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And now we come to Manhattan Transfer, or what we later came to refer to as just "the Transfer". What an amazing run they had—35 years of great tight harmony, jazz, standards and brilliant singing and smart, urbane musicianship. Just four singers, sometimes a piano or...
Continuing this week's survey of iconic singing groups, I'm drawing again from my youth. The Bobs invented themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970's. They wrote most of their own material. I was in school at UC Berkeley and one of my pals from the...
It's Tuesday. It's really hot this July. Tempers are flaring, folks are getting violent (though I've read that crime is down 50% over the past 20 years). Politics looks like some wierd version of "Survivor". What we need is something cool and uplifting. Take 6, who...
This week I want to share singing groups that I think really defined their time. I can't do them all. The Andrews sisters sure made their mark, and captured their full share of fame, but maybe we won't have time for them. But let's start with Lambert Hendricks and...
Ending the week on a transcendent, serene note, I'm returning to Leonard Bernstein at the piano with baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in Mahler's "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen". This piece is an ultimate test for both singer and conductor, but when reduced to...
This week I'm still exploring the role of the accompanist, especially from unusual, unsuspected talents. Here is soprano Galina Vishnevskaya who married the famous cellist Rostropovich, but here Rostropovich is at the piano for an entire recital of Tchaikovsky. He...