Word: glissandi
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...paid to his skill as an arranger of guitar solos and vocal parts. Similarly, Ford didn't get her due as a singer. She looked the way she sang: smooth, clear, pretty. Her voice, tripled or sextupled in harmony, was the vocal version of his slide-guitar style. Her glissandi were intimate, as if she had been singing inside the microphone. (She was, in fact, the first vocal artist to sing not a foot or so away from the microphone, as most studio singers did then, but virtually on top of it, the way it's done today.) Her vocal...
...Here are a few more Encores! epiphanies to recall with a shivery thrill... The giddy glissandi of the "Sing for Your Supper" trio (Gravitte, Luker and Sarah Uriarte Berry) from "The Boys from Syracuse"... Kuhn, an angel lost in hell, turning a 2684-seat theater into a confessional when she performs "The Man I Love" from "Strike Up the Band"... Ruthie Henshell, beautifully torching the ballad "Words Without Music" from "Ziegfeld Follies of 1936"... The second-act overture to "Babes in Arms," when the orchestra began playing "Where or When" and the audience joined in, dreamily humming along and swaying...
...true. But Crosby's early delivery has even more insistent echoes of Al Jolson's, with its declamatory style and its tendency to end on an orgasmic high note (though Bing tended to moo his glissandi, where Jolson went "mwaaa"). Apparently skeptical of the appeal of his natural baritone, he forced it up into the familiar tenor range. It took a while for him to realize that the bu-bu-bu- boos were original, natural and, to his widening audience, deeply satisfying. It was also wonderfully adaptable to the musical genres he would investigate for the rest of his career...
Some of the shows have been commemorated on CD (not good enough--they all must be preserved!), but the magic moments occur in those long weekends onstage. A few to recall with a shivery thrill: the giddy glissandi of the Sing for Your Supper trio (Luker, Gravitte and Sarah Uriarte Berry) from The Boys from Syracuse; Kuhn, an angel lost in hell, singing The Man I Love from Strike Up the Band; the male chorale Some Girl Is on His Mind from Sweet Adeline--a rendition so pure and poignant that it left the City Center crowd in silent rapture...
...songs of inspiration, from The Rose to God Bless America--rarely unleashes Rimes' gloriously freaky soprano; at times she sounds intimidated, like a child called on to sing before stern church elders. Only in an a cappella National Anthem does she let loose the trills and glissandi; but, really, is that a cut you'll want to play...