Category: Music

La Gioiosa: Cecilia B and me

Cecilia Bartoli and me at Tower Records, November 11, 2003

What a shock it was to suddenly see Cecilia Bartoli (accompanied by pianist Lang Lang) on TV, performing the Olympics anthem at the Opening Ceremonies of the Milano-Cortina Winter Games, February 6, 2026. For many years, I’ve neither heard nor, frankly, thought about her.

It wasn’t always so.

There was a time when such neglect was psychologically impossible, as friends can attest. The following recollection was written over two decades ago, but apart from being shared with a few friends, it remained unpublished until now. It contexualizes my psychological self-diagnosis.

My übertolerant wife, divining that it was but a phase, enjoyed Friday night’s performance next to me.

La Gioiosa[1]: My Encounter with Cecilia Bartoli

Cecilia Bartoli, the mezzo-soprano superstar, is my latest obsession. It began in 1995. The occasion was a PBS special I caught by accident. The remote was in my right hand, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s fudge ice cream in my left. Coming under her spell took about five minutes.

After an hour of paralysis, my left arm alchemized into a chocolate Easter bunny. Continue reading “La Gioiosa: Cecilia B and me”

Wé Ani’s Many Visual and Audible Textures: A Birthday Reflection

Since my last post of 2023, I’ve been exploring musical performer Wé Ani’s wide (wild?) diversity of vocal textures.[1] In this one, I present evidence of something no less striking: the extreme variability of her self-presentation. Together, they raise, playfully, the genuine metaphysical question about personal identity over time. Playfully, I say, for it’s grounded not in abstractions, but in perception and enjoyment.[2]

Of course, if you don’t care about her aural variety, evidence for its visual counterpart may strike you little more than an array of silent pictures. It’s up to the curious among you to add sonic color to static portraits.

If that’s not you, fine. If it is, however, click on the audio links. In short, this one’s for the cognoscenti. Continue reading “Wé Ani’s Many Visual and Audible Textures: A Birthday Reflection”

Wé Ani’s Uncanny Sonic Diversity Revisited

I can never confidently predict the vocal texture that Wé Ani, my favorite singer, will bring to a performance. Please indulge me as I take a break from politics, history, philosophy, and theology (all right, except for one footnote).

Over the past two years, I’ve audited all her music videos, almost a hundred of them, long and short. Some were made in her humble home studio, some professionally scripted and videographed, still others televised for competitions where the magic that only million-dollar budgets can buy enhances her image in a dozen different Wés, I mean, ways.

My oft-muttered rhetorical question is: what resemblance does the artist in Video A bear to the one in Video B (A and B standing for any randomly chosen two items in that collection)?

I documented this in detail over a year ago in “Wé Ani: a protean multiplex of vocal performance.” I won’t reproduce all the links, for only a few of you are motivated to verify my assertions. I conceded that this post’s appeal is probably not much more than that of a stranger’s diary entry.

Since posting that essay, there has been even more corroborating evidence.

My topic is her singing, but she also has a wide diversity of “looks,” each a function of her age, diet, wardrobe, hairstyling, lighting, and so forth.

The problem, as I see it, is one of aesthetic reconciliation: I find it hard to reconcile Wé’s many divergent (and, to me, deeply pleasing) vocal textures as embodiments of a single artist.

Continue reading “Wé Ani’s Uncanny Sonic Diversity Revisited”

Happy Birthday, Wé Ani! (2025 Edition)

[I got the date right last year, but this year’s birthday tribute was two days late! She was born on the 23rd of January, 1999. I apologize for the error.—A.G.F., March 1, 2025]

In the late ‘70s, I overheard my social democrat Marxist roommate, while laying out[1] an issue of his new political journal, make it clear to a supporter who disagreed with an editorial decision: “This is my journal! Should I convert to Buddhism, this becomes a Buddhist journal!” I feel that way about this site.

My occasional posts about Wé Ani [way AH-nee], a wondrous musical performer, may seem out of place on this site, devoted as it is to theology, philosophy, and history. What her performances have meant to my soul[2], however, justifies my noticing her doings from time to time. Her 26th birthday is one of those times.

AnthonyGFlood.com will not become more of a Wé Ani fan platform than it currently is; it will serve as an outlet for the joy her music brings me. If I’ve lost some of you, I understand.

(In a hurry? Skip down to “Taste and See: Five Indispensable Wé Ani Performances.”)

Here are snippets of posts that capture my sentiments and may move you to read them in context. If they inspire you to check out her videos and ask, “Where has she been all my life?,” then they have served their purpose. Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Wé Ani! (2025 Edition)”

Two anniversaries of Pat and me

September 9, 1972, was the first time I spoke to Pat Martino on Folk City’s stage while he packing up after his last set. (I had seen him there many times that summer, one perk of having FC’s Mike Porco as a friend of the family).

Exactly 23 years later, a fellow fan took a picture of him, Gloria, and me in Blue Note’s second-floor dressing room. This was directly across the street (that is, West Third Street) from where Folk City once was. (These music venues were never contemporaries.)

I’ve published this picture before, but not the copy Pat signed almost 14 years later on March 15, 2009 at the Rubin Museum of Art (150 West 17th Street). The occasion was the premiere of Unstrung!, a documentary about Pat’s recovery from brain surgery and amnesia. (Free download of medical journal article on Pat’s case.)  Gloria couldn’t make the event, but Mom, who’s the reason I got into jazz, did. A few months earlier, her friend had played Pat’s Strings! album on his turntable, thereby altering the course of my musical life.

My  diary for September 9, 1972 shows that I was equally excited about meeting another fan of Pat’s:

Was I knocked out when Mom came over to me [at my Folk City table in the main music room] and told me that George Benson  was there diggin’ on the music! I went over to his lovely wife to ask if that was truly him and then introduced myself and asked him a few questions. He’s coming out with a book by which student of various levels can progress and “get more serious.” What a surprise that was! Pat M. came over and and rapped about guitar makes (George has an 1898 Gibson) and other things. Ornette Coleman was sitting at the bar. . . . I talked to Pat about little things. He’s really at peace with himself. He went for a walk after his set. Mom was sitting at the bar and stopped him to talk. He’s so gracious. Mom and I hung around to be driven home [in the Bronx] by Mike [whom, in my diary, I cluelessly surnamed “Gerde”!].

As 1994 was the last year I kept a diary, I have only that photo to stir my memory of that 1995 meeting (of whose significance as the anniversary of our first chat I was not then cognizant). The following summer (June 30, 1973, to be exact) I’d see both Pat and George (and a half-dozen other jazz guitar greats) in the Wollman Amphitheater in Central Park at the Newport Jazz Festival. The concert was aptly named “Guitar Explosion.”

Happy to share with those who care and remember that September.

George Benson and Pat, Wollman Amphitheater in Central Park at the Newport Jazz Festival, June 30, 1973.

 

 

80 years ago today

Pat Azzara at about six months. He adopted the surname “Martino” when he went on the road. His father, an amateur guitar strummer, was known as  “Micky Martino.”

Allied forces liberated Paris. Composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein turned 26 and would soon bask in the Broadway success of On the Town. There was, however, another birthday that day (literally, the day of his birth). It was of another great musician whom it was my privilege to know, the guitarist Pat Martino (1944-2021).

It is almost impossible for me to grasp that he would have turned 80 today. In fact, he’s been gone almost three years. To me, he’s still the “guitar god” I met at Folk City on West Third Street in Greenwich Village, when I was 19 and he an old man (in my eyes) of 28. I distinctly remember chatting with him on the northeast corner of West Third and Sixth Avenue (yes, just outside the basketball court informally known as “The Cage”) about how I was picking up the jazz tradition on our common instrument. A few months later, he’d offer to teach me if I’d be willing to travel to his hometown of Philly.

My first initial impression of his playing, like that of many young listeners discovering their favorite musicians, was of his speed of execution. (“Look how fast he plays!) I slowly but surely realized that “fast” does not capture the beauty of his streams of eighth notes. The excitement I so poorly conveyed derived from his melodic inventiveness and “pulse.” He didn’t sound like anyone else, but you knew if someone else was playing his lines Continue reading “80 years ago today”

Wé Ani: a protean multiplex of vocal performance

“I mean, there’s a lot of layers.” Wé Ani (before her American Idol performance of “Ain’t No Way” @0.38)

Imagine a ten-screen movie multiplex, each showing an Anthony Hopkins film. In one, he’s Nixon; in another, Hannibal Lecter; in a third, Zorro; fourth, Odin; fifth, C. S. Lewis; sixth, Pablo Picasso; seventh, John Quincy Adams; eighth, Alfred Hitchcock; ninth, Pope Benedict XVI; and on the tenth screen, Richard the Lionheart. Hopkins is their only commonality; each can make one forget the others (at least for a few hours). He’s all of these characters . . . and none of them.

Wé Ani is her performances’ only common thread: each “theater” in her audiovisual multiplex shows off a distinctive vocal texture into which no other intrudes and which often sets up an expectation that is (pleasantly) disappointed. Each performance also displays a unique dramatic persona.

Perhaps the better metaphor (although it’s by now a cliché) is: a palette of many colors.

If you compare several bars from each of, say, seven (randomly chosen) tracks, then unless you already know who’s singing, you may reasonably doubt that the singer on the first track is the one on the second (or any other). And that’s because of the vocal color she chooses for any song she interprets.

Every great singer has variability in range and textural quality but Frank Sinatra always sounds like Frank; Ella Fitzgerald, Ella; Stevie Wonder, Stevie. That’s what their fans expect. Not so with Wé, however: you may expect Aretha but get Nina; Etta but hear Whitney; and so forth. Continue reading “Wé Ani: a protean multiplex of vocal performance”

Happy Birthday, Wé Ani, My Musical Tonic and Oasis

Wé Ani

Wé Ani turns 25 today. Last spring when she auditioned for American Idol her protean voice began drilling a hole in my soul.

Due more to what was going on in my life than her talent, her equally powerful performances on The Voice in 2016 didn’t have that lasting effect.

Her career is a story of strong family support, raw talent (dancing, acting, classical voice training), and diligence.[1]

I’ll let my notes from 2023’s last post introduce the rest of this one:

. . . Harlem-born performer Wé Ani (b. 1999) [is] the most versatile, and powerful, pop singer I’ve ever heard, whose voice salves my charred soul and never fails to plaster a smile on my face. My wife and I had first seen her in 2016 on The Voice (when she went by “Wé McDonald”).

A physically different (almost unrecognizably so) Wé competed in last season’s (2023) American Idol . . . She can belt like nobody’s business, folk her way through any ballad (guitar and all), or rock it out, or out-Broadway any veteran of The Great White Wé, I mean, Way.

There seem to be at least a half dozen Wé Anis: after watching any two videos, I sincerely wonder, “Is that the same singer?” . . .

And then there’s the uncanny sonic chasm between her childlike speaking pitch and her robust, gritty singing voice: she says she wants to be taken seriously, but “it’s not easy sounding like a 12-year-old at 23.” The simile that comes to my mind is fiction’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (minus the creepy associations): she makes a fool of anyone who prejudges her talent on that basis. . . .

She’s also a modest and charming interviewee (sans tatoos, nose ring, acrylic claws and other accoutrements of female celebrityhood): consider one from 2018 and another from September.

Varleton McDonald (Wé’s father and manager), Wé Ani McDonald, and Michael Amorgianos (Lawrence Middle School psychologist), January 2023

Wé’s voice and musical choices take me back to the day, over sixty years ago, when pop music entered my life, washing away life’s dirt as images of war, assassinations, and race riots washed across the TV screen.

Her voice is more than pleasant: it’s a delivery system for aesthetic endorphins, an oasis and tonic for my soul.

But the above text is so much blather. Why not taste and see for yourself?

Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Wé Ani, My Musical Tonic and Oasis”

On “color-blindness” and artistic merit: the power of The Righteous Brothers

The Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley (b. 1940) and Bobby Hatfield (1940-2003)

Lately, I’ve stumbled upon an unexpected joy—watching “reaction videos” on YouTube where young podcasters experience great musical artists for the first time. My focus has been on their reactions to The Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield. I recall seeing their grainy masterpieces, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, and Unchained Melody, when they were broadcast on TV in ’64-’65. Their sonic power is undiminished to this day.

Reaction quality varies wildly; many are shallow. It never occurs to these tech-savvy kids to research answers to their simple questions, like, “Are they really brothers?” (when viewing Unchained Melody, Hatfield’s solo effort) “Where’s the other brother?” Almost all of them remember hearing the latter in a movie (Ghost, 1990), but none can name it.

Righteous Brothers: The Definitive CollectionIn any case, I find myself enjoying their reaction to the money-making notes that I see coming (having seen the videos hundreds of times). The females, black and white, American, European, and Asian, invariably melt, even shed tears. Sometimes their accents make their English unintelligible to me, but the emotion is undeniable. Some male viewers, rendered speechless, are content in that silence; others, metaphysically shocked. “I thought they were black,” some mutter, followed by “Soul got no color!” or the equivalent.

There are similar reactions to Tom Jones and other exemplars of “blue-eyed soul.” I will not litter this post with links. Interested readers can find them easily enough. Anyone in need of suggestions may ask for them in the comment box.

What these viewers would likely reject is the notion that by enjoying and sharing these performances, they are complicit in the “cultural appropriation” allegedly committed by The Righteous Brothers, Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, and others.

It’s as good a day as any to appreciate that we judge singers not by the color of their skin but by the profound emotions their vocal cords convey. Globally, there are millions of young people with whom I might have very little else in common, yet they and I delight in the same vibrations; in that commonality, however qualified, I take some comfort.