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The vast machinery of loss involves many moving parts, intertwined tragedies that sometimes turn into unexpected blessings. There is a tragedy and a blessing of time that opens the door to the tragedy and blessing of memory. I find myself wandering through a kind of vast desert of sound on mornings when I realize my mother has been gone so long that I cannot clearly recall her voice, only isolated words or fragments of phrases appearing in my mind before the rest fades beyond my comprehension. The puzzling but delightful blessing is that I do remember my mother’s melodious voice, vividly, as one of the first sounds of my childhood. I believe that whether someone is considered a “good” singer depends as much on our love for the person singing the song as on their ability to be an adequate vehicle for the song or a suitable accompanist for another voice pouring out of a speaker. It reminds me that I first became aware of Roberta Flack’s music through my mother’s voice. I don't remember the song or songs, I just remember hearing my mother singing a tune that was playing on the radio. My mother loved Flack, and so I loved her, too, and I was sad to hear this week of Flack's death at the age of eighty-eight, partly because I knew my mother would be grieving.
But I was also sad, because I had always admired Flack as a translator of emotion in song—going beyond simply covering a melody to extract new layers of feeling or narrative, or performing it so masterfully that her own desires colored it in new ways. This ability wasn’t all that surprising, given Flack’s musical background. She honed her already impressive gift at Mr. Henry’s Jazz Club in D.C., where she was a resident in 1968. People would line up around the block to enjoy her performance of a set list of covers and standards. Flack’s debut album, First Take, was recorded in just ten hours in February 1969, between the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the summer of Woodstock and the cultural changes that followed. It’s my favorite Flack record; it’s sad, furious, and searching. But what I appreciate most about it is its transformations. The jazz standard that closes the album, “Ballad of the Sad Young Men,” was written in 1959 by Tommy Wolfe and Fran Landesman for the musical The Nervous Set, about an avant-garde magazine publisher and his Beatnik beauty wife, and their unhappy marriage that can’t be saved even with the spoils of New York City. “Ballad” is a dark tune no matter who sings it, whether it’s Tahnee Seitz on the original cast recording; or Shirley Bassey, singing it live, her arms folded around her shoulders, as if she needs warmth in her own loneliness; or Rickie Lee Jones, his vocals half-inaudible over the gentle strumming of his guitar. While Flack was teaching music in the D.C. area in the years before “First Take,” she performed the song during a gig five nights a week, three times a night, at Mr. Henry’s. Atlantic Records signed her to a recording contract on the recommendation of jazz musician Les McCann, who saw her at a bar. Her version of “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” on “First Take” is especially devastating because of the way Flack places the spotlight on the stage. You have to understand the setting before you can comprehend the pain it contains.
For me, this was Flack’s superpower: her willingness to not just lead you to a feeling, but to first create the space to hold it. The song features sad young people, yes, sitting in bars. But it’s the way Flack takes her time with the verses, each consisting of just a few lines of lyrics, that makes you realize that these are sad young people looking for someone and struggling with the passage of time. They’re “growing old / That’s the cruelest part.” Perhaps it’s because Flack has performed this song in bars so often, for so long, that she’s come to understand that the core of her song isn’t so much “about” the pain echoing through the bar itself, but about everything that brings someone to the bar. Loneliness may be the song’s wings, but loneliness pressed against the cruelty of time is what makes it fly.
Speaking of flying, Flack first heard “Killing Me Softly with His Song” on a plane in 1972, when the original, performed by Lori Lieberman, came on the in-flight audio program. Flack was so taken with the song’s title and melody that she played it several times during the flight, jotting down the notes, and within two days she had an arrangement. Flack’s version, released in 1973, is more insistent, with a driving backbeat that helps the song reach its well-deserved crescendo and major-key finish.
Sourse: newyorker.com
