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| Vol. 24, No. 15 | February 16, 1999 |
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| Vol. 24, No. 15 | February 16, 1999 |
BY SUZANNE TRIMEL
In his lectures, Professor Robert O'Meally defines the central impulses of American expression in the 20th century as improvisation and spontaneity-the very meaning of jazz. As he talks you can almost hear Duke Ellington's 1943 masterpiece "Black, Brown and Beige."
"We're resilient people with this improvised art," he says. "We're in motion." Now he has brought that restless sound to a wide audience as co-producer of a CD collection of the greatest jazz singers of the 20th century. Released last May, the 5-CD set has been nominated for a Grammy award this month in the historical category. O'Meally, the biographer of Billie Holiday, is believed to be the first Columbia faculty member so honored.
"The Jazz Singers: A Smithsonian Collection of Jazz Vocals from 1919 to 1994" came about after a lecture O'Meally gave about black intellectuals to an academic conference. He had put together a selection of jazz recordings to accompany his talk and found an audience eager to know if the collection was available. He suggested a collaboration to Bruce Talbot of the Smithsonian recordings division and the two became co-producers.
The collection demonstrates the richness and diversity of jazz singing with 104 assembled performances, both studio and live recordings, from legends Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan, to lesser known names like Earl Coleman, Lorez Alexandria and Cassandra Wilson. O'Meally intended the set as a kind of seminar on the evolution and development of jazz singing-the first to do so- and wrote an accompanying 127-page program that combines history, analysis and his deep appreciation for jazz. O'Meally notes that jazz singing is not one coherent easily definable art form but a subset of other forms. In the accompanying program notes, he settles on eight categories: blues, gospel, party music, swing, after hours, instrumentals with lyrics, scat/vocalese and novelties and takeoffs.
"These categories could best be imagined as a set of watercolor circles, washing and blending over one another," he writes. O'Meally tracks the influence of jazz on popular singers such as Frank Sinatra (his swinging 1956 "Night and Day,"), Marvin Gaye ("What's Going On?") and Al Green (Could I Be the One?")
O'Meally believes jazz is the soundtrack of the American Century and as a scholar, he is helping to define what it means in larger cultural terms. The collection has won high praise from critics. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Nat Hentoff called it "indispensible." The Economist praised O'Meally's "finely tuned instincts for good singing" and The New York Times said the selections put jazz singing "on full, fine display."
O'Meally has followed the CD set with a new book just published by Columbia University Press. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture is an anthology of important essays, speeches, and interviews about the impact of jazz on other arts, on politics and on everyday life. A comprehensive collection, the book establishes O'Meally as a pioneer in the exploratory field of jazz studies. With writings by Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Stanley Crouch, Amiri Baraka, Michael Eric Dyson and others, Jazz Cadence is intended as a teaching tool.
"More an opening gambit than a finished encyclopedia," writes O'Meally, "Jazz Cadence offers a set of preludes or vamps, setting the stage for riffs and solo-work yet to come," he writes in the preface.
O'Meally, who teaches literature and African-American studies and holds the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Literature, is a longstanding jazz fan. His parents were pianists-his father played jazz and his mother classical music. He studied the saxophone. When he was 12, he heard a Billie Holiday record for the first time and was "floored."
For several years, O'Meally has led a Jazz Study Group, supported by the Ford Foundation, at his Morningside Heights apartment. The group of 35 writers, academics and musicians has staged everything from a talk and performance by pianist Randy Weston to Washington University essayist Gerald Early exploring spirtual dimensions of jazz.
Working with University fundraisers, O'Meally hopes to expand the program to develop an interdisciplinary jazz studies center at Columbia that will open up the fields of art history, literature, history, cultural studies and music to an understanding of jazz. He believes it could be the best in the nation. "We have enormous talents and resources in this area here," he says.
His next book will be a biography of the late Duke Ellington, whose centennial is being celebrated with concerts and lectures at Lincoln Center this year that O'Meally is part of. For the immediate future, O'Meally is looking ahead to the televised Grammy award ceremony in Los Angeles on Feb. 24, which he will attend.