March 21, 1685) is the fount from which the science (mental) and art (spiritual) of all music in Western civilization flows. That’s all of us who play jazz, classical, blues – all styles on all instruments (piano, guitar, violin, etc.) found in Western civilization. The Twelve-tone System, along with its semi-tones (i.e. Funk, tones, blues tones, in-between tones), is as complex a system as the human brain can handle to send and receive musical information – musician to musician and musician(s) to listener. So it’s safe to say that this Twelve-tone System (well-tuned) is all we’ll need for many centuries (maybe forever) to create music – to transmit art in sound and combinations of sounds (vibrations per second) in time (in motion) – not on paper or in books, but live human music.

The science part of Bach’s music is monumental. But that’s only half of it. The spiritual part is simply awesome, and understanding it takes time – lots and lots of quiet listening time. It is said that the six Bach cello suites (BWV 1007-12) may be understood only if you try to play one yourself on the cello. In today’s world that’s a tough thing – but it’s deeply rewarding, both on the surface and at the subconscious level. Today, there is a convenient and generally held view regarding popular music that just as Bach’s music was the popular music of his day, we have the popular music of our day – equally good, just another era. That isn’t really so. Bach never traveled much during his life – only a few hundred miles. Most people outside of his own town never knew much of his music. A few certainly did. Mozart did. And Goethe did.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (born August 28, 1749 – Bach died in 1750) is the greatest figure in German literature. He was a brilliant dramatist, lyric poet, novelist and philosopher. This genius in the world of letters is to Germany what Shakespeare is to England and Dante is to Italy. He was from Weimar, as was Bach, which is how he became familiar with Bach’s music. Goethe said, “[When I listen to Bach, it is] as if eternal harmony were conversing with itself – so it must have been in God’s bosom just before the creation of the world. This, too, was how the music circulated in my innermost being, and it appeared to me that I neither possessed nor needed ears, eyes even less, and for that matter, any senses at all.”

For the most part, however, Bach was all but forgotten. Bach was not a well-known celebrity of his day. He was an artist-scientist, not unlike Copernicus, Galileo or Einstein. It wasn’t until about 1829, eighty years later, that Felix Mendelssohn initiated a widespread revival of Bach’s music, an interest that is still growing today.

My buddy and a beautiful trumpet player, Dave Hibbard, told me that he got to know Slam Stewart while at S.U.N.Y. in Birmingham, N.Y. “Slam told me ‘music is our religion,’” Dave said. Slam had told me the same thing. Music is our religion. Of all the proofs of God’s existence by Saint Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Voltaire, and so many others, there is no more compelling proof of the existence of God than “love”—for all human beings (as well as for animals, like my dog, Chloe). The greatest logical proof of this can be found in music. Perhaps the most brilliant mind among the modern philosophers belonged to Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), who said, “Music comes eons before religion.” Herbie Hancock once noted, “Jazz is really a wonderful example of the great characteristics of Buddhism and great characteristics of the human spirit, because in jazz, we share, we listen to each other, we respect each other, we are creating in the moment.”

No one has to believe what we musicians believe – but they do have to respect our right to that belief, just as they would respect any other religion. I think it’s entirely possible that a thousand years from today J. S. Bach will be regarded as more beneficially important to the human race than Jesus, Moses, Buddha or any of the formal religions.

John Bany – Chicago Jazz Magazine