Word: vocalized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...contract for $2,500. Ray brought with him a pioneering blend of gospel melodies, rhythm-and-blues raunch, a suavely swingin? piano groove ? la Nat Cole and the imposing sound of a big band behind him (though typically he worked with only six sidemen). Oh, and an epochal vocal style that would make him the 20th century?s dominant and longest-lived emissary of soul music to pop music...
...Henry Pleasants, in his ear-opening book "The Great American Popular Singers," gets to the heart of Charles? vocal achievement: ?Sinatra, and Bing Crosby before him, had been a master of words. Ray Charles is a master of sounds. His records disclose an extraordinary assortment of slurs, glides, turns, shrieks, wails, breaks, shouts, screams and hollers, all wonderfully controlled, disciplined by inspired musicianship, and harnessed to ingenious subtleties of harmony, dynamics and rhythm... It is either the singing of a man whose vocabulary is inadequate to express what is in his heart and mind or of one whose feelings...
...After four verses of 12-bar blues, the song rollicks into some of Charles? swingin? lounge piano, then returns to the vocal, in a squealing release - ?Say, have you heard, baby/ Ray Charles is in town/ Let?s mess around till the midnight hour/ See what he?s puttin? down? - that prefigures no fewer than three Atlantic songs: Charles? own ?Let the Good Times Roll? and ?Mess Around? and Wilson Pickett?s ?In the Midnight Hour.? The song ends with generic barks (?Come on! Come on, child!?) that are pretty much grunts with consonants. A listener needs no English...
...earlier Charles work was evident from the first note: on an electric piano that sounded like a guitar with a mitten muffling the strings. It was blues, all right, but with a Latin accent, thanks to great cymbal, conga and stick work by Milt Turner. It featured his urgent vocal, but not until almost 50 seconds into the song. The complex simplicity of the number made it seem both roughhouse and pristine...
...album also showed that Charles could lay his tortured vocal style on such chestnuts as the Arlen-Mercer ?Come Rain or Come Shine? and Irving Berlin?s ?Alexander?s Ragtime Band.? That?s an amazing cut. Written as a ?coon song? (minstrel number) in 1911, Charles made it a black song; he transformed this antique march into a big-band raver. The band (Burns did the brassy, bluesy charts) plays the melody and Charles comes in an antiphonal bar later, bleating "Come on an' hear!" By the end of the chorus he's quoting his own "This Little Girl...