Will Friedwald, author of The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums, is exploring some of the finest recordings of the 20th century on The Jonathan Channel. This week he deconstructs Sing a Song of Basie by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.

Will Friedwald: Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, their album, their quintessential album, is Sing a Song of Basie. That became the flagship for the movement that was briefly known as “vocalese,” which is the idea of taking a famous jazz piece, especially an improvised solo on a recording, and adding improvised lyrics to it.

So, it’s sort of like a translation of what happened in instrumental terms, and putting it in vocal terms. And then, starting with the individual solos, like singing a Lester Young solo or a James Moody solo, or something like that, taking that a step further. Then, what you do, is you take an orchestration, 16 musicians, and you add lyrics to that. And sometimes you add those lyrics on top of an existing set of words.

That was what Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross were all about. They were a very, very unique vocal group. That idea had existed in a limited form prior to then, but the idea of taking a classic Count Basie record and putting words to every little nook and cranny on it was completely new at that point. And it's still something that has not been done perhaps as much as it should have been. When it’s done right, it’s quite brilliant and quite wonderful, but people don't do it that much since L, H and R. They pretty much have the whole monopoly on that. That was the idea that Dave Lambert and John Hendrix had, around 1954-55, and that's the idea they brought to a record company, which was ABC Paramount, where they were fortunate enough to run into Creed Taylor. Wonderful producer, later on went on to great things in the jazz world, and this was one of his very first projects. He gave it the green light, and they had this concept of using voices to do Basie arrangements, but they didn't quite know how to get it done.

They originally tried hiring a choir, and these commercial choirs that you could hire at this point in 1956, '57, they were not blessed with a jazz feeling enough. So, that was not a very accurate transmission of these instrumental ideas into vocal ideas. What they wound up doing was overdubbing.

So, you hear multiple, multiple levels of John Hendricks and Dave Lambert, and also Annie Ross; who had originally been brought in just to coach the singers, and then they realized she was the one they wanted singing as well.

Originally, it was still going to be the Dave Lambert singers, featuring John Hendricks and Annie Ross, but by the end of it, they realized that their destiny was as a trio together. This album was what propelled them, even though it was fundamentally different from everything else by Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, which was the trio. When you hear the record you hear levels and levels of overdubbed Dave, Annie, and John, which is different from hearing L, H&R on everything subsequent, including their live appearances. But it's still a remarkable record just for that, and you can really get the sense of this process of discovery, this idea of these new technologies being used for the first time, or very, very early in the game, like overdubbing, like multi-tracking. And also the very new idea of being able to sing a jazz instrumental, being able to translate, take what had existed only in instrumental terms, and put it into vocal terms as well, to make it relevant for the human voice. I think that's what L H&R did better than anybody, that nobody else was ever able to do to that degree, before them.

A couple of tracks that really stand out are the ones that were famous Basie vocal numbers to begin with, especially “Everyday I Have The Blues.”

“Everyday I Have The Blues,” which was the opener, was famous for the vocals by Joe Williams.

So, because there already was a set of lyrics in the middle of it, it sort of enhanced what Dave and John were trying to do. Where you're used to hearing trumpets open, now you hear voices, doing what those trumpets did, but with the words as well.

Because this was such an iconic record by Count Basie, Everyday I Have The Blues, it was one of the records that really established the primacy of the New Testament Basie band. When people first heard the original “Everyday I Have The Blues” in 1954, 55, by Basie, it was a big signifier that there was a whole new Basie band out there, a whole new era in big band music, and in the blues as well, and it was a huge turntable hit for Basie. And really put Joe Williams on the map as well. For Lambert, Hendricks and Ross to take that, it really made crystal clear what they were trying to do because this was such a well-known record, I mean, everybody knew every little nook and cranny of the record. And John and Dave fit John's lyrics to it in a way that totally revealed what they were trying to do, what they were working with, what they were up against in trying to translate Basie into verbal terms, and they did it!

You can hear every little sort of minor twitch of a trumpet, every little kind of echo, every afterthought, all of which exists in this kind of narrative form. So it's not just like random words, it's not just a little bit of a story here and there, but it's a whole three-act play from start to finish. There’s all these different levels of what's going on in the story that they’re telling. The way that the instruments are talking back and forth to each other as if they had a human voice. Well, the human voice is metaphoric in the Basie record, but it's actually literal here, in Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross; you can hear them communicating back and forth with each other.

“Fiesta in Blue” was a piece by the great arranger Jimmy Mundy. Jimmy Mundy’s probably best known for being the most responsible for the Benny Goodman classic, “Sing Sing Sing.” That's primarily Jimmy Mundy’s arrangement, and he wrote for all the bands. He wrote for Basie, he wrote for Harry James, he wrote for everybody. He wrote this piece called “Fiesta in Blue,” for Count Basie, and there was a feature for Buck Clayton, wonderful trumpet player. When they decided to adapt it for the Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross album, John didn't really know what to do. "A fiesta" and "blue" sounded like two different things. What does a fiesta have to do with being blue? So he came up with the idea, that if you could literalize the blues, to make the blues into, like, an anthropomorphic entity, to give the blues human qualities, then you could actually throw a party for the blues. And that was where he got the idea for the lyric, to talk about the blues as actual entities, all getting together and having a party. A fiesta in blue. And to me, this is a great example of John's imagination: the way he can take a couple of concepts and come up with a whole story, to build a whole narrative form. That is sort of like the ultimate goal for the use of words in jazz. If you can extend the experience by adding a narrative to it, then you’ve really done something special, and something quite wonderful.