“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”