Voices

September 1, 2018
A music journalist surveys more than a half-century of popular music.Coleman (The Train in the Night: A Story of Music and Loss, 2013) has endured severe hearing loss since 2007, but that hasn't dampened his appreciation of popular music. Here, he takes readers on his personal journey through the songs that have influenced him, most of them from his formative years in the 1960s and '70s. As with any work of nonfiction based on opinion, many of the author's statements are bound to raise eyebrows. Jazz lovers will share his appreciation of John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," but many may bristle at his claim that every jazz recording since then "only counts really as an afterthought or further meditation," which is a little like saying that no director has made a great film since Citizen Kane. Of Aretha Franklin, Coleman writes, "no voice in any musical style has ever cleaved as closely to the spirit of ecstasy and its close associate, rapture." Franklin's genius is beyond dispute, but opera and jazz fans might counter with Jessye Norman, Maria Callas, Billie Holiday, and other equally rapturous performers. The author begins one chapter by stating that it would have been a shame if the Cuban missile crisis had destroyed the world because that would have meant "[n]o Beatles, no Stones, no Animals or Yardbirds or Kinks or Small Faces or Led Zeppelin"--and, ultimately, no Taylor Swift. Well, yes, but one could be forgiven for thinking that other losses might have been more catastrophic. Even readers who disagree with Coleman's opinions, however, will appreciate his passion, and he makes many astute observations, as when he writes that the Rolling Stones' output "was never a music of intimate connection but an animated description of life as it is lived on the edge of its own times."Pleasure in music, writes Coleman, "is arguably the most complicated pleasure there is." This book proves the truth of that statement.

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October 15, 2018
How did the human voice evolve from primordial throaty gurgling into the exquisite, expressive, life-sustaining, tuneable communication system we call singing today? Music journalist Coleman (The Train in the Night?, 2012) is interested in singing not as a technical exercise or beauty pageant but rather as a way to better understand what can be gained from good, true, and useful singing. Sticking mostly with pop and rock artists from the 1950s to the present, the author dedicates each chapter to a theme and a handful of singers who exemplify it: rhythm as embodied by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry; vulnerability as demonstrated by Marvin Gaye and Roy Orbison; crooning as interpreted by Iggy Pop and Frank Sinatra. Coleman's ambitious literary style?he describes Joey Ramone's voice as the cry of a fat baby seal stranded limbless on a floating ice shelf ?separates his writing from straightforward music criticism but still demands a basic level of music appreciation for full enjoyment. Best for record-store fiends and casual listeners looking to explore aspects of music beyond today's Top 40.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

November 5, 2018
British music journalist Coleman (The Train in the Night) examines the importance of the human voice on his life and in popular music in this intriguing study. Coleman treasures the voice (“Before words are distinguishable, voices make some sort of case for our close attention,” he writes), which comforted and helped him socialize as an awkward teenager. He arranges his book by categories of his own classification—for example, “Vulnerable” (Marvin Gaye and Roy Orbison) and “Class Acts” (John Lennon and Mick Jagger)—and his all-star lineup of American popular music heroes includes Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard. Coleman eloquently describes the music of Motown singer Marvin Gaye as a mix of “beauty and self-delusion” and notes the “otherworldly intensity of the Pentecostal church” in Aretha Franklin’s soaring sound. He explains how the sounds of American R&B, blues, and soul music emerged in the voices of Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and the shape-shifting David Bowie. As Coleman contemplates the sound of soul, he reaches beyond the voice to discover the lyricism in the instrumental jazz of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Coleman beautifully reveals the sheer pleasure of listening to music.