MUSIC REVIEW BY Thierry De Clemensat, Paris Move
Janis Siegel revisits the tradition of vocalese with elegance, experience and a voice shaped by decades of music, creating a moving bridge between The Manhattan Transfer's legacy and the present.
5-STARS There are album titles that can make a listener suspicious before the first note has even been played. The Art of Vocalese could easily have been one of them, because if another singer had chosen such a grand title, I might have wondered whether it was claiming too much, too soon, as though the artist were announcing her place in musical history before the music itself had been given a chance to make the argument. Then I saw the name Janis Siegel on the cover, and the reaction was completely different, because that name immediately brought back a flood of memories from the middle of the 1980s, when I was programming tracks from The Manhattan Transfer's Vocalese again and again and becoming increasingly fascinated by an album that seemed to expand the very idea of what a vocal group could accomplish.
What stayed with me above all was Janis Siegel's voice, because there was something almost startling about the combination of precision, rhythmic intelligence, technique and emotional freedom that she brought to those performances. I had experienced something similar as a child when I first encountered Ella Fitzgerald, when I began to understand that certain singers could make you appreciate a song while simultaneously making you aware of the extraordinary possibilities of the human voice itself. Siegel belonged to that category for me, and perhaps that is why hearing The Art of Vocalese now feels less like discovering a new record than like opening a door into a room that has been waiting for decades.
The memories are particularly vivid because Vocalese was never simply another successful album in The Manhattan Transfer catalog. It represented an extraordinary meeting of musicians, writers and ideas, with Jon Hendricks at the center of the vocalese tradition and artists such as Bobby McFerrin contributing to a musical environment in which the boundaries between jazz, vocal harmony, improvisation and popular music seemed remarkably flexible. For me, however, the obsession was one particular track, "Another Night in Tunisia," that extraordinary vocal interpretation of Dizzy Gillespie's classic. I played it repeatedly, fascinated by the way the music could retain the rhythmic force and complexity of Gillespie's composition while being transformed into something that seemed to exist in an entirely different musical dimension. Even now, that recording, that album and Janis Siegel's magnificent voice remain remarkably vivid in my memory, which is why I approached The Art of Vocalese with a certain amount of respect and caution.
Nostalgia can be a dangerous companion when listening to new music, particularly when the artist in question has been part of your musical life for decades. We have a tendency to compare the present with an idealized version of the past, and memory is usually generous enough to remove the imperfections while preserving the voices, songs and performances that mattered most to us. What makes Janis Siegel's new album so interesting is that she does not appear to be trying to recreate that past. Instead, she is taking what she learned from it and carrying it into another stage of her life, which is ultimately a much more interesting proposition than simply attempting to reproduce the sound of The Manhattan Transfer.
The Art of Vocalese arrives as Siegel's first major project following the retirement of The Manhattan Transfer, and she has described the album primarily as a tribute to the group and to the work they accomplished together. That intention gives the record an important emotional dimension, but it would be a mistake to hear it merely as a farewell or an exercise in musical remembrance. The album feels more like a continuation of a conversation that has been taking place for most of Siegel's life, one that began long before The Manhattan Transfer became one of the most influential vocal groups in modern jazz and that continues now in a very different musical environment.
The passage of time is impossible to ignore, and it should not be ignored. Janis Siegel does not sound exactly as she did in the 1980s, and there would be little artistic value in pretending otherwise. A voice changes because a human being changes, and after a career that has lasted for decades, those changes become part of the instrument itself. What is striking about Siegel is not that she has somehow preserved the voice of her younger self, but that she has learned to use the voice she possesses today with remarkable intelligence. Rather than fighting the passage of time, she seems to have incorporated it into her musical vocabulary, allowing experience, restraint and a deeper understanding of phrasing to become part of the performance.
That may be one of the most important lessons contained in this album, particularly for younger singers who might be tempted to approach an artist like Siegel primarily as a technical model. The point is not to imitate her tone, her phrasing or the remarkable vocal control she developed over a lifetime, because imitation would miss what is most valuable about her example. What younger musicians can learn from Siegel is the more difficult process of developing a personal relationship with a song, understanding its history and structure, and then finding a way to make the material feel as though it belongs to you without destroying what made the composition important in the first place.
This ability to take possession of a song without erasing its identity has always been one of Siegel's greatest strengths, and it is one of the qualities that helped make The Manhattan Transfer so distinctive. The members of the group never treated repertoire as something that had to remain behind glass, because songs could be rearranged, rhythms reconsidered, harmonies rebuilt and familiar material transformed without losing its connection to the tradition from which it came. Siegel continues that process on The Art of Vocalese, but she does so with the accumulated experience of an artist who has spent decades understanding not only how to sing these arrangements, but how they are constructed.
That last point deserves more attention than it usually receives, because Janis Siegel is not simply the extraordinary voice at the center of this project. She is also an accomplished vocal arranger whose understanding of harmony and ensemble singing has been an important part of her career. During The Manhattan Transfer years, she wrote several of the vocal arrangements for Vocalese and Brasil, and her arrangement of "Birdland" earned her a Grammy Award. On The Art of Vocalese, she again takes responsibility for the vocal arrangements, while pianist and arranger John Di Martino provides the instrumental arrangements for most of the album.
Knowing this changes the way the record can be heard, because Siegel understands the architecture underneath the voice in a way that few singers can. She knows how a harmony should move, where a phrase requires space, how several voices can merge into a single texture and when they need to separate again, and she understands vocalese not simply as a difficult technique but as a musical language with its own grammar, history and emotional possibilities. The technical sophistication is therefore never an end in itself, because the arrangements remain connected to the larger purpose of the music, which is to communicate something to the listener.
That connection becomes even more meaningful through the presence of Jon Hendricks, whose influence on Siegel and on the entire vocalese tradition is impossible to separate from the history of The Manhattan Transfer. Several previously unrecorded Hendricks lyrics appear on the album, providing a direct connection between the musical tradition he helped establish and the work Siegel is doing today. Rather than treating those texts as historical artifacts, Siegel brings them into the present, allowing them to function as living material and reminding listeners that vocalese was never merely an exercise in placing words over instrumental solos. At its best, it is a sophisticated form of storytelling in which rhythm, harmony, language and personality have to operate simultaneously.
The album consequently becomes a meeting point between generations. Jon Hendricks helped demonstrate that the human voice could accomplish things listeners had traditionally associated with instrumental improvisers, The Manhattan Transfer brought that concept to an enormous audience and Janis Siegel became one of the group's defining voices while also contributing to its musical architecture. Now, after the end of The Manhattan Transfer, she is carrying those lessons into another chapter, surrounded by musicians who understand that honoring a tradition does not require freezing it in time.
John Di Martino is particularly important to that process as both pianist and arranger, while the ensemble includes musicians such as Lonnie Plaxico, Vince Cherico, Frank Vignola, Ed Cherry, Wayne Escoffery and Bobby Sanabria. Guests including Raul Midón, Lea DeLaria and the vocal trio JaLaLa, featuring Siegel alongside Laurel Massé and Lauren Kinhan, add further dimensions to a project that is deliberately broader than a simple solo showcase. The musicians do not merely accompany Siegel; they provide the musical environment in which her voice can respond, change direction and find new colors.
That ensemble is one reason The Art of Vocalese avoids becoming an exercise in nostalgia. The record acknowledges its history, but it does not attempt to reproduce the sonic world of The Manhattan Transfer as though the intervening decades had never happened. Instead, the musicians give the material a warmer and more contemporary setting, allowing Siegel to work with the repertoire from the perspective of an artist who has lived with this music for most of her life. The result is particularly appealing because it feels neither like a museum piece nor like an attempt to prove that nothing has changed.
There is always a temptation, when an artist reaches this stage of a career, to talk almost exclusively about legacy. We mention the famous albums, the awards, the collaborations and the history, and eventually the new recording becomes secondary to the story of everything that came before it. That would be an unfortunate way to approach The Art of Vocalese, because the album deserves to be heard as music rather than simply as documentation of a remarkable career. Someone who has never heard The Manhattan Transfer can encounter this record without knowing all of its history and still discover an experienced singer working with excellent musicians, taking familiar and less familiar material and making it personal.
For longtime listeners, however, the historical dimension inevitably adds another layer, and there is nothing wrong with that. Music is one of the places where memory remains unusually powerful, because a song can return us to a particular room, a particular period of our lives or even a version of ourselves that we had almost forgotten. Hearing Janis Siegel again after so many years inevitably brought me back to those days when Vocalese was constantly in my programming rotation and when "Another Night in Tunisia" seemed to possess an almost limitless supply of energy. The important difference is that Siegel does not ask us to go backward with her. She allows us to remember while continuing to move forward.
There is also something fitting about this project appearing on Origin Records, whose history and identity are closely connected to working musicians and to the communities that sustain jazz. Siegel seems entirely at home in that environment, because The Art of Vocalese is fundamentally a musician's record, built around collaboration, arrangement, interpretation and respect for the tradition rather than around the simple reproduction of a familiar brand. That relationship gives the album another layer of authenticity, particularly at a moment when so much music is produced with the expectation that it will be consumed quickly and forgotten almost as quickly.
The title itself becomes more convincing as the album unfolds. The Art of Vocalese sounds like a continuation of Vocalese, but it is not a conventional sequel and certainly not an attempt to recreate the circumstances of the earlier record. The two albums are separated by decades, by changes in the music business, by enormous changes in technology and by the end of The Manhattan Transfer itself. What connects them is the musical language, the commitment to vocal arrangement and the understanding that the voice can function not merely as a vehicle for lyrics but as an instrument capable of rhythmically and harmonically complex expression.
That is why the album feels so human. There is no reason to pretend that time has not changed Janis Siegel's voice, and there is even less reason to regard that change as a problem that needs to be concealed. The more interesting question is what decades of experience have added to the voice, and the answer seems to be a greater sense of judgment about when to push a phrase, when to leave it alone, when to allow an arrangement to carry the emotional weight and when to step forward and take control. Those are qualities that cannot be acquired simply by studying technique, because they are the result of listening, performing, making mistakes, learning from other musicians and spending an extraordinary amount of time inside the music.
That is something younger singers can study, even if they can never imitate it. Siegel's career offers an example of how a musician can remain deeply connected to a tradition while continuing to develop an individual voice, and The Art of Vocalese makes that process audible. The lesson is not that young singers should try to sound like Janis Siegel; it is that they should listen to how she listens to the music, how she makes decisions and how she transforms repertoire into something that reflects her own experience.
For longtime followers of The Manhattan Transfer, the album will inevitably bring back memories, and those memories are part of its pleasure. Yet The Art of Vocalese becomes much more compelling when we stop asking it to take us back to the past and instead allow it to show us where Janis Siegel is now. The record does not restore the 1980s, nor should it. It gives us something more valuable: an artist with a long history behind her who is still willing to enter the studio, surround herself with musicians she respects and discover what these songs can become today.
That is ultimately what makes the album worth hearing. The voice has changed, the musical world has changed and The Manhattan Transfer has reached the end of its extraordinary journey, but the conversation that began with the great tradition of vocalese is still continuing. Janis Siegel is now carrying that conversation into another generation, bringing with her the influence of Jon Hendricks, the experience of The Manhattan Transfer and the knowledge she has accumulated through a lifetime of singing and arranging.
When I hear The Art of Vocalese, I can still hear echoes of the Janis Siegel I discovered through Vocalese all those years ago, and I can still understand why "Another Night in Tunisia" once occupied such a powerful place in my listening life. But I also hear something that could not have been present then: the accumulated experience of a singer who has spent decades learning what a song can become, and who now has the freedom to approach that question from an entirely different point in her life.
For anyone who loves The Manhattan Transfer, the album offers a meaningful continuation of a musical story that shaped an important part of modern vocal jazz. For anyone discovering Janis Siegel for the first time, it provides an unusually rich introduction to an artist whose influence extends well beyond the role of lead singer. And for anyone interested in what happens when a great vocalist refuses to become a museum piece and instead accepts the changes that come with time, The Art of Vocalese offers something even more valuable: the chance to hear an artist carrying an old musical language into the present without pretending that either the music or the singer has remained unchanged.
5-STARS There are album titles that can make a listener suspicious before the first note has even been played. The Art of Vocalese could easily have been one of them, because if another singer had chosen such a grand title, I might have wondered whether it was claiming too much, too soon, as though the artist were announcing her place in musical history before the music itself had been given a chance to make the argument. Then I saw the name Janis Siegel on the cover, and the reaction was completely different, because that name immediately brought back a flood of memories from the middle of the 1980s, when I was programming tracks from The Manhattan Transfer's Vocalese again and again and becoming increasingly fascinated by an album that seemed to expand the very idea of what a vocal group could accomplish.
What stayed with me above all was Janis Siegel's voice, because there was something almost startling about the combination of precision, rhythmic intelligence, technique and emotional freedom that she brought to those performances. I had experienced something similar as a child when I first encountered Ella Fitzgerald, when I began to understand that certain singers could make you appreciate a song while simultaneously making you aware of the extraordinary possibilities of the human voice itself. Siegel belonged to that category for me, and perhaps that is why hearing The Art of Vocalese now feels less like discovering a new record than like opening a door into a room that has been waiting for decades.
The memories are particularly vivid because Vocalese was never simply another successful album in The Manhattan Transfer catalog. It represented an extraordinary meeting of musicians, writers and ideas, with Jon Hendricks at the center of the vocalese tradition and artists such as Bobby McFerrin contributing to a musical environment in which the boundaries between jazz, vocal harmony, improvisation and popular music seemed remarkably flexible. For me, however, the obsession was one particular track, "Another Night in Tunisia," that extraordinary vocal interpretation of Dizzy Gillespie's classic. I played it repeatedly, fascinated by the way the music could retain the rhythmic force and complexity of Gillespie's composition while being transformed into something that seemed to exist in an entirely different musical dimension. Even now, that recording, that album and Janis Siegel's magnificent voice remain remarkably vivid in my memory, which is why I approached The Art of Vocalese with a certain amount of respect and caution.
Nostalgia can be a dangerous companion when listening to new music, particularly when the artist in question has been part of your musical life for decades. We have a tendency to compare the present with an idealized version of the past, and memory is usually generous enough to remove the imperfections while preserving the voices, songs and performances that mattered most to us. What makes Janis Siegel's new album so interesting is that she does not appear to be trying to recreate that past. Instead, she is taking what she learned from it and carrying it into another stage of her life, which is ultimately a much more interesting proposition than simply attempting to reproduce the sound of The Manhattan Transfer.
The Art of Vocalese arrives as Siegel's first major project following the retirement of The Manhattan Transfer, and she has described the album primarily as a tribute to the group and to the work they accomplished together. That intention gives the record an important emotional dimension, but it would be a mistake to hear it merely as a farewell or an exercise in musical remembrance. The album feels more like a continuation of a conversation that has been taking place for most of Siegel's life, one that began long before The Manhattan Transfer became one of the most influential vocal groups in modern jazz and that continues now in a very different musical environment.
The passage of time is impossible to ignore, and it should not be ignored. Janis Siegel does not sound exactly as she did in the 1980s, and there would be little artistic value in pretending otherwise. A voice changes because a human being changes, and after a career that has lasted for decades, those changes become part of the instrument itself. What is striking about Siegel is not that she has somehow preserved the voice of her younger self, but that she has learned to use the voice she possesses today with remarkable intelligence. Rather than fighting the passage of time, she seems to have incorporated it into her musical vocabulary, allowing experience, restraint and a deeper understanding of phrasing to become part of the performance.
That may be one of the most important lessons contained in this album, particularly for younger singers who might be tempted to approach an artist like Siegel primarily as a technical model. The point is not to imitate her tone, her phrasing or the remarkable vocal control she developed over a lifetime, because imitation would miss what is most valuable about her example. What younger musicians can learn from Siegel is the more difficult process of developing a personal relationship with a song, understanding its history and structure, and then finding a way to make the material feel as though it belongs to you without destroying what made the composition important in the first place.
This ability to take possession of a song without erasing its identity has always been one of Siegel's greatest strengths, and it is one of the qualities that helped make The Manhattan Transfer so distinctive. The members of the group never treated repertoire as something that had to remain behind glass, because songs could be rearranged, rhythms reconsidered, harmonies rebuilt and familiar material transformed without losing its connection to the tradition from which it came. Siegel continues that process on The Art of Vocalese, but she does so with the accumulated experience of an artist who has spent decades understanding not only how to sing these arrangements, but how they are constructed.
That last point deserves more attention than it usually receives, because Janis Siegel is not simply the extraordinary voice at the center of this project. She is also an accomplished vocal arranger whose understanding of harmony and ensemble singing has been an important part of her career. During The Manhattan Transfer years, she wrote several of the vocal arrangements for Vocalese and Brasil, and her arrangement of "Birdland" earned her a Grammy Award. On The Art of Vocalese, she again takes responsibility for the vocal arrangements, while pianist and arranger John Di Martino provides the instrumental arrangements for most of the album.
Knowing this changes the way the record can be heard, because Siegel understands the architecture underneath the voice in a way that few singers can. She knows how a harmony should move, where a phrase requires space, how several voices can merge into a single texture and when they need to separate again, and she understands vocalese not simply as a difficult technique but as a musical language with its own grammar, history and emotional possibilities. The technical sophistication is therefore never an end in itself, because the arrangements remain connected to the larger purpose of the music, which is to communicate something to the listener.
That connection becomes even more meaningful through the presence of Jon Hendricks, whose influence on Siegel and on the entire vocalese tradition is impossible to separate from the history of The Manhattan Transfer. Several previously unrecorded Hendricks lyrics appear on the album, providing a direct connection between the musical tradition he helped establish and the work Siegel is doing today. Rather than treating those texts as historical artifacts, Siegel brings them into the present, allowing them to function as living material and reminding listeners that vocalese was never merely an exercise in placing words over instrumental solos. At its best, it is a sophisticated form of storytelling in which rhythm, harmony, language and personality have to operate simultaneously.
The album consequently becomes a meeting point between generations. Jon Hendricks helped demonstrate that the human voice could accomplish things listeners had traditionally associated with instrumental improvisers, The Manhattan Transfer brought that concept to an enormous audience and Janis Siegel became one of the group's defining voices while also contributing to its musical architecture. Now, after the end of The Manhattan Transfer, she is carrying those lessons into another chapter, surrounded by musicians who understand that honoring a tradition does not require freezing it in time.
John Di Martino is particularly important to that process as both pianist and arranger, while the ensemble includes musicians such as Lonnie Plaxico, Vince Cherico, Frank Vignola, Ed Cherry, Wayne Escoffery and Bobby Sanabria. Guests including Raul Midón, Lea DeLaria and the vocal trio JaLaLa, featuring Siegel alongside Laurel Massé and Lauren Kinhan, add further dimensions to a project that is deliberately broader than a simple solo showcase. The musicians do not merely accompany Siegel; they provide the musical environment in which her voice can respond, change direction and find new colors.
That ensemble is one reason The Art of Vocalese avoids becoming an exercise in nostalgia. The record acknowledges its history, but it does not attempt to reproduce the sonic world of The Manhattan Transfer as though the intervening decades had never happened. Instead, the musicians give the material a warmer and more contemporary setting, allowing Siegel to work with the repertoire from the perspective of an artist who has lived with this music for most of her life. The result is particularly appealing because it feels neither like a museum piece nor like an attempt to prove that nothing has changed.
There is always a temptation, when an artist reaches this stage of a career, to talk almost exclusively about legacy. We mention the famous albums, the awards, the collaborations and the history, and eventually the new recording becomes secondary to the story of everything that came before it. That would be an unfortunate way to approach The Art of Vocalese, because the album deserves to be heard as music rather than simply as documentation of a remarkable career. Someone who has never heard The Manhattan Transfer can encounter this record without knowing all of its history and still discover an experienced singer working with excellent musicians, taking familiar and less familiar material and making it personal.
For longtime listeners, however, the historical dimension inevitably adds another layer, and there is nothing wrong with that. Music is one of the places where memory remains unusually powerful, because a song can return us to a particular room, a particular period of our lives or even a version of ourselves that we had almost forgotten. Hearing Janis Siegel again after so many years inevitably brought me back to those days when Vocalese was constantly in my programming rotation and when "Another Night in Tunisia" seemed to possess an almost limitless supply of energy. The important difference is that Siegel does not ask us to go backward with her. She allows us to remember while continuing to move forward.
There is also something fitting about this project appearing on Origin Records, whose history and identity are closely connected to working musicians and to the communities that sustain jazz. Siegel seems entirely at home in that environment, because The Art of Vocalese is fundamentally a musician's record, built around collaboration, arrangement, interpretation and respect for the tradition rather than around the simple reproduction of a familiar brand. That relationship gives the album another layer of authenticity, particularly at a moment when so much music is produced with the expectation that it will be consumed quickly and forgotten almost as quickly.
The title itself becomes more convincing as the album unfolds. The Art of Vocalese sounds like a continuation of Vocalese, but it is not a conventional sequel and certainly not an attempt to recreate the circumstances of the earlier record. The two albums are separated by decades, by changes in the music business, by enormous changes in technology and by the end of The Manhattan Transfer itself. What connects them is the musical language, the commitment to vocal arrangement and the understanding that the voice can function not merely as a vehicle for lyrics but as an instrument capable of rhythmically and harmonically complex expression.
That is why the album feels so human. There is no reason to pretend that time has not changed Janis Siegel's voice, and there is even less reason to regard that change as a problem that needs to be concealed. The more interesting question is what decades of experience have added to the voice, and the answer seems to be a greater sense of judgment about when to push a phrase, when to leave it alone, when to allow an arrangement to carry the emotional weight and when to step forward and take control. Those are qualities that cannot be acquired simply by studying technique, because they are the result of listening, performing, making mistakes, learning from other musicians and spending an extraordinary amount of time inside the music.
That is something younger singers can study, even if they can never imitate it. Siegel's career offers an example of how a musician can remain deeply connected to a tradition while continuing to develop an individual voice, and The Art of Vocalese makes that process audible. The lesson is not that young singers should try to sound like Janis Siegel; it is that they should listen to how she listens to the music, how she makes decisions and how she transforms repertoire into something that reflects her own experience.
For longtime followers of The Manhattan Transfer, the album will inevitably bring back memories, and those memories are part of its pleasure. Yet The Art of Vocalese becomes much more compelling when we stop asking it to take us back to the past and instead allow it to show us where Janis Siegel is now. The record does not restore the 1980s, nor should it. It gives us something more valuable: an artist with a long history behind her who is still willing to enter the studio, surround herself with musicians she respects and discover what these songs can become today.
That is ultimately what makes the album worth hearing. The voice has changed, the musical world has changed and The Manhattan Transfer has reached the end of its extraordinary journey, but the conversation that began with the great tradition of vocalese is still continuing. Janis Siegel is now carrying that conversation into another generation, bringing with her the influence of Jon Hendricks, the experience of The Manhattan Transfer and the knowledge she has accumulated through a lifetime of singing and arranging.
When I hear The Art of Vocalese, I can still hear echoes of the Janis Siegel I discovered through Vocalese all those years ago, and I can still understand why "Another Night in Tunisia" once occupied such a powerful place in my listening life. But I also hear something that could not have been present then: the accumulated experience of a singer who has spent decades learning what a song can become, and who now has the freedom to approach that question from an entirely different point in her life.
For anyone who loves The Manhattan Transfer, the album offers a meaningful continuation of a musical story that shaped an important part of modern vocal jazz. For anyone discovering Janis Siegel for the first time, it provides an unusually rich introduction to an artist whose influence extends well beyond the role of lead singer. And for anyone interested in what happens when a great vocalist refuses to become a museum piece and instead accepts the changes that come with time, The Art of Vocalese offers something even more valuable: the chance to hear an artist carrying an old musical language into the present without pretending that either the music or the singer has remained unchanged.