MUSIC AND MEMORIES PART TWO: ESSENTIAL CDS FROM FAIRUZ, FARID EL ATRACHE, MELINA KANA, ALEX PANGMAN

*The Fairuz CD Almahaba is a powerful yet finely-realized up-close experience, one that requires the listener’s surrender. Here, surely, is evidence why Fairuz is a legend in the Arabic world. Her vocal embellishments are very difficult to achieve, according to an Arabic singer friend, but it’s the inherent beauty and complexity within her voice that incisively haunt and enchant at one go. I wrote a poem to Fairuz in my first book of poetry years ago, but, in truth, I’m not sure how one could capture her unique aura of intimacy a she sings. As I said, one surrenders, and then there is no better place to be. Note that you might find The Very Best of Fairuz and The Legendary Fairuz easier to find.

*My My friend Brenda Bell was known as the legend Badia Star in Canada, even before she took up residence as the featured belly dancer at a posh hotel in Cairo. She has told me often about her thrilling connection with an Arabic audience who know the songs to which she dances and understand the nuanced sexuality of her performances. Canadians instead want what they call sex, bluntly done, while an Arabic audience knows how to savour gradually and thus enjoy more fully.  Which leads me to an outstanding CD titled Farid el Atrache: The King of the Oud on which the singer/oudist/actor communes through his jaw-dropping virtuosity on the oud with a sometimes hysterically appreciative audience that that goes very nuts very often in response.  This man’s a subtle master of his art, one who never does brilliance for show in a music that echoes the depths of the earth.

*I once received a copy of Melina Kana: Portrait to review in my newspaper column and on my first listen I found it only pleasantly appealing, which in retrospect reveals my occasional and appalling lack of awareness in these matters. On my second – to five hundredth – listen, however, it became one of my essential CDs, a collection of compelling and potent performances that range from the initial bouzouki-driven hip-incited Alkoolika Stichakia Vers Ivres (Drunken Verses), to the toe-tapping yet very surreal Tou Christara (For Christara), to the methodically wild and totally irresistible Milo Gia Sena (I Tell of You) with the group Ashkabat from Turkmenistan. This is a song, one finds, that each of Kana’s audiences knows well enough to join the singer. Kana’s voice can sound like a caress, like a firm but distant echo from the mountains of Greece, like a woman deep inside her own long-wounded heart, and like a woman of sophisticated poise who can carry both a taverna or an upscale club and communicate in either with ease.

I’ve long been annoyed with singers who affect a swing era style while, in truth, they are paint-by-numbers stylists whose only individuality lies in emulation. Whatever their hype by the uninformed, they are painful to hear.

So, for me and many others, Alex Pangman has long been a crucial singer on the Canadian jazz scene, for many reasons. Alex knows her idiom as one born in its fibres, knows the nuances of style, knows the racial importance of her material. She knows the individual quirks of those singers long ago who have fuelled her, knows the many potentials of a lyric, knows the roots of a lyric in the human heart, knows the ways a lyric fits in with accompanying musicians. She is an individual on her own terms by instinct.

Alex Pangman finds a lyric’s nitty gritty bubbling in her own flesh. Her method can sometimes be conversational and sometimes she hangs on the musical underpinning of a great tune and lets herself be music’s tool. Her very presence seems an extension music’s rhythm, music’s love of taking a risk, music’s way of taking the listener into late night hours where he or she is changed from what they were and is something else now, though none can say what that is. We don’t have our feet too solid on the floor anymore because rhythm, not blood, flows through our veins. We are music, we live.

In the forties, when I was young, the big bands were gone and singers were still trying to somehow keep as real as possible, albeit with making a living and shallow producers a constant reality. Swing music and the music of twenties became more of a truth to me when I did two books with jazz singer Jackie Washington. One day I played Jackie my box set of swing era bands and I’ll be damned if he didn’t rattle off all the musicians, section by section, pausing only a second here and there. It was fun to hear Jackie’s tales of Teddy Wilson, Jack Teagarden, Benny Goodman, and the rest, because, like Alex Pangman, he dwelt heart and soul in the music.

Any Alex Pangman recording is a good place to start in her catalogue, although today I’m into Have a Little Fun which features Special Guest Bucky Pizzarelli and Alex Pangman 33, two spirited recordings that include crack musicians as much at home in her repertoire as she. I’m especially enjoying the ways that small, barely detectable mysteries of life seep into her singing of a phrase and create an intriguing and mysterious adult personality, the moniker of Canada’s Sweetheart of Song notwithstanding. Alex Pangman can sing a woman’s whole lifetime in a song, can sing it done hip, wisely adult, and playful to the end.