Crooning

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The intimate singing style of crooning was made possible by the invention of sensitive microphones.

Crooning describes a singing style of popular music that emerged in the 1920s with the development of the microphone , the predominantly male representatives of which are known as crooners . The crooning is characterized by the intimacy and warmth of the voice and initially had strong sexual connotations. Well-known representatives of the style are Bing Crosby , Frank Sinatra and Charles Aznavour .

term

Charles Aznavour crooning

The term crooning is derived from the Scottish word croyne (loud, deep din). From croyne was croon making a soft, murmuring noise is called. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the term was associated with lullabies , in the USA especially with those of the Black Mammies. The phrase "croon a tune" in Al Jolson's Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody should also be understood in this sense .

David Manners in the film The Crooner (1932)

Around 1930 the current use of crooning was finally established as a term for a soft style of singing, mainly represented by male singers, which arose in the course of the technical adaptation to the specific requirements of the microphone. The carbon microphone is operated electromechanically and replaced purely mechanical horns with internal diaphragms, into which one had to sing relatively loudly. In 1932, American director Lloyd Bacon released a comedy called The Crooner , in which a New York saxophonist started a career as a singer after being asked to sing into a mouthpiece in his deep voice .

A cultural critic for the London Times described crooning in 1936 as follows:

“While the togetherness of the sexes has not changed over the millennia, the popular love song has strangely changed its tone. The old love song was confident and strong, even when it was most tender; the modern crooner woos [the mistress on the other hand] with an impulse of self-pity . "

Formation conditions and characteristics

The possibility of amplification via microphone fundamentally changed the vocal technical requirements for singers in the 1920s. The Belters' stage voices , based on classical singing, were too loud for the new medium. On the other hand, a singing voice that came along in an effortless, friendly conversational tone, “an everyday, casual, off-the-street and into-your-living room voice” turned out to be ideal for the microphone. The restrained, sometimes feeble-looking vocal handling of rhythms and tones is the most concise feature of crooning. The crooner's songs are characterized by a small range, smooth tone sequences and low dynamic fluctuations. Another feature is singing on consonants.

While some singers refused to adapt to the new technical conditions, the microphone helped other, previously average successful parents like Frank Crumit and Gene Austin to break through. Still others, named here “Whispering” Jack Smith , only succeeded in entering the vocal business through the possibility of reinforcement. With increasing popularity, the character of the crowned songs also changed. "Whispering" Jack Smith, Art Gillham and "Little" Jack Little, as crooning pioneers, represented a very idiosyncratic variety with comic elements, whereas Rudy Vallée gave crooning sex appeal. In response to his great success with the female audience, he is considered the first "swooner crooner".

Bing Crosby finally made crooning accessible to a wide audience. The emotional, sometimes melodramatic sound of the swooner crooner was replaced by lively songs with an easy-listening character . Crosby's deep timbre , worker background and the masculinity he exuded ensured that male listeners could identify with his music as well.

Contemporary reception

While the crooners received great approval from the audience - especially from the female audience - the press remained critical in view of the too weak and generally irritatingly untrained crooning voices. Even in its heyday, crooning had some negative connotations . The singing technique was perceived by critics as unmanly, howling or excessively sentimental. The crooning sound was sometimes found to be unnatural and insincere because of the need for electrical amplification. In this context, technical “dishonesty” was synonymous with emotional dishonesty for the critics. Despite negative media coverage, crooning songs were the dominant form of light music in the United States until the mid-1950s.

In the retrospective, importance is attached to crooning above all with regard to the change in the relationship between interpreter and listener. The style is identified as the first “intimate” form of song in popular music. While the other styles that had prevailed to date were designed for listening in public spaces, the radio brought the voices of the crooners into the private space of the listener. Crooning created the impression of direct communication between the singer and the individual listener. The possibility of mass media distribution via radio also ensured that the early crooners became the first national pop music superstars.

The early crooning style

The crooning of the 1920s found its undisputed stars in the troika of Al Jolson , Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby. With the latter in particular, one should bear in mind that Crosby's style of the time has almost nothing to do with the tonality of his later career. It is difficult to understand that the White Christmas singer should be the same person as the person who popularized the songs on Tin Pan Alley in their original, for modern ears very sentimental versions.

Jolson, Vallee and Crosby dominated pop music in white America of the Jazz Age so completely that parodic songs were even written about the phenomenon. The general public was hardly aware that this music only contained jazz elements in the most superficial sense - as is well known, Jolson played a jazz singer in the first more important sound film in 1927 , although his stylistic home was clearly in the musical and vaudeville sectors.

The style also found imitators in Europe. In Germany in the inter-war period, most pop singers adopted this aesthetic to some extent; well-known exponents are Harry Frommermann from the Comedian Harmonists , Willy Fritsch and Rudi Schuricke . Today Max Raabe can also be attributed to this tradition, although he sometimes exaggerates the style in a satirical way.

The Falsetto Craze of the 1930s

Due to the commercial success of this style with white audiences, black musicians who were much more closely associated with jazz also adopted crooning, which can even be heard in some of Louis Armstrong's recordings from this period (e.g. in the vocal chorus of the through his trumpet solo famous West End Blues ). It was also black singers who exaggerated the “tenor-heaviness” of the style and thus triggered a short-term fashion for falsetto voices in the early 1930s . In the Big Band of Jimmie Lunceford z took over. B. the saxophonist Dan Grissom these vocal parts; in Andy Kirk's Twelve Clouds Of Joy there were numerous vocal arrangements in this style. The extent to which such interpretations are based on a parodic motivation - which one could certainly assume when listening to the recordings from a few decades apart - can hardly be verified.

Style change through Frank Sinatra

Crooning in the modern sense is inextricably linked with the name Frank Sinatras. He became the boy singer of the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in 1940 and revolutionized the aesthetics of male singing in popular music with his baritone voice. Sinatra's new crooning was so irritating to his young white audience because he phrased and articulated to a relatively large extent jazz-like. As a result, even Bing Crosby, who had originally been Sinatra's idol, adapted his singing to the new vocal ideal.

In the course of the forties and fifties Sinatra refined his style to a mixture of jazzy elements and certain concessions to the current taste with which he became world famous. It was only with the advent of rock 'n' roll that Sinatra's dominance among male singers was put into perspective; nevertheless, the sound he has shaped remains an important inspiration for many popular singers, including B. Dean Martin , Sammy Davis Jr. , Tony Bennett, and Bobby Darin .

To a certain extent Sinatra's success also worked back into the narrower field of jazz, where singers like Billy Eckstine or Johnny Hartman took over elements of the stylistics of their white colleagues. The saxophonist Lester Young described Sinatra as his most important artistic influence in the later years of his career, and Miles Davis has made similar statements. Here again it may be remarkable that Marvin Gaye named Young as a decisive inspiration when he began to give his soul singing a color strongly influenced by crooning.

Elements of the older and modern crooning can be found in a number of stylistically quite different singers who have in common that they have a less "sonorous", technically somewhat untrained tenor voice and that they came to singing via their main instrument. B. the (white) jazz trumpeter Chet Baker , his (black) pianist colleague Nat "King" Cole or the Brazilian guitarist João Gilberto .

Currently (2007) the style is cultivated by artists such as Louie Austen , Harry Connick , Michael Bublé , Tom Gaebel , Juliano Rossi , Jamie Cullum , Adam Green and Mario Biondi .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Goldstein, Howard: Crooning. In: The new Grove dictionary of music and musicians. Vol. 6 eds. By Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (2nd edition). London: Macmillan (et al.) 2001, p. 720.
  2. See Pitts, Michael and Frank Hoffmann: The Rise of the Crooners. Lanham (et al.): Scarecrow Press 2002. p. 8.
  3. See Pitts, Michael and Frank Hoffmann: The Rise of the Crooners. Lanham (et al.): Scarecrow Press 2002. p. 21
  4. The Crooner on the website of David Manners , the main character in the film. Retrieved January 18, 2015
  5. ^ The Measure of Pleasure. The Times, September 14, 1936. p. 13. The Times Digital Archive
  6. Pitts, Michael and Frank Hoffmann: The Rise of the Crooners. Lanham (et al.): Scarecrow Press 2002. p. 13.
  7. See Pitts, Michael and Frank Hoffmann: The Rise of the Crooners. Lanham (et al.): Scarecrow Press 2002. p. 28 .; Bielefeldt, Christian: Voice in the Jazz Age. In: Music and Aesthetics 51 (2009). Pp. 41-53. P. 45.
  8. See Pitts, Michael and Frank Hoffmann: The Rise of the Crooners. Lanham (et al.): Scarecrow Press 2002. p. 21, p. 28 ff., P. 35 ff.
  9. See Bielefeldt, Christian: Voice in the Jazz Age. In: Music and Aesthetics 51 (2009). Pp. 41-53. P. 46.
  10. Cf. Frith, Simon: Art vs technology: The strange case of popular music. In: Popular Music (II). London u. a .: Routledge 2006. pp. 107-122. P. 108f.
  11. See Pitts, Michael and Frank Hoffmann: The Rise of the Crooners. Lanham (et al.): Scarecrow Press 2002. p. 38.
  12. See Taylor, Timothy D .: Music and the Rise of Radio in Twenties America. Technological Imperialism, Socialization and and the Transformation of Intimacy. In: Wired for Sound. Engineering and technologies in sonic cultures. Edited by Paul D. Greene and Thomas Porcello. Middleton Connecticut: Wesleyan Press 2005. pp. 245-268. P. 260.
  13. Blurb to What's Going On , 1970/71

literature

German literature

  • Christian Bielefeldt: Voice in the Jazz Age . In: Music and Aesthetics. No. 51, 2009, pp. 41-53.
  • Will Friedwald: Swinging Voices of America. A compendium of great voices . From the American by Klaus Scheuer. Hannibal Verlag, St. Andrä-Wölker 1992.

English literature

  • Steven Banfield: Stage and Screen Entertainers in the Twentieth Century. In: John Potter (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Singing. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 2000, pp. 63-82.
  • Peter Gammon: The Oxford companion to popular music. 1991.
  • Michael Pitts and Frank Hoffmann: The Rise of the Crooners . Lanham (et al.): Scarecrow Press 2002.
  • Timothy D. Taylor: Music and the Rise of Radio in Twenties America. Technological Imperialism, Socialization and and the Transformation of Intimacy. In: Paul D. Greene, Thomas Porcello (Eds.): Wired for Sound. Engineering and technologies in sonic cultures. Wesleyan Press, Middleton Connecticut 2005, pp. 245-268.
  • Scott Yanow : Swing. Great musicians, influential groups. San Francisco 2000.