What's an R&B Girl to Do?
Let me be clear upfront; there’s little that I personally find “girlish” about Deborah Cox or Amel Larrieux. They are, by all accounts, fully grown women. But grown-women—grown black women—seemingly are of little value in the world of contemporary R&B, and increasingly within commercial culture in general—unless they can sell cleaning products or deliver punch-lines with the panache of a tired cleaning woman. Thus the 30-somethings Cox and Larrieux find themselves out of favor to the fickle audiences that the music industry has coalesced around contemporary R&B and have to find new venues to ply their trade. While generational peers have either been musically born again (Kelly Price and Chante Moore) or steadfastly trying to compete with coquettish divas five or ten years their junior (Tamia, Brandy and Monica immediately come to mind), Cox and Larrieux have surprisingly staked out a claim in the world of jazz standards.
Deborah Cox has always possessed a lovely, if not strikingly distinct, vocal instrument. And while she never simply blended in with the crowd, she also is not the kind of artist that audiences, save hardcore fans, have missed. In this sense Cox’s decision to take on the legacy of Dinah Washington with Destination Moon entails less risk than it might have for vocalists on that next commercial tier and likely provides a genuine opportunity for Cox to develop a new audience. Washington is a formidable figure; her ability to brawl with the rhythm & blues boys of the late 1940s and sweetly nuance big-band arrangements on signature tunes (now standards) like “What a Difference a Day Makes” and “This Bitter Earth” made Washington one of the unique female vocalist of the 20th century. Cox wisely chooses the more softer tones in Washington’s oeuvre—covering the aforementioned “This Bitter Earth," “What a Difference a Day Makes,” and “Destination Moon”—though she does more than credible renditions of “Misery” and “Baby You’ve Got What it Takes.”
In this regard Destination Moon recalls an earlier Washington tribute album. Arguably Aretha Franklin’s Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington was the great Aretha album, before she broke through commercially 40 years ago this summer with I Have Never Loved a Man. Michael Awkward writes in his new book, Soul Covers, that Franklin’s tribute was a “compelling manifestation of [Franklin’s] early attempts to master the nuances of black vocal traditions.” As Awkward notes, the Washington tribute album was produced during Franklin’s six-year apprenticeship at Columbia records and it was only after her subsequent move to Atlantic in late 1966 that she became the singer that we all know her as. And perhaps Destination Moon is Cox’s opportunity to begin honing and expanding her craft, but the fact that she is doing so more than a decade into career is yet another example of the fundamental ways that the recording industry has changed in the last two decades. Under contemporary conditions, even Franklin wouldn’t have survived lean years, like the ones she had at Columbia before becoming the “Queen of Soul.”
Amel Larrieux initially broke through as one half of Groove Theory, a formation that woefully underutilized her musical sensibilities. As the daughter of noted dance critic and scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild, it made sense that Larrieux found traditional '90s R&B somewhat confining. Infinite Possibilities (2000), Larrieux’s debut recording, possessed an independent spirit that Epic, her label at the time, struggled to market, even during the height of the so-called neo-Soul moment. Forming Blisslife records with her husband, Larrieux literally chose an independent path for subsequent releases including Braveheart (2004), Morning (2006) and the recent Lovely Standards. On the latter, Larrieux takes on the music of Frank Loesser (“If I had a Bell”), Rodgers & Hammerstein (three tunes, including “Younger than Springtime”) and Duke Ellington (“I Like the Sunrise”). And thankfully, there is no a drum machine to be found.
The feel throughout Lovely Standards is much more intimate than Cox’s Destination Moon, and though it’s easy to read both recordings through some nostalgic lens that places these songs and their songwriters in dogged opposition to those produced for the current crop of R&B divas, the fact of the matter is that Cox and Larrieux provide these songs with a youthfulness that might, in fact, introduce the standards to a younger generation.
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Comments
1.
Kim says:
Thanks for this, Marc - you are always on point. It is incomprehensible to me that there isn't a market for grown women who can sing for real. Instead, we keep getting synthetic soundalikes...it's really dispiriting. Thanks for spreading the word about artists we can support.
08/17/2007 at 5:21 PM