It's a great time to be a jazz singer in your 20s," Jane Monheit says, with the slightest hint of nervousness. The 26-year-old performer admits to being a little surprised by the explosion in vocal jazz over the last few years. When she began singing professionally in the late 1990s, Monheit was among a lonely handful of young artists attempting to further the grand tradition of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.
Now, as the major labels strive to superserve those bewitched and bedazzled by Norah Jones, there are scores of fresh-faced stylists, each hoping to put his or her stamp on the Great American Songbook, each selling a different shade of saloon croonerismo, each determined to buff the standards until they're fabulous again.
"All of a sudden, they're coming out of the woodwork," Monheit says of her unexpected competition, including Jamie Cullum, 24; Renee Olstead, 15; Peter Cincotti, 21; and Michael Buble, who just turned 29 and is Monheit's duet partner on her new CD, Taking a Chance on Love. "I really think it's amazing. I mean, there are now 20 million people and a bunch of teenagers who know 'The Nearness of You' because Norah sings it on her album."
OK, sure. In terms of cultural literacy, Monheit is right. It's great for a new generation to experience Hoagy Carmichael's simple celebration of intimacy, especially as Jones interprets it, in wistful whispers far from typical shooby-doo jazz singing.
Imitation, not interpretation
But is it great to hear actress Olstead, of the CBS sitcom Still Standing, do another color-inside-the-lines rendition of George Gershwin's "Summertime"? Do we really need the students of Sinatra to mimic the master's devil-may-care attitude and bring nothing of themselves to the party? Is there a reason to reward reasonable facsimiles of postwar classics just for their look-what-I-can-do glibness?
This crooner kick, which resembles the youth movement among jazz instrumentalists in the early 1980s, is another of those moments when the hype gets ahead of the music. The focus is on technical accomplishment, not the open-hearted expression of soul and sharing of insights that has marked pioneers going back to Louis Armstrong.
The artists display proper respect for their material, but in only a few cases have they managed what Jones did from the start: to create a compelling, contemporary atmosphere that speaks to the ages, not just a crushed-velvet banquette-bedecked showroom circa 1955.
