Dinah Sings

I saw my brother's superlative jazz band play tonight, and, like the last time I watched their joyous exultation of spontaneous combustion, I left thinking of this number by the great Dinah Washington. It could simply be the fact that two of the band's numbers featured a singer, a cute pixie type with a voice of peppermint that somewhat resembled the vicious assault of Dinah. But regardless of the reason, that jazz concert, like every other concert I've attended, was a vital, surging experience, as it reminded me of the vigor and brilliance of musical performance.


But anyway, back to Dinah. There's much to be said about the woman, who seemed to deliberately embody the mass wave of contradictions that encompassed American jazz in its '50s heyday. Here was a woman who could sing the blues better than Bessie Smith, draw you in with her infectious swing phrasing, and effortlessly pull off even the most wretched of pop affairs – and at the same time, here was a woman who was married a whopping eight times (divorced seven times), whose swagger and attitude nearly overshadowed her considerable talents, and whose death at the age of 39, due to an insane combination of secobarbital and amobarbital, only seemed proper, given the ramshackle approach Dinah seemed to take with everything.


But god could the woman sing, and maybe it was precisely because of her erratic nature that her performances had such a brilliant immediacy. Sure, Dinah could be sweet and sincere, her tone edging on playfulness, but her true brilliance lied in her blues and ballads, where her CUTCO voice slashed and burned the material in ways the composer never imagined – and made the song all the more brilliant as a result. The woman simply smoldered, delivering her lines with a depth and passion that I don't think we'll ever see again, given the overwhelming perfectionism of digital recording technology.


The blues must be messy; it must be ugly; it must be tarnished, in some way or another, by the central fact that it highlights the absolute base level of human suffering. How is that essence remotely possible, given the advances of recording technology? How can something be raw and immaculately recorded at the same time? It's a perversion of nature, a reversal of truth, a bastardization of an art form born out of decades of pain and anguish. To digitally record the blues with modern technology is to cage a Siberian Tiger.


So listen to Dinah; pending the crash of financial derivatives and the resulting implosion of the American empire, we may never hear another like her.

(Flickr photo by marysecasol.com)