Mrs Miller Wild, Cool & Swingin
Let's Hang On
My Love
Yellow Submarine
Moon River
I've Got a Tiger By The Tail
Monday, Monday
Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home?
A Groovy Kind Of Love
Memphis
A Hard Day's Night
The Shadow Of Your Smile
These Boots Are Made For Walkin'
There Goes My Everything
A Lover's Concerto
Second Hand Rose
Catch A Falling Star
Sweet Pea
Queen Of The House
Downtown
Strangers In The Night
The Banshees got a bad rap. In a world too short on song all these mythic harridans wanted to do was give the gift of music until it hurt, and for that people blamed them for death, disease, apocalypse. The Banshees needed a spin meister, but all they got was grief. A war is on, has been for centuries, a low-intensity conflict targeting the very cornerstone of the Banshees’ tender craft. Since the beginnings of time, philosophes and music critics have blasted the vibrato. In the twelfth century, come cat named Bishop Aeldred thought he was standing up for community standards when he attacked singers who put a quiver in their throat: “The voyce,” the cleric protested, “is enforced into a horse’s neighings...writhed, and retorted with a certaine artificial circumvolution.” Five centuries later, the scholar, Caccini embraced the rhetorician’s technique of slamming a subject while merely seeming to describe it. The basis of the vibrato, explained Caccini, was “upon one Note only...to beat...with the throat.” Okay, fine. But where are these guys today? Let’s put one of their Cds on, and we’ll gladly critique their circumvolutions. There is one very good reason why you are holding Mrs. Miller’s ululations in your palm, and not Caccini Goes Country. It is because deep down something in us likes a crazy vibrato. The modern musicologist Nicholas Slonimsky suggested that an acceptable vibrato was made by “letting the stream of air out of the lungs about 8 times per second through the rigid vocal cords; ideally the pitch should remain the same to avoid an irrelevant trill.” He has his point, but so does Mrs. Miller, and her point is to ask, How, exactly do you define irrelevant? We would guess Mrs. Miller goes way past the 8 puffs per second rule, and think that maybe her vocal cords aren’t always rigid. We’re not sure what the oscilloscope imaging of her voice would look like, but we do know the pitch does not remain the same. And for this we sing her praise.
RJ Smith
TOO BE CONTINUED.....