No Comparison
In early May, two leading singers performed locally on the same evening – Katie Melua at the De La Warr Pavilion, and British jazz diva Norma Winstone at the EHSAA. VICTORIA KINGHAM reflects on stardom, publicity, harmony, and public taste in music.
Ok, so I’m going to do something I said I’d never do, and compare artists working in separate genres. The exercise might raise more questions than answers, but hey.
Katie Melua was born in Georgia, raised in Belfast then London – a slightly exotic but nevertheless very British background. Her voice and presence carry a warm, personal quality. Her songs are heartfelt and empathetic, decidedly middle-of-the-road, ‘easy’ on the ear, making few auditory ‘demands’. Her band (with guitarist brother Zurab) and stage presentation are smoothly professional. She is 43, talked about, adulated, in the ‘established celebrity’ bracket.
A successful product
She is also, like many good and popular musicians, clearly a product of the ‘star-maker machinery behind the popular song’. Spotted’ at the age of 19 by super-supremo Mike Batt (don’t mention the Wombles) and mentored by him ever since, Melua and her recorded successes therefore follow in the wake of Bright Eyes, All Around My Hat, Please Don’t Fall in Love, and Elkie Brooks’ Lilac Wine. The evening’s presentation included the song Melua admits changed her life, Nine Million Bicycles. Her words are clear, her presentation accessible, her voice melodious, and she owns every song. She is also undeniably beautiful.
Still striving
Winstone is a legend (‘I’m old’ she said, ‘you aren’t a legend unless you’re old’) of the British jazz scene, with hundreds of appearances, songs, workshops, various bands, styles, countless venues, behind her accomplishment. She has received numerous awards from British and European musical performance organisations, and her fifty-year, four-octave career has encountered hundreds of different collaborations with the main protagonists of the British jazz scene. Listen to her extraordinary album Edge of Time – produced in 1972, it is experimental and weirdly beautiful, and sounds as contemporary and interesting now as it did then.
Now 82, Winstone returned some time ago to singing jazz standards; definitively on her own terms. She can still sing a saxophone impro, and at various points in the evening she and saxophonist Stan Sulzmann (another legend) swung melodies in glorious unison. We appreciate a particular number on the combination of her voice, her presence, her interpretation, and the lasting quality of the song itself. She still strives for jazz difference, for the re-birth of a song in each performance.
Inhabiting a song
She and Melua obviously aim at thoroughly distinct end results. As great singers, both inhabit a song. They do this variously through talent, intellect, commitment, dramatic ability, stage presence, and audience communication. This thorough occupancy of a number is perhaps something the two have in common, though the musical routes they have travelled could hardly be more divergent.
So What?
Nothing, yet, but watch this space. What makes listening ‘easy’, and why should it be? What brings audiences in? How do they make a choice? International star Melua filled a thousand eager seats at the De La Warr. There were maybe a hundred people to see Winstone, whose audience is largely in the UK and Europe. What is it about commercially popular artists that gives them such guaranteed admiration? The production, the orchestration, the glitz, the mere familiarity of the arrangements? Clearly, Mike Batt knows the answer.
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