Somebody asked me recently how I judged art and music. What’s my criteria for what I perceive as good or bad? Well, my taste was formed decades ago in Brownsville, Brooklyn. When I listen to music I’m always looking for a way home, a way back to the soulful, warm, communal feelings of house parties with 45rpm singles on the Hi-Fi, rum & Coke in glassses, and myself peering around a corner in my PJ’s at a party I was too young to attend. It’s taken me years to appreciate how my yearning to be part of those very adult moments still haunt me and how the sounds that came through the turntable seeped into my blood. My analytical mind is defined by those Saturday night rituals in the living room of our public housing apartment.
For me Aretha, David Ruffin of the tempin’ Temptations, Gladys, Otis, Curtis, the wicked Wilson Pickett, the Four Tops’ Levi Stubbs and Mr. James Brown are major deities from temples in Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, Philadelphia and Muscle Shoals, Alabama to who I worshipped via black vinyl totems.
The primacy of the human voice — whether crooning, shouting or whispering — is the through line of my life. You can describe voices technically (tenors, altos, sopranos, bass), which may tell you how they sound, but doesn’t tell you a thing about how they make you feel. Every recording I hear, every performance I witness, and every jam in a club that gets me nodding, evokes a soulful feeling deep in my bones. Whatever instrumentation is employed, chorus sung, or sonic trickery engineered has to speak to me in the language “soul.”
Like the word brotherhood, the idea of soul has been relegated to the dust bin of history as new forms of music have arrived, many of built on the foundation of ‘60s soul. Still, I don’t think you can spent any time enjoying black music of any era and not be bathed in soul. But what do I mean by “soul?” To me soul is the ability to communicate an infinite wide range of feeling via voice or musicianship no matter what, officially, the song is about. In a sense lyrics, while not immaterial, are too tangible to always capture the intangibility of our inner lives. It is sound alone that is the truest vehicle for the complexity that the intangiblity of music articulates for player and listener. I heard the seventysix year old Bettye LaVette sing the standard “The Man I Love” the other night at the Hollywood Bowl and somewhere in the second verse you hit a note that had me ran right through my body and damn near made me cry. I could describe that moment with a lot of adjectives, but simply put Bettye has soul and I felt it run right up my spine.
I may parse lyrics for metaphors. I may ruminate on how technology, social issues, and biography affect songs. But none of it matters without that soul connection. That’s what I came from, that’s where I’m coming from, and that’s what I’m looking for.