When I was in my twenties I worshiped at the altar of funk. James Brown, Tower Of Power, Ohio Players…you get the picture. If they marketed action figures of funk musicians my toy box would have looked like the line-up at an Oakland barbeque and funk fest. From my perspective, country music was completely of, by and  for sequined, cowboy-hatted shit-kickers who lived in trailers with two cars parked on cement blocks in the front yard. If anyone had told me that The Ohio Players’ wardrobe was  as ridiculous as Porter Wagoner’s there would have been trouble.

But as a musician who earned the daily bread by making club crowds of many persuasions happy, I found myself in playing situations that didn’t always correspond with my personal tastes. That didn’t prevent me from being a smart ass and when a customer would request a country song, my witty answer would be, “Sure, what country?” Thankfully I grew out of my bias to discover that there was crappy music to be ridiculed in every genre and, as I gained further wisdom, great music to be cherished as well.

Over the years and during the time I managed The Band’s old haunt, Shangri La, I had the pleasure of getting to know and appreciate the work of some great rock musicians who had one foot planted firmly in a cowboy boot at some time in their career. I can also say that standing on the stage of the Grand Old Opry and playing to the 4,000 fans who fill the concert hall was one of the big thrills and chills of my playing career. Patsy Cline, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash have become as firmly ensconced in my iPod as my erstwhile funk gods and I feel no sense of disloyalty shuffling between What Is Hip and Your Cheating Heart.

Katie Thompson

There is an up and coming young country artist on Sellaband who answers my “Sure, what country?” dumb-ass question with a vengeance. Katie Thompson is a classic country singer/song writer from what is probably Nashville’s most remote satellite, New Zealand. Katie exhibits her own sense of style, opting for cocktail dresses over blue jeans as she leads her accomplished band through a repertoire of classic country tempered by her Kiwi upbringing.

Katie’s three original tracks on her Sellaband profile page indicate that she has the potential of becoming a household name not only in New Zealand but anywhere that hosts “Electric Slide” night. When she reaches the budgetary goal of $50,000 Katie will have the opportunity to go into the studio with the right people and the right toys to create an album worthy of her honest approach to writing and singing. Her vocal delivery is intimate in the vein of classic story tellers like Emmy Lou Harris and Patsy Cline. Katie doesn’t deal in pyrotechnics or phony gospel riffing. She just tells a story as if she were talking over the back fence and her fresh sincerity is her most engaging quality.

Tall Poppy is written and sung with the voice of a typical young person battling the slings and arrows of peer pressure as she develops a sense of self worth in a cruel world. The story, while common to anyone who hasn’t been raised by wolves, is nevertheless a persecution unique to each individual. Everyone coming of age in the world of schoolyard, fashion, teen dances and the required accoutrements associated with being “cool” has moments when they feel themselves too tall, too short, too skinny, too fat, too stupid or too smart to be considered acceptable by their peers. Katie’s angst laden lyrics ride over a deceptively cheerful rhythmic track but the darkness of the chord progression brings clearly into focus the pain of wanting to be accepted . The guitar playing on this as well as all three of Katie’s Sellaband tracks is not only well executed but tasteful and most importantly, relevant to the song.

Tall Poppy

Monteiths On Tap is a bit of fun and could very well be the hook that lands the big fish for Katie. One can quibble about product placement or the political correctness of glorifying the imbibement ( I think I just invented a word) all the way to the steps of their favorite house of worship, but what is a good old country song if not a paean of praise for either fast cars, faster trucks, loyal dogs and good beer? New Zealand’s Monteiths Brewery has stepped up to the plate in supporting Katie’s Sellaband journey and well they should. Who can say how many Monteiths empties land in the recycling bin the morning after one of Katie’s appearances at a pub pouring the “liquid gold?” Wonderful resonator guitar work on this track, while the feel of the rhythm section never strays from the “sawdust on the floor” vibe that just begs for another round.

The third track on Katie’s Sellaband profile is an introspectively dark recitativo of bittersweet goodbyes. The emotion of the song, as in the case of Tall Poppy, is one to which any listener can easily relate. I don’t like to repeat myself but here again the guitar work provides a perfect sense of yearning to Katie’s wrenching story. Katie’s song writing skills, while well down the path of becoming memorable, could do with a bit of soul searching here. She has great instincts and her topic choice is right on the money. But some of her lyrics, while not being brazenly cliche, could be more intimately powerful with a tweak here and there.

Song writing is an exercise in telling a story or conveying an emotion that can be related to by the broadest possible cross section of an audience. This is what makes a song popular, and why bother to put music before the public if popularity is not the desired result.The magic of masterful song writing lies in the ability of the writer to say something in a way that is familiar yet original. When Bob Dylan sings “The answer is blowin’ in the wind” we say to ourselves “Well of course it is. Who didn’t know that!” But inside we all know that we could never have come up with such a simple way to state the obvious. Economy and eloquence are bought and paid for in currency represented by reams of discarded lyric sheets.

Katie Thompson is deep in the process of honing her craft and this can be a critical phase in the development of a young writer. Staring at a page of lyrics with the unbiased eye of a supreme court justice and knowing what will go on an album and what will better serve as kindling for the grill is not a skill that comes easily. That process marks the difference between great songs that remain relevant for generations and about a gazillion MP3s on Myspace.

When Katie reaches her $50,000 budget on Sellaband, New Zealand, with a population of 4.3 million, will have cornered what might be the highest degree of success per capita on the internet crowd sourcing platform.  Katie Thompson’s success combined with Sellaband Hip-Hopper Maitreya will have made a strong showing for New Zealanders.  And with Katie’s Sellaband release, I’ll no longer be asking “Sure, what country?”

Alright, alright! All you guys snickering in the back of the classroom knock it off! It’s not what you’re thinking. This article is about singing so you can go back to sleep and wait for the bell to ring. For the rest of you, pay attention and you will learn a few things about the mechanism that helps us make the noises between the notes that define the difference between vocal and instrumental music otherwise known as language. If you are interested in singing more effectively, writing better songs or producing better vocal tracks hang in there with me. This could get boring.

During my 30 plus years teaching voice I’ve had some interesting students with challenging goals. The inspiration for this article comes from an actor who recently asked me to help him speak English with a Viennese accent. During 2008 I produced Two bands from Austria, ConFused5 and Solidtube and since both bands performed in English I had some work to do in accent eradication with these artists. Coaching an American actor to adopt a convincing Austrian accent seemed at first just a matter of reverse engineering or getting him to do what I taught the Austrian singers not to do. During the process I realized that it’s really all about consonants and the difference between voiced and un-voiced consonants is a subject over which all too few singers have mastery.

For the purpose of this discussion, I will loosely define vowel sounds as music and consonants as noise. These noises can be a hiss, a short burst of air under various degrees of pressure and can be created in various areas of the mouth. For the untrained performer consonants can be the worst enemy in attempting to sing intelligibly and effectively but an understanding of how they are created can make them a singer’s best friend when it comes to executing difficult and sometimes poorly written passages. Many young songwriters compose what seems to be a pleasing melody and cobble together some verses which rhyme admirably but come up short when it comes to ease of singing. Great songs, those which great singers love to sing, are written by songwriters who understand, either by instinct or education, how to place sounds in areas of singer’s range with a minimum of booby traps.

Cross section of the mouth

Voiced and un-voiced consonants come in pairs or partners which are made by the same mechanical method. Whenever I work with a student in describing how consonants are made I ask, “What two pieces of meat are you slapping together to make that nose?” Let’s start with a hard ‘K’ sound. The ‘K’ is made by closing the back of the mouth. The back of the tongue rises slightly to meet the tip of the soft palette or uvula which you will recognize as the punching bag hanging in a cartoon character’s mouth when he screams. Air pressure is built up in the throat and released as the closure is opened suddenly resulting in a hard ‘K’ noise. There is no noticeable pitch. When the vocal cords are engaged as the closure is released the the resulting sound is a hard ‘G’ as in god or dog. The difference between the voiced and unvoiced versions of the same mechanical process allows us to tell the difference between a deity and a codfish and a canine or a physician.

Now let’s take a look at the ‘T’ sound. What pieces of meat or bone do you use and how do you use them to make a ‘T’ sound? The tip of the tongue comes into contact with the roof of the mouth just behind the upper teeth. Build up a little air pressure, release it by dropping the tongue and Voila (that’s French for Ta-dah). The release of are pressure results in a ‘T’ sound which is no more than the noise of escaping air under pressure. Engage the vocal cords simultaneously and you will create the ‘D’ sound or “Duh.” Once again to illustrate the importance of these sounds to clear language, substituting voiced for unvoiced sounds at either end of our previous example, our god can become got, cod or cot and our dog can become completely unintelligible.

Before I go into why this is so important and how it can save a singer from gagging let’s take a quick look at the other pairs of voiced and un-voiced sounds. The ‘P’ sound (you in the back, stop your giggling) is produced by releasing air pressure behind the lips. Add pitch and the ‘P’ becomes a ‘B’ sound. ‘F’ is made by air escaping from the slight opening between the lower teeth and upper lip. add pitch and the ‘F’ becomes ‘V’ as in love. Ever notice how a native German speaker pronounces “Love” as “Luff” and “we” as “vee?” The sibilant ‘S’ sound is made by air escaping through an opening formed by the tongue in the same general area as in the ‘T’ sound. Sustain the hiss and add pitch to produce the voiced ‘Z’ sound. Mastering the correct mechanics of the ‘S’ has actually helped me coach a lisp right out of a singer’s repertoire.

How then, do we use this knowledge to our best singing advantage? One might think that the un-voiced consonants present the most difficulty in singing a legato line but this is in error. It’s the voiced sounds that cause the most problems in sustaining pitch and also in singing intervalic leaps accurately. When singing a lyric like “My dog begs for his dinner” on one sustained pitch many singers will fall into the trap of singing only the vowels and dropping the level of support needed to sustain the line at the points where the consonants interrupt the flow of pitch. Looking just at the word “begs” for a moment we see that the initial ‘B’ sound is a voiced consonant so support must be maintained and the ‘B’ must be produced on the same pitch as the vowels surrounding it. Otherwise there will be a noticeable scoop in pitch. The voiced ‘G’ followed by the voiced version of S (sounded ‘Z’) at the end of the word “begs” must also be supported or the pitch will fall off and interrupt the line connecting “begs” with “for.” Careful examination reveals that these six words contain eight pitfalls for the inexperienced vocalist. Only the ‘F’ in “for” and the ‘H’ in “his” allow for an interruption in pitch.

Most American kids can sing “My Bonny lies over the ocean” so I’ll use the phrase to illustrate how knowledge of mouth mechanics can cure scoops or slides when approaching intervalic leaps. In the key of C the word “My” is sung on G and the first syllable of “Bonny” is sung on the E above at the interval of a Major 6th. Since the ‘B’ in the word “Bonny” is a voiced sound it must have pitch.If the singer falls into the habit of not sustaining support through the consonants the ‘B’ will resemble a spoken sound at some random pitch and the singer will have to scoop or slide up through the interval finally landing on the E. In order to sing the interval accurately, the ‘B’ sound must be approached as actually having the same pitch as the vowel which follows it. This is just one small example from a dumb little children’s song so you can imagine how many exist in songs you might be singing every day.

I have said in the past that singers should not allow themselves to be thought of as the least capable musicians on the stage or in the studio. One of the most effective things any vocalist can do to raise their level of musicianship is to study their material, recognize potential road hazards, make notations and address those areas that can be executed more musically. Singers who are also songwriters should be especially aware of composing potentially difficult passages that could, with a little effort, be written more effectively. Singing should be expressive, emotional and relevant. Knowledge shouldn’t take away from this but should enhance a singer’s ability to communicate with an audience. Sometimes a scoop here, a dip there and a slide up or down is just what a song needs. But just as a singer like Joni Mitchell uses the break between head and chest voice for intentional effects, so too should every vocalist develop their particular style according with intent and not because of limitations in technique and knowledge.

Okay, you guys in the back of the room can wake up and go home. Class is over.

Carl Orff’s lusty Carmina Burana holds a special place in the hearts and ears of many non music lovers. Most who have never enjoyed a full performance of the piece may refer to sections of Orff’s work as “that music from Excalibur” or “the theme from Glory.” Indeed, the emotional impact of the cantata, based upon Medieval texts discovered in a Bavarian monastery in 1803, is so universal that sections of the piece have sonically illustrated war, peace, braggadocio, militarism and even instant coffee.

The power of the music rests firmly on the art of choral singing. For un-classically inclined musicians this roughly translates to “a lot of people singing at the same time without making a lot of mistakes.” Standing in the midst of 20,000 basketball fans screaming “We Will Rock You” can get the old adrenal glands pumping, but that experience is smashed to ashes against the timpanic downbeat and opening “O Fortuna” of the Carmina Burana when performed by a skilled ensemble.

On May 3, 2009 I had the pleasure of witnessing just such an event as the Pasadena Master Chorale under the expert baton of Artistic Director Jeffrey Bernstein presented the Carmina Burana to an overflow crowd at the First Congregational Church in Pasadena, California. Big budget organizations normally perform the piece with full orchestra but the impact of the music was certainly not compromised by Mr. Bernstein’s use of the smaller chamber version of instrumental accompaniment. Melodic/harmonic chores were handled on piano by Shawn Kirchner and Renee Gilormini while Wade Culbreath on timpani and percussionists Theresa Dimond, Joe Mitchell, John Magnussen, Ken McGrath and Aaron Smith kicked what can only be described as serious ass in executing Orff’s challenging percussion score.

The eighty voice Master Chorale sounded twice their number from the opening phrase on. This group is not your average community choir. Sopranos and basses can be found at most decent church choirs these days for about $4.75 a gallon for the high octane models, so it is not surprising for an ensemble like the Master Chorale to be well stocked. It’s the inner voices, however, that often can be the difference between a competent choir and an exceptional one. Genuine tenors and sonorous altos, like the meat in the middle of a choral sandwich, can sometimes make even stale bread taste like a French dip from Philippe’s. Although the Master Chorale’s tenor section is the smallest by number, the sound palette of the entire group is well balanced. As any vocalist can attest, singing with power offers less challenges than achieving blend, cohesion, intensity and expressiveness at pianissimo levels. Mr. Bernstein has trained this highly skilled choir well and from top to bottom, they sing with a purpose and as one voice.

The Carmina Burana was composed in modern times and the score is well-stocked with metronome indications. As a musician of the heart as opposed to the clock, I normally don’t question the conductor’s choices as to tempo but I couldn’t help feeling as though some sections of the piece were performed a click or two faster than I would think comfortable. The text is extremely wordy and I sensed a bit of hastiness in the brighter sections. Perhaps it can be written off to the acoustics of the venue but one or two beats per minute less here and there might have allowed more definitive interplay between the voices and the intricate accompaniment. It also would have guaranteed a longer performance which, when the closing “Fortuna Imeratrix Mundi” was just an echo in the rafters, would surely have pleased everyone in the house. As it was, the audience rose instantly to their feet and stayed there for an appreciatively long ovation.

Jacquelynne Fontaine

Abdiel Gonzalez and Jacquelynne Fontaine went above and beyond in rendering the lush melodies that Carl Orrf composed for solo baritone and soprano. The baritone solo can be particularly challenging for the “Dies Nox Et Omnia” requires the soloist to sing the opening melody as a lyric baritone, the release section almost in the manner of a counter tenor, yet maintaining sweetness and size, and then deliver the final “Per un baser” in the low range with authority. This is not a role for one dimensional singers and Mr. Gonzalez sang the piece with emotion, dexterity and musicianship beyond what might be expected of someone with his youthful appearance. As for Ms Fontaine, anyone who knows the piece will be on the edge of their seat halfway through the jaunty “Tempus Est iocundum” in anticipation of the climactic “Dulcissime” and Ms Fontaine did not disappoint. The highlight of the soprano solo is only four measures long but requires the soloist to execute flawlessly a very difficult, emotional and exposed line with minimal accompaniment.

Jeffrey Bernstein

Another welcome feature of the performance was the appearance of an actual children’s choir. The Washington Middle School Glee Club, directed by Cynthia Abbot, patiently waited until their turn at bat and proved why music education in our schools should be nurtured at a high priority. Well done.

The Carmina Burana, from a choral standpoint, is not a particularly difficult piece. It is high on the list for many crack high school choirs. The harmonies are sonorous, the dissonances logical, the vocal ranges not insurmountable. But when real men and women roll up their sleeves and go to work as Mr. Bernstein and co. did on May 3rd, look out. Simplicity performed with mature conviction is something altogether different than getting a high school group to pretend they know what they are supposed to be conveying. The piece will grow hair, don medieval chain-mail and the audience will see the 12th century sunlight glinting from the points of marching halberds.

Next up for the Pasadena Master Chorale is The German Requiem by Johannes Brahms. The introspective piece is a departure from the traditional requiem mass format and for it, Brahms has composed some of the most glorious choral music in the literature. I am already salivating to hear what Mr. Bernstein and his excellent choir have in store.