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Singing In Tongues


Shaster

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Meant to post this before - stop me if you've heard it.... Sting, Lionel Ritchie, Colin Hay and countless others have enhanced their performance of a particular genre of music (often reggae, or African World Beat) by copping some of the indigenous accents. So the other day I was singing Moondance and I started thinking of Van Morrison, and before I knew it, I was doing my best attempt at an Irish accent. Bam! The song suddenly made sense to me, and sounded better. Now I was not doing a mockery, just thinking of how he might have approached the lyric.. I tried the same thing in Brown Eyed Girl and it too felt way better.

 

Since then I don't attempt to do my (bad) Irish accent, but I am aware of where the song comes from... The flip side to this is all the ladies I hear from Winnipeg or Wisconsin (or wherever) who insist on sounding like Amy Winehouse. As I've said before, she sang that way partly because of her thick English accent, and how she approached a song.

 

You can take the whole deconstruction thing much too far, but hey, if you're ever bored, try Van with a slight Irish accent - you might be surprised. Now I want to try It's Not Unusual with a Welsh accent, but that might be somewhat challenging on all fronts...

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I agree 100%

 

Pronunciation is like articulation on the sax. So is resonance or vowel sounds.

 

Years ago I played with a blind Pianist/Singer, Gilbert Montagne who is now a big star in France. He used to contort his mouth and face to get all kinds of timbre changes out of his voice. We do the same thing to a lesser extend on the sax by changing the shape of our oral cavity, changing the stiffness of our tissues, and both placement and pressure of the lip on the reed.

 

Guitarists do it with pedals.

 

Expression is the most important thing in music, and pronunciation is a big part of that.

 

Notes

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No we don't [says the guy who doesn't use pedals]! We do it with bending, vibrato and magic fingers...and the volume/tone knobs. Piano players do it with pedals.... ;)

 

But I agree in the sense that to really understand why someone phrases as they do, one should consider their native language as a jumping off point. Oddly, though, when you listen to singers like Van, the Beatles, Elton John, Tom Jones, etc, you don't hear any 'accent', really. With Aussie singers, too, like the BeeGees, Little River Band, INXS the accent is lost, or with Men at Work where they intentionally pushed it to get the point across on 'Land Down Under'. But listen to Marley, Burning Spear or Jimmy Cliff...their 'patois' is evident, if subdued; but it is part of the cultural aesthetic of Reggae.

Something about singing in English strips away local pretenses for a unifying experience. I wonder if the same is true with Spanish [the second most widely spoken language].

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A certain amount of 'accent' is melodic, so that disappears when you're singing.

 

Then there's modern country singers -- especially the guys. Even Canadian country singers elevate all the vowel sounds until they sound like they've been inbreeding up some West Virginia holler for the past six generations. *shudders* I use their recordings at high levels to remove loose paint from my walls.

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