High Notes

By Annalyn Swan

AMERICAN SINGERS by Whitney Balliett Oxford; 178 pages; $10

A good jazz accompanist is hard to find.

He has to play up the soloist, adding a flourish here or a rhythmic twist there, never straying from the background. Whitney Balliett is his critical counterpart. Jazz aficionados tend to go heavy on the adjectives; Balliett favors a deceptively simple style that illuminates the musician instead of the writer.

This latest collection of a dozen profiles, mostly from his New Yorker criticism, is Balliett's "act of homage to a highly gifted and unaccountably neglected group of Americans." They are America's nonclassical singers: figures like Mabel Mercer, Tony Bennett and Ray Charles, who straddle the worlds of theater tunes, blues and popular standards. They work within a rich tradition that came out of ragtime and came in with the fascinating rhythms of George Gershwin and Jerome Kern. The early singers were "intuitive and homemade," Balliett observes, but their descendants are sophisticated musicians who blend the soft contours of the Bing Crosby crooners with the hard blues of Billie Holiday.

It is a volatile mix. Blues Singer Joe Turner, a burly man with a boyish face, "sometimes ... pushes his words together, lopping off the consonants and flattening the vowels so that whole lines go past as pure melody, as pure horn playing." Ray Charles can sing anything but opera: "The sound of his pinewoods voice tearing along over violins and a choir is one of the wonders of music." Cabaret Singer Blossom Dearie, a honey-blond with a "boxed and beribboned" manner, offers a tiny sound that "without a microphone, would not reach the second floor of a doll house. But it is a perfect voice . . . occasionally embellished by a tissue-paper vibrato."

Offstage, Balliett lets the singers ram ble through the big dates and broken marriages of their pasts, reviewing their child hood idols and latter-day saints. Anita Ellis recalls a memorable appearance with Billie Holiday: "I couldn't get over how she changed--from that naked, smoking, tough woman in the dressing room to the cool, motionless, vessel-of-life singer onstage." Joe Turner tells how as a teenager he wheedled his way into singing at a local Kansas City club: "The man who owned the joint . . . asked me how old I was, and I told him twenty, and he looked at me and said, 'Your mama know where you are?' " The irrepressible octogenarian Alberta Hunter, who got her start as a singer in Chicago "sporting houses," once got on the wrong side of Ethel Waters: "I guess I outsang her, because she put everything but the kitchen stove on me."

Beneath the melody of laughter and good times runs a melancholy undertone.

Alberta Hunter, Joe Turner and the others are survivors. They came up in the heyday of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, only to watch rock conquer the record charts and TV topple nightclubs.

Too honest to slick up their style, they began to be as obsolete as a 78-r.p.m. single. Here and there, Balliett touches on the poignancy of their lives, as when Blossom Dearie says wistfully, "I'd sort of like to become the rage for a while." As American Singers makes clear, she never will be. But there are all kinds of celebrity, and Balliett's glowing tribute may prove more enduring than gold records and cabaret applause.

Annalyn Swan

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.