Big Luciano is Gone: Opera Singer for the Masses

I have to confess to a ridiculous degree of sadness over the death of Luciano Pavarotti—“Big Luciano,” as the Italians call him. As an avid opera fan—indeed I sometimes feel like an opera queen trapped in a woman’s body—I noted that Luciano, over the 30 years I’ve been listening to him, has given me more sheer joy and pleasure than some men I’ve known a lot better….

But it’s difficult when there’s no real political or intellectual rationale for this emotion I’m feeling over the death of a stranger. Pavarotti was not the left-leaning son of Spanish anti-Fascists like fellow tenor Jose Carreras, or the all-round singer, director, conductor, disciplined musician that Placido Domingo is, or a premature anti-fascist like the brilliant conductor Arturo Toscanini. But he was born with one of the most beautiful voices of the 20th century. As a Marxist, I view this voice, like all great talent, as an expression of our “species being” or human capacity; its beauty is a sort of spiritual experience for me.

And more than any other artist of his time, Pavarotti made opera alive and accessible to the masses.

Sure, Pavarotti got careless and self-indulgent as celebrity and wealth corrupted his artistry. But anyone who tries to dismiss his fame as a product of hype is just plain hatin’. People are not so stupid as to make this man a gigantic global pop star for over 30 years for no reason.


Check this out—two masters, in the twilight of their careers, performing their totally different schticks together and making it work. It’s a duet by Luciano Pavarotti and James Brown! The concert is a benefit for Angolan refugees in Pavarotti’s home town of Modena, Italy, in 2002.

I’m no music critic but when I’ve tried to describe Pavarotti's voice, the images that came to me were red wine and honey. (I later read actual music critics who described it that way.) It was rich and full-bodied and smooth and sweet and deeply colored—ruby, golden. You couldn’t confuse it with any other voice. And the way he married the words and the melody was incomparable, sustaining the meaning of the phrases and the lines while uttering each sound perfectly.

And the other thing, if you ever heard Luciano Pavarotti live, is that you really felt he wanted you—personally-- to have a great time. He wanted you to share the joy that he took in using his beautiful voice. I think this quality is what pulled people in. You can feel it too from the videos of performances, especially in the early live operas that PBS stations are showing this week, from before he became grossly fat . He was never slim but he had the grace of a former soccer player, a compelling physical presence with plenty of stage business, a light comic touch and timing, a melting smile, and those big, warm brown eyes. Nice-looking, not extraordinary, in a very Italian way.

On the weight thing, by the way, I kinda subscribe to the hypothesis put forward by Fritz Perls, the founder of gestalt therapy, in Ego, Hunger and Aggression. He posits that opera singers may tend to over-eat out of some self-protective impulse to replenish and repair. Because they give so much of themselves orally, they tend to take in too much orally.

For me, the emotional intensity around opera and Pavarotti has to do with the records my mother played and the stories she told us about my grandfather the chef, serving the legendary tenor Enrico Caruso at the Waldorf and catching opera from the cheap seats. (I don’t know if it’s really true that once, when Caruso hit the high note, it shattered the flask of olive oil in my grandfather’s back pocket that he had filched from the restaurant—but it’s a great story.) And then the many seasons beginning in the '80s when my mother and sisters and friends got subscriptions to the Met together.

My mother died over a year ago and the times when I hear something and think I need to call her are less frequent. But it happened when I heard, on the 7 a.m. news, that Pavarotti had died. My sister heard it at the same time and called me 30 second later, and we spoke about him several times throughout the day.

When we heard Pavarotti and his homegirl, the soprano Mirella Freni. perform La Boheme in the mid ‘80s at the Metropolitan Opera, I felt that I had experienced perfect beauty and could die happily at that moment. (Pavarotti and Freni grew up together in Modena and, because their mothers worked in the cigar factory which turned their milk sour, they were actually breast-fed by the same wet nurse.)

I was also present at what I think turned out to be Pavarotti’s last good Met performance, (since the 2004 Toscas didn’t work out too well) in Aida in 2000. It was the his last show of the season, and he’d received poor reviews for the previous ones—not in good voice, lumbering around the stage virtually held up by two chorus members because his legs were so stiff. But he somehow got it together for this last performance. He stood on his own two feet and though the high notes were muted, that beautiful legato line was mostly sustained and there were glimmers of the maestro in his prime.

Grazie, Luciano. Non ci scordiamo di te.

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Take Five--James Brown Cuts

[Take Five. Every Friday, Fire on the Mountain picks a category and lists five cool things in it. It's up to you, dear reader, to add your own in the Comments section. Just click on the word "comments" at the bottom of the piece and you're off to the races.]

This week's category is a no-brainer--James Brown tunes with political themes or implications. I was inspired to do it, and to keep things on the positive tip, by a memorial post for James on Ajamu Dillahunt's blog, Sankofa Meets the Future:

In 1980 i heard revolutionary activist Muhammad Ahmad/Max Stanford give a talk about how culture does not and cannot lead a movement. His point was that a mass movement creates conditions under which artist generate products that reflect the level of struggle and consciousness of the movement and even push it further. His example was James Brown and the creation of the inspiring and challenging lyrics of "Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud." With the movement on the wane, James Brown could issue patriotic songs like Living in America from Rocky fame and even endorse Nixon in 1972.

TAKE FIVE

I Don't Want Nobody To Give Me Nothing (Open Up The Door, I'll Get It Myself) [1969]
Old James was a do-for-self kind of guy, and this is an ideological follow-on to that current in "Say It Loud." It's all the more powerful for its bluntness--just get your foot off our neck and we'll do fine.

Blackenized--Hank Ballard [1969?]
This is here because somebody stole my copy of "How You Gonna Get Respect (If You Haven't Cut Your Process Yet?)" about 30 years ago, and my memory being what it is (or isn't), I don't want to fake it. Hank Ballard & The Midnighters cut a bunch of great rockers in the '50s ("Work With Me, Annie" and "Let's Go, Let's Go, Let's Go," for instance) with a gospel flavor that was an influence on James. In the late '60s he paid his debt back by incorporating Ballard into his entourage, and producing several very James-flavored songs for him. This one is in the "Say It Loud" tradition lyrically, though not as funky, a flute-driven quasi-shuffle.

Now I don't know whether you realize
Before you get some respect
You got to be Blackenized
You been leanin' on others to be your keeper
That's why they call you Negroes and colored peoples

Rockin' Funky Watergate--The JBs [1973?]
A couple days ago, I blogged about "I Don't Care About Watergate, Just Give Me Some Bucks And I'll Get Straight" and the need to come to grips with its anti-politics message. This one doesn't even bother to make a value judgement--just turns "Rocking Watergate" into an intermittent party chant in one of those live (or "live") jams James excelled at.

King Heroin [1972]
Some of the most powerfully "conscious" Black songs have been anti-drug ones from Curtis Mayfield's "Freddie's Dead" to "White Lines (Don't Don't Do It)" by Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel. James's spoken entry in the field is kinda weird, because he recites it from the point of view of the drug itself.

Santa Claus Go Straight To The Ghetto [Jeez, late '60s I guess]
Here not for really political lyrics (though I like the fade-out appeal "Santa Claus, a soul brother needs you so") but because it shows Brown's lifelong identification with the Inner City. Let's not forget James collapsed after his annual Christmas toy give-away in Augusta, GA. It's not the hard funk of the day, but an almost boppy rhythm wound just a half turn too tight to be relaxing.

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James Brown, Revolutionary

Okay, don’t get your undies in a bunch—I’m not memorializing James as belonging in the same expressly political musical pantheon as, say, Bob Marley or D. Boon or Phil Ochs. I just want to highlight a few points which were shorted in many of the obits that have blanketed Teh Internets and the media.

James Brown was, beyond any doubt, a musical revolutionary who changed the face of African American music—two times, maybe three. Which means he changed the face of American music. Which means he changed the face of world music. And that’s revolutionary, small-r revolutionary anyhow, on a scale few have ever achieved.

The estimable Charles Keil, a crack musicologist of the partisan rather than the academic type and all-round smart guy, identifies two traditions in popular music. The more common is the one which highlights strings and the human voice—“pickin’ and singin’ ” for short. The other is based on horns and drums, a school which Charlie favors, as shown in the more intriguing shorthand he has devised for it—“beaten and blown.” If one accepts Charlie’s typology for a minute, the biggest difference, in my opinion, is that pickin‘ and signin’ tends to be head music, listening and toe-tapping music, where beaten and blown is body music, demanding, impelling, a more comprehensive physical response than the patting of a foot.

Well, James Brown was a beaten and blown guy all the way, in a country where, with the partial exception of the big band era and some earlier and subsequent small group jazz, one could argue that pickin’ and singin’ has dominated and shaped musical taste for the last century.

With early instrumentals like 1961’s “Night Train” pointing the way, he developed a band that transformed the vamp—the repeated unison instrumental riff in a long jazz performance, as in “vamp ‘til ready”—into the whole song. Goodbye to the conventions of popular songwriting—the intro, the verse, the chorus, the bridge, the changes, the resolution. What was left at the heart of the song was the vamp. Folks talk about the Live at the Apollo, Volume 1 album as the epistemological break, but I gotta go for “”Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” Dave Marsh says of it:

“No record ‘Before Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” sounded anything like it. No record since—certainly no dance record—has been unmarked by it.”

But “Brand New Bag” was only a turning point, not the end. By the time he got to “Cold Sweat” a couple years later James had virtually dispensed with chord changes, period. As the late Robert Palmer put it:

"The rhythmic elements became the song....Brown and his musicians began to treat every instrument and voice in the group as if it were a drum. The horns played single-note bursts that were often sprung against the downbeats. The bass lines were broken into choppy two- or three-note patterns....Brown's rhythm guitarist choked his guitar strings against the instrument's neck so hard that his playing began to sound like a jagged tin can being scraped with a pocket knife."

In these early years he had also transformed soul vocals. In jazz the voice was often treated (as in classical and art music) principally as another instrument—words were secondary. Scat singing as practiced by Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald made the point that the often–corny pop lyrics they recorded didn’t matter; the joy of the music and artistic mastery (mistressy?) were what counted.

James’s implied critique was different. Drawing from the traditions of the Black church, he tortured the lyrics, hollering them, whispering them, drawing them out, chanting them, moaning them, and in doing so transcended the lyrics by showing that these words, that any words, were too weak, too pallid to fully express what was inside him—and us.

The second revolution Brown pioneered was the further evolution of what was by now called Funk. In the late “60s. early ‘70s, he was putting complex polyrhythms into cuts like “Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine,” codifying and deepening Funk and setting the stage for the early ’70s disco era. Like ‘60s soul, with its Motown vs. Stax/Volt dichotomy, classic disco had its smooth and its rough—and James was in the vanguard of the rough.

Of course Brown didn’t make the revolution alone. He had help, in the form of his band, and motivation , in the form of innovative funk competitors like the Isley Brothers, the Brothers Johnson, New Orleans’ Meters, and loads of others. The main one of course was George Clinton and the whole P-Funk combine. Some followed James’s polyrhythms back to Africa, like Osibisa and Mandrill. Folks who turned to Africa to find the roots of this remarkable music found themselves tripping over James himself more than once, in the form of artists like Nigeria’s Fela Anikulapo-Kuti who got turned on to him during a US sojourn in the late ‘60s. The creator of Afro-Beat, Fela returned the favor, influencing James Brown cuts like 1973’s “Time Is Running Out.”

Which bring us to the “maybe three” revolutions in the introduction. Plenty of people will argue that without James Brown, there would be no hip-hop. Certainly his shit got sampled by more early MCs and producers than anyone else’s—by at least an order of magnitude. It kind of peaked with NYC MC Fresh Gordon’s “Feelin’ James” tribute in, what was it, '85? (And someday somebody’s gonna write a book about James’s influence on house music. Despite what would appear to be an insistence worthy of the Adversary, the AntiJames, on a synthesized four/four beat, a lot of ‘80s house and garage cuts used piano flava recorded or inspired by James.)

To close, a brief word about James Brown’s politics. A lot of people have parsed his interesting love-hate relationship with America and his contradictory views on racism and capitalism and poverty. Hey, go to the music. Two tunes tell the story, and the rest is commentary.

In 1968, James Brown cut the raucous, defiant anthem of the Black Liberation Movement, “Say It Loud, I’m Black And I’m Proud.” This was well before the more mainstream outfits like Motown and Stax/Volt let their artists record even mildly nationalist or political music—or, to be more exact, were forced by them to allow it. It announces that the long centuries of white values, white history and white aesthetics being imposed on Black folk and used as a yardstick to judge them are at an end. When Sam Cooke cut the achingly beautiful “A Change Is Gonna Come” less than five years earlier, neither he nor anyone else could have predicted that it would come this fast or that it would take this amazing form.

Another five years on, in 1973, Richard Nixon was going down in flames. James’s background band, the JBs, led by legendary trombonist Fred Wesley, recorded a little ditty called “You Can Have Watergate, Just Gimme Some Bucks and I’ll Get Straight.” It’s absolutely a James Brown cut of the era, complete with grunts, a goofy riff on Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddy’s Dead” and a repeated chorus of “I need some money!” (Which reminds me—there’s precious little in Go-Go that doesn’t come from James Brown, too.) And the message is just as simple as “I’m Black And I’m Proud”: Black folks can’t afford to care about politics, we got to focus on the wallet. Wrong, but a view that is stronger now than it was then and hence one that revolutionary socialists need be on top of and ready to engage with.

But I can't leave that as the last word. The personal is after all political. James Brown was an abuser of women, a serial abuser. He may have meant every syllable of agonized self-abasement in "It's A Man's, Man's, Man's World," but it didn't stop him from clocking wives and girlfriends anymore than "I Get Along Without You Very Well," stopped Frank Sinatra. I'm gonna go back and reread Pearl Cleage's influential "Mad At Miles," to cut my sadness, and my wonkery, with anger.

UPDATE;

Be sure to check out Ajamu Dillahunt's thoughts on James's death over at Sankofa Meets the Future.

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