The Art of Vocalese

The jazz vocal has few better friends and finer multitasking practitioners than Janis Siegel.

Since her 1972 debut as part of close-harmony revivalists and vocalese re-vital-istes the Manhattan Transfer and a concurrent wide-spectrum solo career, Sigel has acted not only as playful contralto/mezzo-soprano singer and elastic lyricist (occasionally, in tandem, with spiritual mentor-turned-collaborator Jon Hendricks), she's an accomplished producer and vocal arranger who won a Grammy for said skills with the Transfer's take on the Joe Zawinul instrumental "Birdland."

While she's known primarily as the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross-whisperer for bringing singing improvisation to new heights, Siegel's solo albums — from Short Stories and Slow Hot Wind, both with pianist Fred Hersch, to the soulful showtune rarities of Sketches of Broadway with stops at noir pop (NightSongs) and Yiddish jazz (Mazel) — are equally exquisite, eccentric and experimental. Which brings VOX to Siegel's new solo album, The Art of Vocalese.

For her first solo album since the Manhattan Transfer's retirement in 2023, Siegel returns to the scene of the rhyme shared with Hendricks on compositions from Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck, Claus Ogerman and more, with a crack jazz ensemble featuring pianist-arranger John Di Martino, bassist Lonnie Plaxico and saxophonist Wayne Escoffery among the storied players.


Photo credit: John Abbott
Together, with lyrics by Hendricks found among her papers, the ensemble backs Siegel singing both the Bird and Miles solos on Parker's "Back to Barbados"; pays tribute to bop tap dancer Howard "Sandman" Sims on "It's Sand, Man"; and hones in on Miles's "Bye Bye Blackbird" solo (the latter two with respective vocal guests including Raul Midón and original Transfer member Laurel Masse.

"I love listening to and thinking about different interpretations of the same song," says Siegel in consideration of the distinctly dissimilar emotional tumult of both Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra singing "I'm a Fool to Want You," before she shared her heartache on national television during the run of her 1975 CBS variety series with the MT.

Vocalese as a curious art form is but one step afield from varying those interpretations and connecting the dots between wine-vintage jazz solos, freshly designed vocal riffs and funny, funky new lyrics, as did King Pleasure, LH&R and Bobby McFerrin. In making this first post-MT album a nu-vocalese work, Siegel pays tribute to the group she's been a part of since 1972.

"Vocalese was a very big part of the Manhattan Transfer from the git-go as Tim [Hauser, the quartet's late founder] and I wrote lyrics to for the first album's 'You Can Depend on Me,'" says Siegel of finding words and making noise for the Earl Hines-penned, Count Basie-recorded classic, "with me writing the Lester Young solo and Tim doing Shad Collins's solo."

In the mood to clean house, literally, after that last Manhattan Transfer concert, Siegel found reams and racks of charts, arrangements and lyrics, a file of which just happened to be those of neighbor and friend Jon Hendricks. "They had never been recorded," she says. "Jon would just come over to my place, with his yellow legal pads and write in longhand in this beautiful handwriting. I found his full lyrics for Charlie Parker's 'Barbados,' Miles's 'Bye Bye Blackbird,' the Average White Band's 'Pick Up the Pieces.' I felt like an archaeologist in my own home."

Cobble that with lyrics and arrangements that she'd written for Dave Brubeck's "Square Dance," among other lost charts, and Siegel all but had an entire new album and its theme before her. "It was a natural path for me once the Transfer stopped touring," she says.

As for her own longtime solo album path, The Art of Vocalese included, and the aforementioned work with Hersch and other top-tier instrumentalists, Siegel goes strictly on instinct. "It's all about what draws me in, what and who I'm hearing that I like, where's the heat, where's the passion," says the vocalist.

"I love Broadway musicals, saw Barbara Stresiand in Funny Girl as a kid growing up in Brooklyn, but I wasn't a showtune person — I'm ashamed to say that I wasn't into Stephen Sondheim — until a friend suggested that I do an album of these songs and reinterpret them. Thinking of all that now, Sondheim's tunes are very jazzy. Then there's the B-3 organ and guitar thing for Friday Night Special and that late-night soul sound. That was my producer Joel Dorn, who I worked with often — that was his idea."

Thinking forward to The Art of Vocalese, Siegel's experimental instinct led her to record all of the album's "dummy vocals" in one day ("it's about money, but it also sometimes leads to a great, raw vibe that I keep"), something that, in looking at jazz now, the singer is wildly enthused about. The fusions in jazz — its rhythmic and harmonic innovations and sophistications, its genre-twists and improvisational abandon — thrill Siegel as a vocalist, arranger and musician.

"All of that is exciting to me," she says of jazz experimentation in her youth and in her present. "When I started listening to jazz, it was all instrumental stuff — that was the turn-on — the first album I ever bought being Kenny Burrell and Jimmy Smith's Blues Bash. In college, I was attracted to free jazz and all its energy... I mean, I didn't really start getting into singers and singing until the Manhattan Transfer."

Thinking of who Siegel has been from her start, you can hear her love and devotion to the instrumentalists. That's what lies at the wild, wily heart of The Art of Vocalese and will likely dwell within each song that she, her ensemble and her vocal guests perform at its release party at Dizzy's Club in New York on November 4: freedom.

"It's all about being a part of the band, being at one with the players," Siegel says. "Something I teach my students about singing is that you got to listen to the trumpet players. You have to listen to the saxophonists. Sing with that feeling and articulation. And vocalese is but a way into all that as you're accessing the mind of the improviser — of, say, Coleman Hawkins through "Body and Soul," through him negotiating those changes. You're learning in a more visceral way."