Table Talk
JUDY GARLAND started it. I wasn’t at her Carnegie Hall performance in April of 1961, but in my sixteenth year I’d somehow come into possession of the double LP live recording of it. I didn’t so much listen to the performance as I was pierced by it and by music’s unreason. Whichever number she performed, Judy’s thrilled tones registered a quivering, animal alertness to being alive, as if she’d just woken to existence and had to sing about how dangerously fine that was. Her silvery voice, with its miles-wide vibrato, was fearlessly beseeching, strung out by a sense of exalting hurt and glee. My Judy experience was sharpened by my frequent consternation whenever the female voices in my family cut loose—the women, I mean, on my mother’s side of the family, the Neapolitan side. I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with them. Their voices, to my ear, were tea-kettles shrieking or bench-saws whining. No lullabies allowed! Listening to Judy induced a plaintive rush that in its corners housed anxiety, heartbreak, and a grief over anything available to be grief-worthy. And it initiated my lifelong (at age seventy-three, I’m entitled to say that) love of the female voice, love as atomic surrender to the physicality and crushing immediacy of song.
It was of course sexual—like anything carnal that excites us, scrapes our nerves, and fills us with irrational longing—but I’d had very little sexual experience, so it must have been some kind of mousy adolescent lust for Judy’s voice, its sufferance of life’s highs and flat-lines. I played those sides so much, as if I wanted them to succumb to my wants and demands, my desire for more women of certain voices, registers, timbres. I wanted them all, right there and then, no waiting or delay, it felt that urgent. I wanted intensities, burns, absolutes, angelic excesses, and it was female vocalists who gave that to me. They’re still giving.
Soon after my Judy days I became madly intimate with other voices getting a lot of air-play on pop and jazz radio stations. Streisand’s bladed sound made my skin wrinkle, as did the similar reedy voice of Morgana King. When I was a kid and everybody had transistors, the air indoors and out was voluptuously laddered by other great stylists: Della Reese, Carmen McRae, Anita O’Day
