Back to Heaven Again: Wesla Whitfield Sets the Standards

I have a coworker as fond as I am of making lists. These aren't "to do" lists. I make those too, though I've seldom managed to do much with such a list before I misplace the note. But I've always kept lists, in one form or another, of things like the books I've read or want to read, the movies I want to go see or rent, what cities I would visit if I could. Mostly though, I make lists of favorites. Making and keeping such a list, or just finding an old one in my files, can clarify, if just for the minute or two it takes to make one, or to read an old one, just where one stands or once stood on a given subject. (Finding a very old list among the childhood papers I recently brought back from storage at my parents' house, I I'm reminded that at twelve, for example, I listed, among the potential rewards of wealth and fame, "getting to kiss Leif Garrett," -- an ambition long since abandoned without regret. Tempus fugit.) But most lists I make; of favorite mystery novels, or out of print English lady novelists that may be reprinted on the bookstore's EBM*, I make for reference at work, and as a means to make recommendations to customers.
My coworker and I took to discussing this sort of thing now and then, when he passes on his security rounds by the used books buying desk. Most, not surprisingly, have been to do with books, but not all. Our favorite movie westerns, for example. We both put The Searchers at the top. We exchange these lists now and again, on a slow Saturday, just to amuse each other, get to know one another better, and also on the chance that one might find something on the other's list that will be new. I stumped him with one name on my list of favorite singers:
Wesla Whitfield.


I don't want to distract from the pleasure of listening to Wesla singing the Gershwins' "Our Love Is Here to Stay" by nattering while she does this so perfectly, so please, do watch the clip.

Lovely, isn't she? That's the Mike Greensill Trio she's singing with in this clip. There's quit a bit of information on Wesla and the Trio, on Wesla's website. Check it out for forthcoming gigs, recordings and the rest.

My friend at the bookstore had never heard of Wesla Whitfield. I never had either, fifteen years ago when I happened to pick up a CD called "Beautiful Love." I liked the look of her, and the playlist of standards. I didn't realize that I was going to fall in love.

Wesla's the kind of contemporary jazz singer that didn't used to be, back when jazz was the popular music of the day. She's a student of popular song, and now a master, of course. Someone like Rosemary Clooney came up as a girl singer with a band. Later in life, when Rosie made her comeback and started recording all those classic albums with Concord Jazz, there was a beautiful logic to the thing: Clooney came full circle, back to the music she'd grown up on, knew best, loved most. But for a later generation of great singers, singers like Susannah McCorckle, and later, Dawn Upshaw or Ian Shaw, and Wesla, the era of great popular jazz, of melodious ballads and swing, had already passed. For the great singers after rock & roll, after bebop, to sing these standards straight, as it were, was a very different challenge. For Clooney to sing what was after all the music of her generation was a kind of homecoming. For a singer like Wesla, a commitment to this music pretty much guaranteed a career in cabaret, little clubs, small recording labels, not being famous, study. It takes guts to sing this beautifully now.

There is a kind of studious, academic jazz, the kind of music that Wynton Marsalis has done so much to teach and preserve, that is more admirable, usually, than not. There are jazz singers, too, who obviously love this music and can sing it with a proficiency that would frankly startle many of the composers who, back in the day, were experimentalists after hours, as it were, and who, with few exceptions like Betty Carter, didn't really work all that often with truly great jazz singers who also happened to be great musicians themselves. As I said, all this is admirable, but not really my cup of tea.

The singers I love best, love the lyrics. Call them, narrative singers, for want of my knowing a better term. The Gershwin these singers love best, is Ira. Me too.

The greatest generation of jazz singers, from Billie and Ella to Sassy and Carmen McRae, however fast and loose they were prepared to be with the words they sang, when it came to the best lyrics, they respected the songs they sang. What did it really matter if Sarah Vaughan forgot the words to "Perdido," and said so, or rather sang so, in the middle of a performance? It was fun, that. But listen to her singing the Gershwins' "I've Got a Crush On You," or "Biddin' My Time," neither exactly deathless poetry, but both with clever, whimsical, sweetly sentimental lyrics, and one can hear the pleasure she took in the words. Listen to her sing one of my very favorite songs, Gershwin or otherwise, "Someone to Watch Over Me," listen to Billie or Ella or Carmen sing it for that matter, and one will hear just what could be done with a great lyric.

Listen to Wesla Whitfield sing "My Shining Hour," and see if it isn't exactly that same thrill. Like those great ladies, Wesla can sing seemingly anything from The Great American Songbook, as it's called, and make it either swing or cry, as she chooses, and sometimes do both, as only the greatest can.

Wesla understands the structure of these songs, musically and lyrically, and respects it. She can be playful, and like a true jazz singer, sing wherever she wants, behind or before the beat, in a run up or a slide down to the point in the score that she's so effortlessly working toward, but she never fails to tell the story, tell it well, and tell it right. That doesn't mean she acts. She's not an actor who sings, mind. There's an afflatus that swells into parody in a certain style of cabaret singer, an unchecked need to emote that makes every song not a story but autobiographical confession that can be embarrassing or just delightfully knowing depending on the performer -- say Liza Minnelli as opposed to Julie Wilson. These are the performers who sing, not singers as such, and certainly not jazz singers. Wesla's voice is too good for that sort of thing.

There are a few great singers, like Dawn Upshaw, who are classically trained but whose musical curiosity is such that they sing, among other things, standards. Unlike the great opera divas who have infrequently recorded the occasional stiff, grotesquely over-orchestrated tribute album to Irving Berlin or the like -- and don't get me wrong, I love me some Kiri Te Kanawa -- Upshaw has the taste and delicacy to record songs within the range of the composer's original intent; singing soft ballads softly, for instance, without threatening to blow them up. But Upshaw, though she can swing a little, has a musical reserve that can be frustrating for a jazz fan. There's always, in even her prettiest ballads, the suggestion of the recital hall, and never a hint of the tin pan, let alone the alley.

And then there's Wesla Whitfield. She's said in an interview that while she was classically trained and even sang in the opera for a bit, she found the chorus boring, and while her voice retains something of that classical purity, she's never been a prisoner of her training. As I said, she isn't really a classic cabaret artist either though. She doesn't need to have an act. She has the kind of voice she can trust, and the rhythm to back it up when she wants to swing. More than this though, she has the confidence to sing straight. She understands not just the music, but the words, and with that comes the bravery to just sit there by the piano and sing.

She's probably the nearest thing to perfect I know when it comes to doing just this. When someone suggested in an interview that she was America's greatest living jazz singer, she responded by saying that that was, not to put too fine a point to it, "bullshit." I understand and respect her dismissal of the idea. There are other singers now working within the tradition who do more; who work on the wire, as it were, and go higher, faster, or who can pull off the kind of astonishing tricks of balance and grace that can leave their listeners rather breathless with admiration. That kind of jazz singer is exciting exactly because of the risks they take. That isn't the only kind of jazz that's admirable though, or pure. There's also the music made in less likely places, little concert venues and clubs and festivals like the ones Wesla usually plays with her band, The Mike Greensill Trio. These are the quiet little spaces wherein the singer and the song are the whole reason to be there, within which one lovely voice, backed by a great pianist, a bass and drum, can remind one just what there is to love about listening to a great love song. Though sometimes she sings in bigger joints with an orchestra, and Wesla has the voice to do that superbly well too, for me, what she does best she does seemingly in conversation with only her Trio and with the great songs, and with me.

For my money, Wesla Whitfield is the best. Call what she does whatever you like. She sings. As Longfellow said of such, "God sent his Singers upon earth With songs of sadness and of mirth, That they might touch the hearts of men, And bring them back to heaven again." For me, Wesla Whitfield's singing is my idea of Heaven.

*EBM = Espresso Book Machine.