By: Estefanía Romero
Cover photo: Helios Salas
As Clifton Anderson said during our interview, the understanding of the music we call jazz starts when we recognize that, even though it may involve different elements, it necessarily comes from the black culture, the black experience.
At the core part of her concert, Melanie Charles elevated her beautiful African American timbre and verbalized the sentence “Fuck jazz school!”, which led me directly to Clifton, when he literally said:
“I would say hands down to my personal experience that you cannot learn this music [jazz] going to school. You can learn the superficial things you need to have: the vocabulary, the theory, these types of things, but to actually play this music [jazz]… this music is passed down, and it’s passed down through the life experience, and through the experiences of your elders in this music”.
Fun fact: Melanie and Clifton went to the same arts education high school institute in the US.
“You pay thousands of dollars, and you can be Brad Mehldau… pay thousands of dollars and you can be Jaco Pastorius. It doesn’t work that way” are the phrases that Melanie used to reinforce her statement, and I love it, because I also think that an artist doesn’t come out from a factory, an artist is inherently unique. Her next step was to sit at the piano and start what by the first tones seemed to be a sweet ballad, but the first singing line was “I want my money back”, we had no option but to laugh out loud.
Melanie’s protest became broader, when she asked the public: “Why can’t we dance to jazz?”. Plenty of jazz historians have commented that jazz went unpopular when it ceased being danceable; this is when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie revolutionized jazz and created what media started calling bebop (also known as modern jazz), during the 40’s. This “new jazz” was not about going to dance to a great saloon anymore, as in the swing era, which occurred along the 20’s and 30’s; bebop was about sitting down and listening, about observing and intellectualizing the appreciation of a mere auditive contemplation, similar to the rituals of the concert music. It wouldn’t be long before Dizzy Gillespie decided that bebop wasn’t going to be only intellectual, but fun and danceable too, that’s probably why his music became so popular among the followers and the non-followers of jazz.
Taking this into account, we see how Melanie Charles is an advocate for jazz being popular. She’s going to make it. Firstable, because she has a deep-rooted notion of what jazz means: she understands the blues, the swing, and she’s not imitating any other artist. As a matter fact, I find unfair that certain writers have compared her to Billie Holiday or Abbey Lincoln, when these great women have each one a unique and different voice and personality. We already see a lot of copycats and we don’t need any more of those.
Melanie’s voice control is that of a real professional, she has a very high level of expressiveness, because she gets how to manage the emotions of her audience: she is able to make people happy, as much as she is capable to evoke sophisticated feelings, like sarcasm, irony or frustration. Being in one of her concerts is to be alive!
Charles knows how to use dynamics all the way through a piece of music, and all along an entire concert, thus creating a super structure of novelties. She ordered her songs in such a way that the show felt like being on a roller coaster of soul, R&B, funk, pop and even punk coexisting with jazz. This knowledge of hers on how to build a concert is truly assertive, because it ensures a memorable performance.
She delivers a first-class scat, and she conveys her discourse directly to the listeners. At a certain moment, she invited and welcomed her audience to repeat a melodic and creative line over and over, placing us into a straight and direct communion with the music. I still can’t stop repeating this line in my head.
Now… some people joke around saying “nobody pays attention to a bass solo”. A double bass solo in Melanie’s band is impossible to ignore. It stands out because the music previously established for the solo to be coherent, it does work! Neuroscientists have commented on the aesthetic pleasure that occurs in our brains when we listen to musical patterns that reach a resolution; that’s one of the reasons why Western music theory works. All of this is evident in the musical discourse of Melanie’s ensemble. I could say the same for the rest of the solos in her band.
I must applaud that, even though Melanie used synthesized elements to play with her voice, she didn’t abuse these resources; actually, there was a moment during the concert when she performed a processed chorus, which perfectly worked as a beautiful brushstroke over the music canvas they had already created as an ensemble.
Moreover, I would like to emphasize that Melanie Charles mentioned how important it is for her to constantly tribute the women who paved the road for her to be here as an artist. On this occasion, she summoned the name Marlena Shaw, whom I completely recommend listening to as well for all those who love beauty in sound.
To summarize, Melanie Charles is a consummate artist, she is a witness to the times we are living in, she has statements, she isn’t afraid of humor… her energy has a goal. What a joy it was to see her and her band performing at the MJazz.