In the August 1956 issue of the magazine Good Housekeeping, music editor George Marek asked, “How can America import ‘American’ jazz? It's American with a foreign flavor—and it just suits our taste.”Footnote 1 He opens by presenting a “time-encrusted,” old Europe in contrast with an implicitly modern United States and continues:
A fine state of affairs! Has tin-pan alley become a street around the world?
When you go to France you hear, instead of the songs of old Provence, American tunes translated into a French that rhymes l'amour with toujours. In a way that's a tribute to our pop music; there is something about it that appeals internationally. Slick and sleek, jaunty and easy, the tunes fit whether you wear a hat, a beret, or a sombrero.
But that matter goes even further. The American product is being manufactured abroad. The singers and the band leaders of Europe, the German jazz musicians and the French chanteuses, are taking our tunes (or tunes very much like ours), singing them and playing them in American style, and then exporting them back here. And with excellent success!
Many American songs recorded in Europe have become hits here. European stars are offering competition to our own pop-music stars. . . .
But even more than the pop song or the dance tune, Europe has appropriated jazz as an enthusiasm. As a new art form, jazz was taken seriously in Europe, particularly in France, long before our pundits glanced at it. As entertainment, it seems to suit the youngsters of Scandinavia, England, Holland, and France. It is less popular in Italy. It is extraordinarily popular in Germany, where it's almost as much at home in West Berlin as in Berlin, New Jersey. . . .
We may debate whether this universal Americanization is a good thing for music. The whole world seems to be wearing the same hat. Won't that lead to a weakening of individuality? Obviously part of this standardization stems not from artistic but financial causes. This is the biggest record market in the world, and songs are sung and jazz music is recorded without the thought, Will it sell in the U.S.A.?Footnote 2
We notice a number of well-known tropes from the US reception of European culture and jazz. Marek repeats the narrative that Europeans took jazz seriously before US-Americans. This elevation of European aesthetic attitudes extends to the artists, as Marek affords Europeans more creative agency. By contrast, US music is “slick and sleek, jaunty and easy” and its culture has universal appeal. This image of US music is tied to commodification, as it is described as a “product” that is “manufactured.” Marek speculates that this standardization of US music is the result of financial, not artistic, concerns, thus positioning European musicians as (willing) victims of US capitalism. This uniformity of US culture is also marked by the fact that almost all of the musicians Marek mentions are white (although he does not make this explicit), with the foreigners as unproblematic appropriators of Black styles, who only have to compete with white US-Americans when imported to the United States.Footnote 3
Marek's article gives a picture of the ambiguous yet cheerful attitude with which European jazz and popular music was greeted within the United States in the 1950s.Footnote 4 The article does, however, not specify where one might get a taste of this foreignness. The closest we get to an indication of what might distinguish European performers is Marek's gendered description of vocalists: “Singers, particularly if they are very female, give the home-grown music the allure of a foreign aura.”Footnote 5
In this article, I focus on two of the singers Marek highlights, Alice Babs and Caterina Valente. Babs started her career as a Swedish teen star blending jazz and European yodeling. Later, she changed her singing style to a more “classical” soprano-sound and ended as a featured soloist for Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, where her “pure” timbre signified gender, European highbrow culture, and whiteness. Valente, a French singer with Italian roots who started her career in Germany, was presented as a cosmopolitan figure who could easily sing in a plethora of languages and styles. US critics marveled at her versatile soprano voice which embodied a whiteness and femininity that could appropriate several ethnicities. I proceed by giving an account of the breakthroughs and US careers of first Babs and then Valente, before returning to Babs's work with Duke Ellington and Valente's last work in the United States in the 1960s.
I do not take what Marek called “aura” to be an essence of difference, foreignness, Europeanness, whiteness, or femininity.Footnote 6 Rather, I approach it as a point in what Stuart Hall calls positioning, emphasizing the production of cultural identity.Footnote 7 Following Hall, I argue that the production of Babs's and Valente's cultural identities “was not, and could not be, made directly, without ‘mediation.’”Footnote 8 I want to highlight the ways in which Babs's and Valente's US positioning as European women was, to paraphrase Hall, “not [about] the so-called return to roots but a coming-to-terms with [their] ‘routes.’”Footnote 9 The formation of specifically gendered and European identities was mediated by transatlantic routes.
This positioning happened through a musical persona, encompassing, as Philip Auslander theorizes it, the real person (the performer as an individual), the performance persona (the performer as a social being), and the song character (the role the performer plays in a specific song/work).Footnote 10 My analysis shows how Babs's and Valente's real personae as Europeans and women was blended with their performance personae using musical elements that marked Europeanness and gender, and sometimes individual song characters through lyrics, vocal performance, and arrangements.
Babs and Valente formed these personae in the changing musical world of the 1950s and 1960s and fulfilled stereotypical expectations of easy listening, middle-of-the-road popular music of the period.Footnote 11 This music may mainly have been consumed by the heteronormative white US middle class; and it may seem that the “light” sound and stylistic heterogeneity of female singers like Babs and Valente is the sound of something aesthetically lightweight. However, as Albin Zak has argued in his account of the music of the 1950s: “The new sounds pointed in no particular direction, yet, paradoxically, it was the era's unfocused meandering that fuelled its revolutionary thrust.”Footnote 12 Simultaneously to canonically revolutionary musical developments like rock ’n’ roll and free jazz, Babs and Valente provided the soundtrack to the mid-century expansion of the middle class.
Additionally, even as Babs and Valente were successful pop singers, they were also jazz singers. Though jazz has an unmistakable US identity, its hybrid nature has from the beginning invited global interpretations.Footnote 13 With Babs and Valente we hear that transnational hybridity being imported back to the United States. Furthermore, as feminist interventions in jazz studies have highlighted, the politics of jazz is such that vocal music, female musicians, and music that lies at the intersection of jazz and pop gets marginalized and sometimes even denigrated.Footnote 14 Jazz has a masculine bias, both in scholarship and journalistic narratives, but in the broader context of popular music around 1960 Jacqueline Warwick has also warned us that “if our histories of the period valorize the activities of boys and men, they also valorize the aesthetic priorities of popular music associated with maleness.”Footnote 15 This article heeds these words and engages with the “very female” sounds of Babs and Valente that might otherwise easily be trivialized as middle-of-the-road pop and non-jazz.
Babs's and Valente's gender and vocality became main elements in their personae in the United States.Footnote 16 My research here builds upon recent scholarship that seeks to theorize the voice anew.Footnote 17 My attention to the US reception of these European voices is not merely of historiographical interest, but is also a methodological move that follows Nina Sun Eidsheim's insistence that “voice is not innate; it is cultural” and that “the voice does not arise solely from the vocalizer; it is created just as much within the process of listening.”Footnote 18 The following contains analyses of Babs's and Valente's vocal performance but does not conclude that there is a vocal formalism of European singing. My focus on reception history is meant to uncover some of the ways the encounter between European singers and US listeners shaped the voices of Babs and Valente.
Babs's and Valente's female personae and vocality was positioned in conjunction with their ethnicities. This article joins the growing critical study of whiteness in music studies to include considerations of race and how the ethnicity of these European singers played into their US reception. A hallmark of Babs's and Valente's singing was their high-pitched voices and clear timbres, which historically have been coded as white in contrast to the lower-pitched, “darker” timbres found to be the essential characteristics of Black voices.Footnote 19 This vocal style was combined with exoticizing musical elements signifying Europeanness. Although “European,” these tropes function similar to the orientalist markers of otherness that Susan McClary has called “fetishized pitches” (e.g., lowered sevenths, raised fourths).Footnote 20 In the case of Babs and Valente, we might thus even talk about fetishized pitch, because their vocal performances used such fetishized pitches but also because their voices were fetishized for their high pitch.
As Grant Olwage writes, “the voice assumes its vocal identity, its sonic and therefore social identity, from the aesthetics of musical pleasure in which it is embedded. . . . So, instead of the color of the voice, we might speak about the color of the ear.”Footnote 21 Thus, we must go beyond Babs's and Valente's voices as such and explore US desires for a particular kind of voice—the color of the US ear—that produced a conception of a feminized and exoticized European, foreign aura.Footnote 22 Their forays into US jazz and pop were not only an appropriation of Black music—in fact they rarely engaged in what Matthew Morrison has termed blacksound (i.e., sonic blackfaceFootnote 23)—but was just as much the construction of a white, European otherness, which is not directly equivalent to any white US sound but is doubly marked as not African American and not American. Yet, Babs's and Valente's racial position was still elided with US whiteness. Marek's failure to name the whiteness he linked with the vocal “aura” of Babs and Valente exemplifies the observation that whiteness often appears, in white society, as an unmarked marker.Footnote 24 However, as other whiteness scholars have pointed out, whiteness only remains invisible to those who inhabit it.Footnote 25 In this case, Marek's commentary reveals how European ethnicities were positioned as forms of otherness interior to whiteness. Babs's and Valente's position as Europeans was marked as a difference from US musicians, but the whiteness they shared with hegemonic US culture was what made their appropriation of jazz and US popular music acceptable. Showing how the production of ethnic difference is accompanied by shared racial markers, this article echoes studies of musical difference which have emphasized the sameness that is also central to transnational music.Footnote 26 Through this analysis of race, ethnicity, and difference, we come to see that musical whiteness is in fact rarely unmarked, but functions through a series of racialized musical tropes and ways of listening for race.
The Swedish Yodel Girl Goes to the United States
Alice Babs (1924–2014) began her career as a teen idol in Sweden where one of her defining characteristics became her yodeling: her very first recording codified her early performance persona “Joddlarflickan” (“The Yodel Girl,” 1939), but she also mixed the style into her broader repertoire.
A song created as advert for a radio set, “Jag har en liten Radiola” (“I Have a Little Radiola,” 1939), gives us an example of how she inserted, mixed, and conflated African American jazz style with yodelingFootnote 27:
Babs's vocal acrobatics could be heard as a version of African American singing, but she also inserts a yodel-hiccup in the middle of her scatting (Example 1), which more obviously connoted sounds of the Swiss and Austrian Alps and thus offered Swedish listeners a more familiar exoticism as shorthand for musical difference. The yodel-hiccup is doubly marked, as it is situated in a phrase that features a play around the regular, major third that gestures towards the blue third (in my transcription marked as a F# grace note and a scoop up to the G, indicating a blues inflection). African American style (i.e., scatting and blue notes) is mediated and assimilated into a European context via yodeling. As the cultural historian Johan Fornäs has argued, this opening towards US culture works through the transposition of blackness onto other ethnic differences in Sweden.Footnote 29
Example 1. Babs's scatting and yodeling in the bridge of “Jag har en liten Radiola” at 1:13. The yodel is marked with a bracket.
During the 1940s and 1950s Babs expanded her range, musically—three and a half octaves—and geographically, beyond Sweden, making a name for herself in Scandinavia and then in Europe (most significantly as a schlager singer in Germany where she had success with several yodel-themed recordings). So, by the late 1950s she was looking across the Atlantic.
In 1957 she went to New York, which she later described as a “culture shock.”Footnote 30 She recounts being skeptical of US managers and refers to one of them, using the US-American word, as a “gangster type.”Footnote 31 During her visits the following years these impressions continued, with an image of the United States formed by US popular culture, the service industry, and consumer products. The emphasis on standardization leads her to imply a dichotomy between the United States and a more artistically minded Europe. For example, she describes how she and guitarist Ulrik Neumann had to fight to amend their second (and otherwise identical) set at Los Angeles's Coconut Grove to include their version of a Bach fugue.Footnote 32 She finds the US music industry more exploitative than the European, describing how (too) many people in the United States demand a cut of the artists’ wages: “The insight I got to get into American performing-life during my three years in the United States completely saved me from dreams of America! I praised my lucky star that I was Swedish and a European.”Footnote 33
In 1959, Babs partnered up with Neuman and violinist Svend Asmussen to form The Swe-Danes (a portmanteau of their nationalities) and returned to the Coconut Grove (and later Minneapolis and Chicago; examples of US ads for the band appear in Figure 1). The initial response from the Los Angeles Times was, however, that they “seemed better suited to some other place than this home of sophisticated entertainment,” and that “the act needs brighter material.” Apparently, the “Yodel Cha Cha” Babs performed was not bright enough.Footnote 34 Still, they ended up with considerable success, and it is a bit ironic that the same newspaper described what was ostensibly the same show next year as “bright.”Footnote 35
Figure 1. American newspaper ads for The Swe-Danes. Notice the ad placed in the middle here, from the Minneapolis Star, October 20, 1960, which pitches the band to the Scandinavian-Americans in the region with a Scandinavian festival and the Scandinavian word for “hello,” goddag.
If one listens to their hits, like “Scandinavian Shuffle” (the title track of their 1960 album), one gets a sense of how this perceived brightness was directly tied to their vocal performance, with the Minneapolis Star describing them as having “refined scat singing to a modernistic degree, voicing syllables in close harmony, and using this technique to imitate instruments and to blend vocal and instrumental harmony.” In this, the paper wrote, “the Swe-Danes do European things to American tunes and American things to European tunes.”Footnote 36 This transatlantic mix was a result of the repertoire (which included jazz standards, “O sole mio,” and yodeling), but central to the Swe-Danes’ style was Babs's high-soaring, clear-toned soprano that blended classical singing, yodeling, and instrument-imitation in Asmussen's arrangements. Her voice still presented a “diversifying hybridity,” to use Fornäs's term,Footnote 37 but it was—to use Marek's contemporary characteristics—more “slick and sleek” than previously, secured by the virtuosity of the music and her increased vocal range. The repertoire was “bright,” which worked as a synonym for easy listening, though perhaps extending its connotations to a white, middle-class, female identity that Babs embodied and represented with her vocal timbre.
“A Perfect Antidote to Acute Hipsterism”: Alice Babs Sings for the Middle Class
From the mid-1950s, Babs tried to downplay yodel-singing. Her exotic folkloricism, timbre, and preference for higher pitches was characterized by an increasing use of open vowels, sometimes in recordings aided by studio manipulation in what Serge Lacasse calls vocal staging.Footnote 38 This is most evident in an album she made with Svend Asmussen, Scandinavian Folk Songs Sung & Swung! (1964), which was produced in a special release by Philips for the US market. Aiming at an international, Anglo American audience, the album contains English-language versions of Nordic folk songs. The songs are jolly representations of an imagined pastoral past and melancholic ballads representing the cold climate and wide spaces of the Scandinavian landscape, creating a Nordic exoticism.Footnote 39 Babs utilized her incredible range (sounding relaxed and comfortable around C6) to signify high-spirited folk idyll or tall peaks in the landscape. For example, on the tune “Blue Mountain Land,” the mix amplifies this sonic image by adding an astonishing amount of echo and reverb to her voice (Example 2). This combination of reverb and high pitch is a musical othering common in mid-century exotica, described by Peter Doyle as a double remove, where “the sound is ‘laterally’ removed by the reverb and then ‘lifted’ off the ground into the ethereal realm.”Footnote 40 It also uses what Rebecca Leydon has called a soft-focus sound, which feminizes her voice through the excessive reverb and marks her as embodying a persona of fantastical, faerie-like Nordic femininity.Footnote 41
Example 2. Babs's vocals in the outro of “Blue Mountain Land” at 2:38. Her voice has reverb added and is placed further back in the sound box than during the performance of the song itself. Sung in unison with strings that glissando, close-miked, up to the beginning notes of the chromatic sigh-motifs after the double barline.
Even if she had tried to minimize it, another part of her Nordic exoticism was her continued use of yodel-motifs. Appearing on The Dinah Shore Chevy Show in 1961, Babs distinguishes herself from the program host, Dinah Shore, by ending their duet performance in a high-pitched cadenza (arguably yodel-inspired) that had become her trademark of timbre and vocal virtuosity (Example 3).Footnote 42
Example 3. Babs's final cadenza from “I'm Sitting on the Top of the World” from The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, February 5, 1961. “Yodel” marked with brackets.
Shore's persona was the embodiment of the 1950s ideal of a middle-class all-American woman. Babs was mirrored in this image, but unlike Shore's appearance, which had been physically (through plastic surgery) and culturally altered from Jewish, bluesy jazz singer to white entertainer,Footnote 43 Babs was still positioned in a persona that accentuated her ethnicity with the folk-inflected crocheted dress that points to a regional identity (in fact the same dress she had worn when representing Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest; see Figure 2). Similar to the “neutral Americanness” that Shore presented,Footnote 44 Babs offered a white, if exotic, Europeanness that could remind US listeners and viewers of the old country of white, ethnic safety while serving as a postcard for the US middle-class tourist, who dreams of visiting a Europe that is both historical and folkloric, but also modern and fashionable.Footnote 45 This US fascination with Scandinavians goes as far back as, at least, Emerson, who located the ancestral home of whiteness and Anglo-Saxon identity in the region.Footnote 46 Well into the mid-twentieth century “Nordic” continued to be used as a term to draw a racial colorline between white Europeans from northern Europe (including Anglo-Saxons and the Irish) and the southern “Mediterranean” race.Footnote 47
Figure 2. Babs on The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, February 5, 1961.
This white, middle-class Scandinavianness is clearest in Babs's and Neumann's first US release, When the Children Are Asleep (1958; before they teamed up with Asmussen to form Swe-Danes), distributed by the Hollywood-based pop label Dot Records (owned by Paramount). The repertoire emphasized middle-class coupledom with tunes like the title track, as well as “Two Sleepy People,” “Home with You,” and “Let's Put Out the Lights” played in intimate (but not erotic) duet arrangements. This album was marketed as “adult-oriented” jazz-pop with a selection of standards that exemplify the age-format stratification in the political economy of music in the 1950s. Furthermore, it was an LP, which carried a higher symbolic capital into its middlebrow context.Footnote 48
The album iconography (Figure 3) shows Babs and Neumann in front of the fireplace in a well-decorated living room, depicting them as idealized spouses, intentionally exploiting the song characters of the romantic repertoire to create the performance personae of a married couple (Babs and Neumann were not a “real” couple); the liner notes declare that “even married people can be in love” and suggests listening to the record when the children are asleep.Footnote 49 This iconography draws attention to an imagined listening experience placed in a domestic space, which is paired with the new LP format, middlebrow culture, and a middle-class social setting.Footnote 50 In her early career in Sweden, Babs was at the vanguard of musical modernity and cultural hybridity, but as she grew older and travelled across the Atlantic her positioning changed. No longer a teen idol, her age, ethnicity, race, and musical style instead placed her at the vanguard of adult-oriented jazz and pop marketed to the growing white middle class. As Down Beat concluded in the review of When the Children Are Asleep: “Recommended as a perfect antidote to acute hipsterism.”Footnote 51
Figure 3. Album cover for Alice Babs and Ulrik Neumann, When the Children Are Asleep (1958).
From Istanbul (not Constantinople) to Malaga: Caterina Valente's Exoticism
Caterina Valente's (1931–) biography was central to her image from the very beginning of her career. Her multilingual abilities and range of musical styles came to define her as a cosmopolitan persona. In marketing and in the press Valente's multinational identity—from an ethnically Italian family of performers, speaking with a French accent, and holding a German passport—was paired with her upbringing “on the stage,” which was exotic compared to her image as a German Mädchen (girl) and later as a middle-class mother. One of the only scholarly studies of Valente summarizes her as “‘the German world-star,’ characterized through the attractive blend and harmonization of numerous contradictions and opposites.”Footnote 52 These dialectics of harmonization and contradiction, of Germany and the world, of the national and international played out in a career that saw Valente become a TV star on both sides of the Atlantic and in her repertoire of German schlagers, French chansons, and songs in Spanish, Italian, and other languages, plus a constant undercurrent of various Latin American styles (with occasional other folkloric, exotically tinged songs evoking other places and ethnicities) and swing music. This repertoire variety blended together in the persona of a Cosmopolitan Lady (the title of her 1959 album) and The Greatest… In Any Language! (1961).
Not all of the musical styles Valente inhabited held equal force in her US career (there was never a US market for her German schlager singing). The style that secured her a breakthrough in the United States and continued to figure as a marker of exotic difference was a broadly conceived Spanish or Latin American sound.Footnote 53 In doing so she participated in the mid-century highpoint for the exotic in popular music.Footnote 54
The opening measures of Valente's first hit record in Germany serves as an example of her exotic cosmopolitanism (Example 4). Recorded in 1953 with Kurt Edelhagen and his band, “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” is a novelty song (sung in English) that relies on orientalist tropes. The tune opens with a clarinet playing arabesques in a phrase that ends with an emphasis on the diminished second (D-flat). The clarinet (and a few measures later, Valente's voice) is the top part of what Rebecca Leydon identifies as a layered texture characteristic of musical exoticism of the period.Footnote 55 Below the clarinet is a sparse, stable rhythm section of bass ostinato and castanets, as well as sustained chords from trombones and muted trumpets, all creating an exotic setting.Footnote 56 This layered, instrumental texture is answered by a vocal cadenza with Valente's vocalise in three parts. First, a metrically offset phrasing that gives the sensation of half-tempo that contributes further to the multilayered groove. Second, her own arabesques mimicking the clarinet. Valente's arabesques then, thirdly, lead into a scat break where she and the band switch from rubato-like feel and straight eights to swing.
Example 4. Opening of “Istanbul.” The instrumentation also includes (not transcribed here) trombones and muted trumpets playing sustained chords, as well as castanets (or a percussion instrument imitating castanets) playing on each beat.
The combination of the arabesque and the scat singing is jarring in its juxtaposition. The free-flowing rhythmic delivery of the first phrase gives it a rubato feel. It also contains a polyrhythmic layering that (though not captured in transcription) gives the feeling of triple against duple time. These vocal elements all contribute to the exotic texture highlighted in the instrumental arrangement. Furthermore, while the first phrase does not reach the highest soprano range, its initial leap to the high-note of C5 is contrasted with the plunge towards the low-note on F3 in the scat-phrase. This follows the trope of lower pitches signifying black vocal styles. The juxtaposition is also alluring in its suggestion that the two styles of vocalizing are sides of the same coin. Similar to Babs's mix of yodeling and scat in “Jag har en liten Radiola,” the introduction to “Istanbul” presents a convergence of a folk-like, and in this case orientalist, exoticism and African American scat singing.
In “Istanbul” the exoticism was confined to the lyrics and the music in the introduction (the rest of the recording is in a swing jazz style), but subsequently exotic styles became a staple of Valente's music. Her next two hits, which inaugurated her US career, were a full exercise in Spanish-themed sounds. “Malaguena” and “The Breeze and I” (recorded 1954, with Werner Müller's orchestra) again open with Valente's melismatic arabesques. Valente's exoticism illustrates Derek Scott's point that “musical Orientalism has never been overly concerned with establishing distinctions between Eastern cultures, and that an interchangeability of exotic signifiers proved to be commonplace rather than astonishing.”Footnote 57 With “Malaguena” and “The Breeze and I,” based on movements from the Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona's Suite Andalucía (1933), Valente moves easily from the orientalist sounds of “Istanbul” to Spain, itself the site of various elisions of orientalist and exotic musical imaginations in European art music. The genealogy and performance of the songs, thus, reveal the transnational, exoticist repertoire that became central to Valente.Footnote 58 Many of her songs—including “Malaguena”—follow the template from “Istanbul” and stages Valente's high-soaring vocalises and arabesques, a vocal presentation common in exotica of the era.Footnote 59 They are often placed in introductions and middle sections, giving them both a marginal status against the normative pop and jazz singing in the verses and choruses, but also distinguishing them as musical moments that require special attention. Indeed, “The Breeze and I” stretches the introduction of the song to take up almost a full minute, and “Malaguena” achieves the same feat by orchestrating the verse as a minute-long introduction before the proper groove sets in for the refrain. In both cases there is an explosive array of brass hits, cymbal crashes, castanets, Spanish guitar, chromatic descents by flutes and strings, and of course Valente's vocalise above it all.
The Hi-Fi Nightingale: Caterina Valente's Voice and Image in the United States
In the United States, the record label Decca (partnered with the William Morris agency) marketed Valente as the “Malaguena girl,” crafting a performance persona out of her song character (Figure 4). In 1955, she charted in Cash Box and placed in the Down Beat critics’ polls 1955–1957 under the category “Female singer—new star.”
Figure 4. Caterina Valente on cover of Cash Box (March 12, 1955) magazine as the “Malaguena girl.”
The US press positioned her difference by stressing her artistic family background and nationality, as well as her singing and gender. One paper called her an “Italian feminine singer”Footnote 60 and another used the adjectives “slender, girlish” and dubbed her “the girl with the rollercoaster voice.”Footnote 61 This image of a young girl was echoed the following year with a description that also emphasized her appropriation of Black music: “New pop singers influenced by some of the greatest Negro jazz singers today include: Caterina Valente, lean attractive ponytailed singer from Germany who learned American jazz style from recordings by Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters and Billie Holiday.”Footnote 62 Time magazine even described her in racially ambiguous terms: “Her singing style has settled into a kind of modified Moorish that can develop into a frightening, savage howl or sink into a sweet whisper.”Footnote 63 The two sides of Valente's voice were racially coded, with the savage howling representing blackness and the sweet whisper connoting whiteness.
Valente's vocal style was at the center of her musical persona, evidenced by the title chosen for her first US LP, The Hi-Fi Nightingale (1956). The repertoire placed Valente as a singer of Spanish and Latin American styles (including “Malaguena” and “The Breeze and I,” as well as “Siboney,” “Begin the Beguine,” “Fiesta Cubana,” and “[Tango] Jalousie”). The combination of repertoire, vocal staging, and Valente's hi-fi persona exemplifies how such records, as Tim Anderson puts it, “manifest not only exotic musical techniques but also recording methods and aesthetic sensibilities that appear exotic” to listeners.Footnote 64
The title and cover iconography play on Valente's age and gender as a young girl whose voice sets her free (Figure 5). A technological fetishism continues in the liner notes: “The voice of Caterina Valente is an international sensation. It captured America through the medium of one exciting recording.” Here, the caging-metaphor, suggested by the cover, is reversed: Her voice is set free but in doing so it captures US listeners.Footnote 65 The vocal and cosmopolitan are stressed in the rest of the text: she is “a true international star possessing a beauty and personality that match her sparkling vocal technique.”Footnote 66 If one is to believe an anecdote told in her autobiography, part of the sparkle of “Malaguena” was a product of the recording's vocal staging. Werner Müller was unhappy with the initial takes: “It needs to sound like a dream and the voice must simply float and yet be very present.”Footnote 67 In order to achieve this, they placed Valente's microphone in the marble-clad ladies’ room, using it as a makeshift echo chamber and recording booth.Footnote 68 Similar to Babs's vocal staging on Scandinavian Folk Songs, this is a technique of soft-focus sound. The surplus of space not only gives her voice its extra “sparkle,” but further feminizes her and gives her something akin to the “very feminine” and “foreign aura” identified by Marek in the way that it stresses the timbral qualities of her voice and suggests distance and thus perhaps foreignness.
Figure 5. Front cover of The Hi-Fi Nightingale (1956).
During the rest of her US career she still relied heavily on Latin repertoire and sentimental pop songs, but her late-1950s attempt to break into the United States was sought via jazz. For her first album recorded in the United States, Plenty Valente (1957), Decca paired her with the Black arranger Sy Oliver and a big band. This followed the crossover practice established in swing music during the previous decade, according to which an African American sounding band was palatable for white audiences but generally required a white rather than Black singer.Footnote 69 The arrangements indeed point to the jazzier end of popular music, but Oliver and the producer, Milt Gabler, clearly found that her “rollercoaster voice” should be foregrounded from the very first song of the record, which pointed more in the direction of novelty and exotica. After a brass hit, “Poinciana” begins with Valente's voice floating above the band (Example 5). She enters with a gentle crescendo, and again her voice is staged via extra reverb, giving the impression of Valente coming to us from afar.
Example 5. Vocal introduction from “Poinciana.”
Valente's “Poinciana” worked as a well-chosen sequel to “Malaguena” and “The Breeze and I.” The lyrics exchange the “blue night” of “Malaguena” with a “pale moon” and substitute the “breeze” for a “tropic wind.” In music theory terms, we may label Valente's performance of the wind a topic.Footnote 70 This functioned as a vocal signifier, affording Valente with a vocal brand that fitted her persona. The wind topic and images of tropical shores are repeated in “Flamingo,” and the theme of longing through the night is found again in “Nocturne for the Blues” (the jazz standard “Harlem Nocturne”). The wind topic appears in high-pitched vocal melismas, which have added reverb, not unlike Babs's voice on Scandinavian Folk Songs. Footnote 71 Thus, it is not only repertoire and lyrics that evoke the exotic. Peter Doyle has shown how spatial recording practices in mid-twentieth century popular music, created through echo and reverb, were used to set up pictorial spaces that often signify exotic locations and otherness.Footnote 72 Plenty Valente may consist of jazz standards played in a mainstream swing style, but Valente, Sy Oliver, and Milt Gabler managed to position her voice to signify distance, longing, and something exotic.
“She Has Overcome the Problem of Singing as Pretty as She Looks”: Alice Babs and Duke Ellington
From the mid-1960s Babs ceased regular touring in the United States. She expanded her repertoire of European folk and art songs, and most importantly, throughout this period she actively sought to improve her technique by taking lessons from a classically trained vocal coach. But it was her collaborations with Duke Ellington that secured her legacy in US jazz history.
Babs first met up with Ellington for a 1963 recording session in Paris. The association with a jazz great like Ellington was, however, not enough to do away with the stylistic heterogeneity that troubled some listeners. The music historian Olle Edström recounts that Swedish critics “had issues with the many-sidedness of Alice Babs—that is, she sang everything from yodeling songs, schlager, and swing, to Elizabethan songs and (later) classical art songs, all with the same pure quality of voice, intonation, and musicality.”Footnote 73 He also argues that there was a gendered bias in these assertions as “it seems as if the role of a female singer in a band entailed a stricter stylistic ‘purity’ that had to do both with gender and the quality of the voice.”Footnote 74 Edström speculates that it may have been a consolation for Babs that, unlike the Swedish critics, Ellington “accepted her as a jazz artist.”Footnote 75 This is probably true, but Ellington also selected Babs for his projects (most notably the second and third Sacred Concerts) because she inhabited a many-sidedness, which I argue was available to her—and Ellington—via her whiteness, ethnicity, and gender.
In his autobiography, Ellington describes Babs (referring to the Second Sacred Concert, 1968):
[S]he is probably the most unique artist I know. She is a coloratura soprano, an unlimited soprano. She sings opera, she sings lieder, she sings what we call jazz and blues, she sings like an instrument, she even yodels, and she can read any and all of it! No matter how hard the intervals, when you hand her the music, she sight-reads and sings it as though she had rehearsed it a month. Every word comes out perfectly enunciated, understandable and believable. Alice Babs is a composer's dream, for with her he can forget all the limitations and just write his heart out. . . . She is a terrific musician, and when I look at pictures of her taken in the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine—why, I think she looks like an angel! She is a beautiful person who has overcome the problem of singing as pretty as she looks.Footnote 76
Describing her in otherworldly terms, Ellington positions her persona as—going back to Marek's words—“very female.” Apart from her looks, he links otherworldliness to her coloratura-like singing, sight-reading skills, and virtuoso ability to perform difficult compositions. These are all techniques and values tied to the classical, European music that she had been studying in order to change her sound.
Both of the Sacred Concerts are vehicles for Babs's singing on open vowels with clear, classical music-like timbre in the highest range. Ellington composed music that, performed by Babs, sounds uncannily like classical art songs or European oratorios with, as Edström notes, “the sort of melodic lines that are more common in twentieth-century art music than popular music and jazz.”Footnote 77 Ellington's oeuvre is replete with music that bridges low, middle, and highbrow forms. In this case, he composed music that both in its formal structure and in its use of Babs's voice gestured toward modernist, European music and employed her whiteness to signal highbrow universalism.Footnote 78
Babs's voice was no longer “bright,” but instead, according to Leonard Feather, it was “glorious”Footnote 79 with “unprecedented radiance” and, indeed, specifically “feminine.”Footnote 80 Most reviews named her as a “soprano” (not simply as “singer”). The New York Times's reviews are indicative and comment extensively on the quality of her voice. It was “pure” with “warm translucence,”Footnote 81 but also invoking her Nordic identity through associations with landscape familiar from Scandinavian Folk Songs by describing her voice as “clear, clean and sparkling as a running mountain stream.”Footnote 82
Remarking on these timbral qualities, the US press was engaging in what Melanie L. Marshall has called a purity logic of the voice.Footnote 83 Such (sonic and spatial) perceptions of purity are not only a matter of class and gender but is also racially coded as white. Jennifer Stoever has traced the US reception of a “pure,” European, virtuosic voice back to another Swede, the so-called Swedish nightingale, Jenny Lind. The US ear linked whiteness, femininity, and nationality in the voice of Lind during her US tour, 1850–1852. US-Americans thought that clear-toned soprano voices embodied a “female range” that was characteristically far away from the lower pitches signifying African American vocality.Footnote 84 A century later Lind's compatriot, Babs, came to the United States performing in a style that emphasized the highest ranges of the female voice with timbral qualities that are associated both with European classical music and European folk music. The fact that these vocal gestures signified something “angelic,” “pure,” “graceful,” and “controlled” is also part of their white privilege, as such gestures are always already embodied even when they are heard as transcending their bodily origins. By contrast the sonic colorline would demand that a black voice always remain rooted in the body. This resonates especially with the religious context of Ellington's sacred. When Babs was heard as angelic, it is through a discourse that uses her gender, class, and identity as an argument for the transcendence of her body, and this relies on her vocal embodiment of whiteness.
Even though listeners heard her radiant voice as a signifier of sophistication and transcendence there was still an element of her yodel-singing in her improvisation. In “Almighty God Has Those Angels” her vocal fills include rocking motifs, reminiscent of the vocal oscillations of yodeling (Example 6). What we do not hear, however, is direct instrument imitation or the use of scat syllables that often signify vocal blackness. Instead, Babs opts for singing in the highest register, on an open “oh,” supporting her clear timbre and whiteness.
Example 6. Excerpts from Babs's vocal fills in “Almighty God” from 2:28; all sung on “oh”; brackets mark “yodel”-motifs.
Babs's change from yodel girl to Ellingtonian hymn singer follows the standard narrative of jazz going from lowly pop to high art.Footnote 85 I would, however, also suggest that her career and style show that this was not a case of jazz “naturally” evolving into a (high) art form nor that it was revolutionized and thrust upwards in the cultural hierarchy. Rather, Babs actively transformed her voice using the techniques of classical music and that these techniques were closely linked to such a “low” style as yodeling, which also carried connotations that met at the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender.
“Miss Valente Sings in Six Languages, Cooks in Most Languages Too”: Catarina Valente's Domestic Internationalism
From the late 1950s through the 1960s, Valente became a major name in the United States. Her voice was still a point of positioning, exemplified by an album like Superfonics (1961) using the rhetoric of The Hi-Fi Nightingale to describe the marriage of recording technology and “her extraordinary dynamic range” and “incomparable vocalizing.”Footnote 86 Thus, much of the US reception of her music continued along the positive notes of the 1950s, but sour notes also began trickling in. In a review of her appearance in a 1963 Bing Crosby TV special, she is accused of marring a song to the point where it is “stylized beyond recognition.”Footnote 87 This type of accusation had appeared by the late 1950s and been brought against artists associated with hi-fi aesthetics, such as Valente. It reflected a change in attitudes towards adult pop, where the appeal of jazz-inflected pop and sentimental ballads from the major labels shifted. What had once seemed well produced, now seemed overproduced.Footnote 88
A further problem contributing to Valente's falling popularity in the United States may have been that her girlish image from the 1950s was being substituted for a more mature persona. She thus hit the problem identified by Laurie Stras, “we don't want girl singers to be women.”Footnote 89 No longer a caged virgin bird, she appeared as the adult woman in talk shows with famous male hosts or was portrayed as a housewife in the press. In the latter case, the domestic identity was paired with her life as jet-setting star by using cooking as a metaphor for her cosmopolitan identity and vocal versatility: “Miss [sic] Valente, who sings in six languages . . . cooks in most languages too.”Footnote 90 Elsewhere she was described as “musical goulash,”Footnote 91 and a review that makes the link between repertoire and cooking, lauds her as a polyglot, and praises the way she compartmentalizes national musical styles (“she uses different musical arrangers for each language”).Footnote 92 Her cooking is linked to middle-class heteronormative femininity which by extension is connected to voice and identity.
Valente still occupied an international position and had gained an adult persona, but the judgement was that her music and voice had suffered. The US desire for a “very female” voice may then also be a desire for the youthful voice. A possible precursor to Valente (and Babs), Deanna Durbin, serves as a point of comparison. Durbin initially inhabited a pan-European identity through her operatic repertoire and film narratives that gave her various Europe origins (she was Canadian, raised in California). Later, her film company tried to strip her of her European characteristics and give her a more adult persona, which, according to Jennifer Fleeger, ironically “only made her appear more foreign, for her characteristic voice failed to signify anything but opera.”Footnote 93 The same irony could be at play in the case of Valente. Unlike Babs who transitioned from the easy listening era and secured her place in the jazz canon via Ellington, Valente engaged in the full range of middle-of-the-road pop and TV, but lost her star in the United States as those vocal sounds were eclipsed by the youthful authenticity of rock.Footnote 94 By the late 1960s Valente sounded too much like the aging crooners she appeared alongside on US TV.
This part of her career peaked when she briefly became the co-host of the talk show The Entertainers. She was still presented as an “international” star, who could toggle between identities and as a conduit of exotic styles. In some cases, this even went as far as presenting her as an expert of music that she held no national or ethnic claim to. Her imitation of African American singing sounded increasingly inauthentic, but at the end of her US career she leveraged her associations with Latin American music to appear as a bossa nova singer. In a 1966 appearance on The Dean Martin Show, she and the host are chatting, and Martin plays off of Valente's accent and goes into an undefinable European accent (Italian, French, German?) prompted by her suggestion that they sing bossa nova.Footnote 95 He thus willfully and/or comically mistakes the Brazilian origin of that style for Valente's pan-European persona. Furthermore, she is positioned as a musical authority, teaching Martin how to sing the bossa nova. Here, Valente is the “ideal appropriator” via cosmopolitan authentication.Footnote 96 Such a combination of cosmopolitanism and cultural appropriation, I argue, is an ability predicated upon her whiteness, as white people are allowed to pick up other voices and master them, in contrast to people of color who can only be essentialized as representative of their own ethnicity. Her foreignness came not from a direct representation of specific German, Italian, French, or even Brazilian authenticity and ethnicity, but from a reification of multiculturalism, difference, and cosmopolitanism itself, which was also predicated upon her whiteness.
Conclusions
Babs and Valente were cast as “very female” with “the allure of a foreign aura,” expressed and perceived through the use of the highest soprano range, “pure” timbres, and a repertoire that emphasized non-US places. In the case of Babs that place was Scandinavia and later via her more “classical” sound, it was a broader, highbrow northern Europe; Valente's geographic signifiers were more widespread, because her persona was constructed through a southern-European identity that stretched from Istanbul to Brazil. Their voices, ethnicity, and gender, produced through musical markers of difference, were commodified as products for the white US middle classes, positioned as domestically safe, yet exotically alluring.
Their “female” and “foreign aura” was often found in vocalises. Jacqueline Warwick posits that such vocables “express more than conventional language allows.”Footnote 97 Similarly, Roland Barthes famously found the grain of the voice in “a dual posture, dual production—of language and music.” The melismatic vocalises of Babs and Valente were perhaps, in Barthes's words, an attempt to “displace the fringe of contact between language and music.”Footnote 98 These points of contact were indeed placed at the fringe of the vocal range and at the fringes of songs, in introductions, middle sections, and codas. These vocalises use open vowels and clear timbre that float above the rest of the music and embody a “very female” range, style, and technique, which was also tied to whiteness. The fact that these vocal gestures may signify the “pure” and “controlled” is part of their white privilege. When Babs was heard as angelic, it was through a discourse that uses her gender and identity to transcend her body, which relies on her whiteness. Similarly, Valente was lauded for her versatile voice and transnational performance, which was tied to her talents as a polyglot and the cosmopolitanism she thus embodied, but this flexibility of identities was predicated upon her whiteness (as perhaps also evidenced by the fact that African American transnationalism, by comparison, was explicitly politicized and antagonistic to hegemonic US society). The use of non-language vocalizing positioned Babs's and Valente's identity as something alluring, exotic, and foreign, yet not more different than it could be easily consumed.
However, rather than seeing Babs's and Valente's voices as endpoints of essentialized, commodified performance, my argument is that the fact that they were essentialized and commodified is indicative of their reception and positioning. Nina Sun Eidsheim points out that “because the myth of vocal essentialism and innateness runs so deep, we create complex, schizophrenic, layered listening situations in order to compensate for confrontations with the non-essential nature of voice—confrontations caused, for instance, by vocal likeness, imitation, or ventriloquism.”Footnote 99 Babs and Valente were active players in the game of vocal likeness, imitation, and ventriloquism, but they were also being played. When Babs and Valente went to the United States, the game of vocal likeness cast them as jazz and pop singers imitating African American styles and as white and/or cosmopolitan Europeans who were inevitably foreign.
The US careers of Babs and Valente show us that notions of what constitutes musical US-Americanness or Europeanness are not created separately on either side of the Atlantic but emerge in a transatlantic dialectic. These case studies reveal that gender and class are important categories in the formation of European identities and that such identities were not created in Europe and then imported to the United States but were created in the process of transmission into the United States. Furthermore, though often less obvious, race and ethnicity were used by musicians, critics, and listeners to position Babs and Valente as Europeans. Their whiteness was transposed in a US context and their stories tell us as much about US ideologies of whiteness as it does about European ethnicities.
