Crossing Over

Aretha Franklin has the right to sing opera.

by Peter Burwasser

Beloved American soprano Eileen Farrell put out an album many years ago with the self-proclaiming title I've Got a Right to Sing the Blues. Who's to argue? For that matter, Aretha Franklin has the right to sing opera, as she did in her gloriously note-twisting way last week at the Mann, in no less than three arias by Handel, Gluck and Puccini (of course, we also heard "Respect" and other favorites). The famous pipes are still in pretty darn good shape.

Music-biz people used to call this kind of stuff "crossover." That concept has produced so much embarrassing crap that most self-respecting music lovers run the other way when hear the term. The difference in the cases of Farrell and Franklin is that they are stretching their repertoire not because some publicist convinced them that it would be good for their careers, but because they love the music and want to express their enthusiasm to their audiences. That is a huge distinction.

Classical composers have incorporated other idioms into their material for centuries, with tons of folk music folded into Beethoven, Dvorak, Bartok, Shostakovich, Copland, and on and on. Jazz has had an influence in this world almost from its inception. Stravinsky latched on by the early 1920s.

A pair of recent CDs showcase two different, but equally daring, meldings of vernacular and academic musical styles. For "The Old Burying Ground," Evan Chambers gives a potentially hokey, but ultimately powerful, setting of epitaphs from 19th-century New England gravestones. The mixing of folk singers and operatic voices is surprisingly effective in this evocative, theatrical work. Nader Mashayekhi is a contemporary Iranian-born composer. His "fié ma fié II" opens with the hypnotic, rhapsodic traditional Persian singing of Salar Aghili followed by a starkly minimalist orchestral part — big oozing clouds of brass and percussion mutating with a Morton Feldman-like deliberateness. Mashayekhi's attempt to bring the two contrasting elements together does show its seams, but this is startling music-making nonetheless.

Duke Ellington — who, along with his great colleague Billy Strayhorn, had their own encounters with the classics, including a boffo jazz Nutcracker Suite — put it so well. There are, he said, only two kinds of music: good and bad.

(p_burwasser@citypaper.net)