Welcome to part two. If you missed part one, here's the recap: before launching into our review, we established how Jazz has lost cultural/financial significance in the mainstream over the years.
We also demonstrated how it took blog-based fallout around a piece of satire and a stunt-like release of another Tony Bennett Duets album (this one with Lady Gaga only and entitled Cheek To Cheek) to bring the medium some cultural cache again.
We then wondered if there was anything on the record to suggest whether or not this album was anything more than a stunt. We asked the question, "is this album a viable piece of material?"
We had complicated reactions, leading us to conclude that yes, this album feels like a stunt more of the time than not, and that the best indicator of its stunt-like status lay within its mix--a subject I've flogged around a lot since coming to write for this institution.
Since I imagine some of you would roll your eyes in the evocation of one of my favorite talking points (cultural co-option and appropriation seem to constitute other tropes in these online pages), I gave you a choice to follow me here, to part two, to pick up the argument.
Here goes:
Over the years, a tried and true method of Jazz mixing (at least, for so-called "traditional" or "straight ahead" Jazz recordings) has been established. The same goes for masters. I won’t bore you with the details here, but I’ll give you some adjectives everyone tends to keep in mind for the traditional jazz release: natural, acoustic, organic.
This, mind you, is the complete opposite of three adjectives governing the mainstream these days: manipulated, electric, and assembled.
The distinction is apparent: traditional Jazz music is played into being—with real live instruments! All played at the same time!—whereas today’s pop is manufactured piece by piece in no set location; a modern day hit can (and often will) circulate through many bedroom studios before the name-brand pop icon applies her vocal in a proper studio booth.
As such, the mixing of a traditional Jazz album is often innately different to accommodate that aforementioned lively aspect. Radical techniques (steep tweaks of equalization; slamming the dynamics with compression; the introduction of auto-tune or synthetically engineered harmonic distortion) often will not be implemented, or else an instrument--indeed, all the instruments, as traditional Jazz is usually played in concert--will cease to sound natural, acoustic, and organic.
What we have here on Cheek to Cheek is rare for the jazz world: an album of traditional jazz standards, arranged traditionally, but mixed like a pop record.
On “Goody Goody,” the piano sounds so compressed that unnatural resonances have been emphasized. On “Nature Boy” the vocals float on-top of the rest in a way less reminiscent of a Johnny Hartman recording than of a 2014 pop tune: the voices lay flat dynamically--they live in one space, the music inhabits another, and neither the twain shall meet.
Other sonically weird inconsistencies abound: drums that overpower the rest of the mix on certain selections; odd vocal edits (in “Firefly,” specifically), pianos saturating to the point of distortion (“Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”; “Sophisticated Lady”). A signal to noise ratio favoring noise instead of signal—listen to the underlying hiss on the ballads: this hiss is the result of unnatural amplifications. In a traditional jazz recording--especially a modern day straight ahead record produced within the last fifteen years--the noise floor would sit much, much lower.
All of these attributes are not hallmarks of Jazz records—even those of our modern age, in which sonic elements are made more crystalline than they ever were on a classic Blue Note record.
No, these are, instead, the trappings of a Pop record.
Furthermore, they demonstrate the stunt-like mentality behind this project: thanks to these dodgy mixes, it becomes utterly apparent that concessions were made to shoehorn a millennially-ignored genre into a millennially-popular sound; by evidence of the production itself, we can reasonably assert that someone made the choice to concede to both mediums, which is a marketing ploy, rather than a musical choice: it serves no sonic purpose to give traditional Jazz a modern Pop gloss--the aural differences between the two are just too disparate.
To make matters worse, it’s a halfhearted attempt: the record is just compressed enough to make it sound strange to a Jazzhead, but not embracing enough of pop conventions to appeal whole-heartedly to the Pop demographic either. It’s too much in the middle, which in my mind, makes it mediocre.
Indeed, who could've conceived that a record of the American Songbook would have ever benefitted from a glossier production? Past concessions to shoehorn Jazz into the Pop world often feel cheesy in retrospect, and indeed, if they had gone this route, Cheek to Cheek might not have been an exception.
However, there was motive, opportunity, reason, and context enough for them to at least consider a more modern day arrangement: the juxtaposition of the song "Lush Life" with the immutable facts of Lady Gaga's own lush life; but I'm getting ahead of myself.
For now, I have another bone to pick:
Gaga has said she made this album to rebel against the shoe-horning of modern day producers. “Although it was still my songs, and I still had a lot to say about the production,” she told the Telegraph, “the vocal was something that they really, really wanted to control. So my vocal presence has been kind of the smallest presence about me for a long time. So everything else becomes the focal point.”
She is using another genre to showcase an ability she thinks has heretofore gone ignored. In other words, Gaga has basically admitted to pilfering a move right of the “Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines” playbook. Unfortunately, her intentions fall prey to the same mistake Garth Brooks made: she kept her well-branded name in the marquis.
I've always wondered, would Chris Gaines have seemed more authentic if he weren’t marketed as Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines? Would we have been able to spot that rat? It’s a question we can’t really know the answer to, because he didn’t pull a full Andy Kaufman in the submersion process—he went about it half heartedly.
Likewise, if Gaga wanted to make an album that truly showcased her talent, leaving the persona aside, why not release the album under her own name—one that’s slightly less famous, but still carries water nonetheless? It would have been a solid indicator that she meant business in approaching this album as seriously as possible, one that Bennett would’ve appreciated: Tony Bennett is only "Tony Bennett" when he's singing; when he paints, he re-assumes his real name—Anthony Benedetto—to make a clear distinction between two art-forms, to minimize the stunt.
Indeed, the half-hearted manner in which Gaga tries to separate herself from herself extends, unfortunately, into the music.
And this brings us back to the Billy Strayhorn classic “Lush Life.”
If you want to distill the album's ultimate failure into one song, look no further than this number, played traditionally, sung for maximum bravura, and arranged in the orchestral style popular so many years ago; ultimately all of these aspects become its downfall.
The song would be a perfect vehicle for Bennett's and Gaga's intended purpose--to introduce this music to a slew of people who care little (if at all) about it; this was the number to pour all that energy in.
Consider the double entendre only a figure like Gaga could’ve made of the tune's opening line: “I used to visit all the very gay places, those come-what-may places.”
Oh ironies of ironies! The phenomenon of Gaga could have given such a dramatic curveball to those lines, and going further, such a vital, new interpretation to the meaning of the whole song.
Most ironically, this new and viable interpretation could have very well been achieved by giving some credence—some nod—to Gaga’s favored style of production. Sure, the move might've lured Gaga and Bennett into the same pitfalls as others who try to update the American Songbook through the means of production, but for the moment—for the now of our times—it would've built the right bridge for the gap in generations.
To be clear, I'm not talking about the bells and whistles of a song like "Aura"—I'm talking about the weighty gravitas of a song like “Dope,” one of the more favorable tunes on ARTPOP, a back-to-basics number which augmented its piano core with bits of ghostly organ, rumbling sub-harmonics, and drawling, intentionally out of tune vocals.
Imagine, for a moment, if a "Dope"-like arrangement of "Lush Life" were achieved. It’s not that much of a stretch, and it wouldn’t sound too much like a stunt: take out the strings and put in the organ; take out the drums and put in the rumble; take out the annoyingly, technically perfect vocals and replace them with snarling emotive cries.
Indeed, it’s easy to imagine, and easy to picture as a success.
But the opposite has been done here. The arrangement is nostalgic to the point of being both pat and pap. Most disappointing are the vocals: technically perfect, they are obsessed with being technically perfect—of showcasing the “I can do this!” rather than the “see how I can do this.” The song is all about the vocals, instead of the other way around--the mark of a truly inexperienced performer.
So much could’ve been done to make this song unique, to achieve the outcome Gaga purportedly wanted. She could’ve shown off her talent; instead she showed off her voice. It’s a sad irony: she wanted it both ways—Lady Gaga in name only: a Gaga project blighted by Stefani Germanotta’s needs, a Germanotta project unduly served by stripping away the Monster.
Indeed, here was her chance to broaden her deep musical reserves and her brand; she missed on both accounts.
So is the record a stunt? Yes. It’s a stunt, but it’s a well-meaning one. It’s clear—so very clear—that she tried so hard, so very hard. There is something admirable about that, but admirable isn’t the same as listenable.
But in the end, does it really matter? The sales projections are good, if not great. The record has made a splash in the media. These indicators, along with other strong showings—the number one debut of Barbra Streisand’s high profile take on the jazz duet format; the hubbub surrounding Django Gold’s New Yorker piece—say something positive about Jazz, a genre very close to many hearts: in mainstream terms, it's far from dead.
