When we say that an interpreter “makes a song his own” we imagine an energetic act of appropriation that results in an act of creation: the song stands there inert and the great voice and the great arrangement swoop over and sculpt it as Michelangelo would have carved a block of marble. Some performers, in fact, have imprinted their style on certain songs indelibly: Black coffee anyone can sing it again but it’s a Peggy Lee song, like Night and day and Frank Sinatra or Unforgettable by Nat “King” Cole. It took me a while to accept some Cole Porter songs not sung by Ella Fitzgerald personally. “In jazz and pop,” notes music critic Will Friedwald in his book The great jazz and pop vocal albums, “More than in classical music and opera, certain recordings have become a sort of style manual. Generations of musicians, singers and listeners have grown up with those albums that have become a ‘gold standard’, meaning a touchstone for the future.
And when we repeat that an interpreter “makes a song his own” we underline the uniqueness of his style, the courage of his appropriation, the ability to impose his point of view on the listener. Think of how a swing star like Anita O’Day took a standard and stretched it to her liking like a rubber band, or how Sarah Vaughan dragged the great songbook American in the era of bebop.
Listening Where is love?, one of the very few albums that the Czech-born jazz singer Irene Kral (1932-1978) left us, we are witnessing a paradox: an interpreter who makes the songs her own by just touching them. Yet the way of treating her repertoire, so minimal and discreet, remains a proud act of appropriation and creation. An act in which the artist’s presence seems invisible and in which the songs seem to sing themselves. It is obviously a deception, because the songs do not sing themselves and the work of their interpreter starts from the selection. Each piece of Where is love? it is chosen with extreme care together with the pianist, the New Zealander Alan Broadbent, who accompanies it with a soft touch and almost impressionistic tones. There are standards (Spring can really hang you up the most), pieces written by other composers and performers of immense talent (I like you, you’re nice by Blossom Dearie) and medley of songs from musicals by Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein.
It is precisely in these showtune, pieces written for musical theater, which Irene Kral’s style expresses itself best: no sentimentality, no excess, zero vibrato, the songs breathe and show all their lyrical potential. The artist weighs every word and in a seemingly natural and effortless way she gives it meaning: Irene Kral is an interpreter of ballad and of prodigious standard. When, in I like you, you are nice sings: “Take me home and stay with me for a while. If you’re good I’ll make you a wonderful, fabulous and infamous cup of Costa Rican coffee. ”She can say it all. She manages to be sexy and a little cheeky but at the same time fragile, like a person who makes a joke not to be taken too seriously at a time when she is asking for attention and love. Precisely in her dryness and her economy of means, Irene Kral exposes herself emotionally in every song on this album. In Spring can really hang you up the most (“Spring can really bring you down”), inspired by TS Eliot’s verse “April is the cruelest month”, Kral manages to be not only simply melancholy but to her melancholy she manages to give all the colors and sounds of the summer, among blooming flowers and chirping birds.
Irene Kral, in the mid-seventies, is an appreciated and respected singer who for much of the fifties and sixties had been quietly in the shadows. She had done swing and jazz as a guest in big bands and her fame had always been crushed by that of her older brother Roy, pianist, arranger and also a singer. She died of breast cancer in 1978, aged only 46 and she, as she amply demonstrates Where is love?, he had just found his voice, after decades of apprenticeship and refinement of his art. In the notes accompanying the first edition of the album, the singer Carmen McRae, her fraternal friend who recognized her impeccable taste for the repertoire, wrote: “A record to have for anyone who loves beauty”.
Irene King
Where is love?
Choice, 1974