The Rough And The Smooth

Listening to Count Basie: The Complete Decca Recordings, a very fine 3 CD set by the way, I was struck by the powerful contrast between the voices of Jimmy Rushing and Earl Warren, juxtaposed as they were in the cuts Good Morning Blues (featuring Rushing) and Our Love Was Meant To Be (featuring the multi-talented alto sax player.) JR sounds natural, a real blues singer, modern; EW sounds soupily lugubrious, like something out of an Ivor Novello musical, dated.) Yet presumably at the time of recording the difference wouldn't have seemed quite so sharp. And for all the contrasts there are features the styles of singing share: clarity of phrasing; clarity of the melodic line, especially in terms of holding single notes; an effortless musicality.

It's astonishing how styles in voices change. It's impossible to imagine anyone today essaying the Warren approach, except in parody. For all its virtues there's something faintly comic about the performance. And maybe we're in danger of losing what made Rushing so great. For all his brilliance as a blues shouter there's a smoothness in that voice to relish that makes it perfectly balanced. That's extremely rare these days.

I wonder if anyone's tried writing a history of vocal style in western music? I've got a feeling that such an account would shed much light on the kind of societies various voices have emerged from and given voice to.