Bringing It All Together

"My music," says Aretha Franklin, "is me--and I'm not sure what that is." Her confusion is understandable. At 25, she is still Aretha the Baptist minister's daughter, the former teenage gospel singer in her father's church in Detroit, the shy girl who regards the glamorous trappings of show business as "a game." She can overcome her nervousness at singing in public only by imagining that she is "just at a party, and the audience is just my friends."

But when she sings, she is something else again. "Ain't nobody gonna turn me around," she belts out in the knowing tones of an older and wiser woman. Her plangent voice, ranging from a sensual whisper to a banshee wail, exuberantly projects the confident sexuality of Baby, I Love You: If you want my lovin'. , . Stretch out your arms, little boy, you're gonna get it, 'Cause I love you. Or it summons the throbbing despair and resignation of Going Down Slow, a lament of oncoming death: Somebody write my father . . . Tell him that early one morning, look for my clothes home. To the gospel sound of Clara Ward she adds the jazz feeling of the late Dinah Washington, lays it over a pounding rhythm-and-blues beat, and seals it with her own gritty, down-home conviction. "Yeah!" she shouts in mid-lyric. "I believe it!"

So do her listeners, and more are being converted all the time. In the past ten months, Aretha has reeled off a spectacular string of record hits: three singles (I Never Loved a Man, Respect, Baby, I Love You) that sold more than 1,000,000 copies apiece, an album that topped $1,000,000 in sales, and a new single release (Chain of Fools) that has sold more than 900,000 copies and is going at the rate of 75,000 a week.

The "soul" flavor of Aretha's performances comes from the influence of her father, the Rev. Clarence L. Franklin, a preacher and singer who has recorded more than 40 albums. She served her apprenticeship with him by traveling as a featured performer in his evangelist shows. When she developed a habit of rushing through her lyrics, he advised her: "Take your time; say what you want to say."

At 18, she was saying it so well that she felt ready to apply what she had learned to pop music. She set out for New York City with a suitcase full of demonstration records and a determination to do "the uphill thing." She did it for five years, making records that never quite distilled her true essence, plying the often seamy circuit of jazz and rhythm-and-blues clubs.

Then last year she started recording for soul-oriented Atlantic Records (TIME, July 28) and "everything came together." Not only did her records take off, but she became a top attraction at college concerts, began lining up guest appearances on prime-time television (her stint on last week's Kraft Music Hall was the first), and started getting offers for glossy nightclub bookings. By last week, she had won all but one of the major trade awards open to her--and last week she won that one too: Billboard magazine's citation as the top female singer of 1967.

AVANT-GARDE

Adventure in Affinities

Splotches of color danced and melted into each other on the walls. From the silhouetted forms of musicians onstage, archaic strains of medieval chansons overlapped with the thumps and twangs of contemporary rock. At the side, electronic sounds erupted from a glittering electronic synthesizer that resembled a far-out version of the Radio City Music Hall's mighty Wurlitzer. Not surprisingly, the program notes listed a consulting psychologist.

It was last week's "Electric Christmas" concert in Carnegie Hall, an experimental, 80-minute program that had no breaks--except with tradition. The participants: the twelve-member New York Pro Musica ensemble, whose long-time specialty has been little-known medieval and Renaissance music; the five-man Circus Maximus, a Manhattan-based rock group; a lighting crew from the Electric Circus, a Manhattan discotheque; and Electronic Composer Morton Subotnick, a professor at New York University.

"This was not a concert but a celebration of the affinities among the musicians," explained Pro Musica Director John White, who conceived the project. Actually, the quality of the program was as mixed as its media. The lighting effects eventually became tiresome distractions; the electronic sounds sometimes rambled and screeched. Yet the shattering of conventional concert categories was exhilarating, and the music at its best did reach White's goal of achieving "some great moments," notably in a delightful collaboration between the Pro Musica and Circus Maximus on Guillaume de Machaut's 14th century song Douce Dame Jolie.

The Electric Christmas was an eight-century leap away from the Pro Musica's usual holiday fare. Every year--including this one--it climaxes its eleven-month season by presenting church performances of two 12th century music dramas, The Play of Daniel and The Play of Herod. Staged and costumed in period style, these productions unfold in vocal chants and instrumental passages of austere elegance and moving simplicity. White, 43, a musicologist and harpsichordist who took over the Pro Musica after Founder Noah Greenberg died in 1966, has no intention of abandoning such efforts. In fact he plans more: the group will soon start rehearsals for a production of Jacopo Peri's 1600 opera Euridice, the earliest opera for which all the music has been preserved, and is preparing an Elizabethan masque for next season.

Last week's "adventure" outside that direction, says Conductor White, served to show that "somewhere in the past all these kinds of music have a common ground. Our music and rock are similar in that the rhythms are strong and vital, the harmonies are crisp and clear, and there is so much improvisation that the performer is part creator. In our concert, groups thought to be opposed were working together for the same purpose."

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