Like dancers with choreography or actors with scripts, jazz singers could take material that was known, even loved, then risk interpreting and revising it. They could conceal even as they revealed themselves. Inflection, timing and tonality were their language, at least as much as words.
Interpretation
Jazz singers creatively reinterpret known material, blending personal expression with established works.
In this quote, Margo Jefferson highlights the artistry of jazz singers, who have the ability to take familiar songs and infuse them with their own interpretations and emotions. This process of reinterpretation allows them to express their individuality while still paying homage to the original material, showing that music is as much about personal expression through inflection and tone as it is about the lyrics themselves.
In practice
In a lecture on creativity, one might use this quote to illustrate the power of personal interpretation in the arts.
We talk about how we think, believe, suspect Michael Jackson treats children. We don't talk about how WE treat child stars. Child stars are abused by the culture. And what's more treacherous than when the rewards of child stardom issue from the abuse?_x000D_ Child stars are performers above all else. Whenever their triumps, they are going to make sure we see everyone of their scars. That's the final price of admission.
I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.
So much of what blacks and women contend with is centered in how we view, and how the world views, our bodies. Gestures, voices, affect.
Depression is so treacherous - it can be so alluring as well as punishing. After all, it's yours and yours alone - no one else can interfere with it.
I found literary idols in Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, and Ntozake Shange, writers who'd dared to locate a sanctioned, forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility.
Black Power was really a major challenge to the social privileges and structures of the kind of privilege that I had grown up with. That whole belief... that you will only be able to advance if you are perfectly behaved, if you present yourself as what white people would consider an ideal of whiteness... all of that just began to burst open.
One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.
Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.
Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
I don't need to manufacture trauma in my life to be creative. I have a big enough reservoir of sadness or emotional trauma to last me.
I'm not performing anymore. I reveal myself to the audience. I reveal myself. That's the show now.
Yes, actually ever since I saw his films and tried to write about them, Sirk's been in everything I've done. Not Sirk himself, but what I've learned from his work.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.