I just heard that Charlie Collins has died. Mixed with my sadness at his passing are feelings of wonder and disbelief that this charming, elegant and ever-youthful man, who until very recently sang regularly with my band, could possibly be 85 years old. He still had a voice that was strong and swinging and he could hold a melody with perfect pitch and timing at all tempos. He was the complete professional, with impeccable microphone technique and the ability to project a song in a way that fully engaged every member of an audience. But more amazingly, at 85, he still retained the vigour and enthusiasm of the young man who, over half a century earlier, had spent a season singing with the wonderful Sid Phillips band.
Musing about Charlie and about how much we will miss him led me to thinking about band singers in general and the place of vocals in popular music history. I suppose it all started with Thomas Edison's nursery rhyme. He didn't have a band. And for about the next thirty years of recording history most vocalists also sang with scant support of a band. Billy Murray, for example, turned out literally hundreds of recordings between 1903 and 1927, including some great songs well worth reviving today. But he, and all the others of the time were backed by a muddy wash of sound which more closely resembled a distant military band that anything we associate with popular music. Following these pioneering days when named vocalists appeared on record "with instrumental accompaniment" (unidentified) there was a period when record labels gave the band name e.g. California Ramblers "with vocal refrain" (also frequently unidentified). This was a time when it was probably a charitable gesture to leave the name of the vocalist, often singing in an excruciating parody of an Irish accent, unidentified; although assiduous discographers have since toiled to unmask the likes of Arthur Fields and Jack Kaufman. A fairly strong constitution is required to listen all the way through to something like Poor Papa by The Redheads, a record awarded a three-star thumbs-up by the Melody Maker in 1926. There were of course some exceptions to the dire quality of 1920s vocals, and artists such as Connee Boswell, Cliff Edwards and the wonderful Annette Hanshaw can still offer listening pleasure, to me at least.
The big bands of the swing era continued the tradition of anonymous singers. Even Frank Sinatra and Perry Como provided vocal refrains to big hits for bands such as Tommy Dorsey and Ted Weems. Only with the decline of the big bands did the cult of the singer as pop idol really emerge. The early trad jazz bands in Britain and America continued to feature band singers. Clancy Hayes and Pat Yankee took many of the vocal honours with the bands of Bob Scobey and Turk Murphy, while Chris Barber featured Ottilie Paterson, and singers like Clinton Ford and George Melly worked with the Merseysippi Jazz Band and Mick Mulligan's Magnolia Jazz Band. George, indeed, is another near-octogenarian still successfully plying his trade.
What happened then to all the band singers with jazz bands? Today's bands feature vocals galore, but almost always delivered by a trumpeter, a trombonist or, as in my case, a clarinettist. Often delivered badly, with none of the hard-learned techniques honed by the full-time dedicated vocalist. Should we lay responsibility for this change, as for many other changes in popular music after the mid-sixties, at the door of the Beatles? Were they the first to make the case that anyone who played a musical instrument could also be a singer. Even Ringo sang! Whatever the reason, jazz bands, and traditional jazz bands in particular, now almost universally adopt a do-it-yourself attitude to vocals, with the result that these are often the weakest elements in the performances. Nowhere is this more apparent than in some performances by continental European bands whose first (or even fifth) language is not English. I treasure a video of a German Jazz Festival in which a succession of Central European bands play excellent trad jazz peppered with vocals which declaim:
Woanoo camoh, Bill Bailey
Woanoo camoh?
Sheik rise da holiday rank.
Ahdoo da cookie hanny
Ahpay da rank
Ahno ahdanna rank.....
This sounds cruel, and I know how easy it is to mistake the words of a song delivered in a foreign language. After all until very recently I heard Jimi Hendrix's line: "Excuse me while I kiss the sky" as "Excuse me while I kiss this guy". But, excellent though the trad jazz on my video is, it is for the delightful vocalists, mostly female, and mostly for some reason bouncing up and down as they sing, that I watch it, often with tears of joy streaming down my cheeks.
Well, this has been a particularly rambling addition to my Musings and one that reaches no real conclusion, for I will continue to sing with my band, very badly, and with none of the specialised techniques which single out the real band singer from the crowd. Perhaps the best way for me to end is to put on the CD that Charlie Collins recorded privately shortly after his eightieth birthday and listen with pleasure and admiration to a master of that almost forgotten trade, the band singer.
Yarl River Jazz Band
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