Rock fans instantly recognize the wordless vocals of Clare Torry, even if the name does not register immediately to any but diehard Pink Floyd fans. Recommended by producer Alan Parsons, Torry came into Abbey Road Studios while Pink Floyd was recording Dark Side of the Moon, which would go on to spend a record-breaking 917 weeks on the Billboard Top 200 charts and sell more than 45 million copies.
Keyboardist Richard Wright composed “The Great Gig in the Sky,” and the band had the idea of having a woman vocalist “wail” over the keyboard-driven melody. When Clare Torry began her session, as Parsons tells it, “she had to be told not to sing any words: When she first started, she was doing ‘Oh yeah baby’ and all that kind of stuff. So, she had to be restrained on that. But there was no real direction – she just had to feel it.”
Torry’s part begins at 1:07, coming in strong and maintaining a high level of intense expression until 2:23. The remainder is, mostly, a quieter approach – like a reluctant acceptance of why we grieve, although with spike-like questions and demands for understanding. As Torry’s voice fades with the final piano notes, there is little question that, without lyrics, the message is one of loss and grief.
The rest, as they say, is history. But what of this wordless vocalizing that sent the thoughts of many Pink Floyd fans into the ethereal? To find out, let’s venture back to the early 20th century.
Sergei Rachmaninoff composed “Vocalise” for the soprano Antonina Nezhdanova in 1915, in the midst of World War I and just two years before escaping revolutionary Russia, never to return. “Vocalise” was originally published with “13 other songs he had written for high voice (either soprano or tenor) …. The song contains no text for the singer, only a melody line. That melody line is sung on a neutral vowel, like oo or ah, that is chosen at the singer’s discretion.”
When Nezhdanavoa protested the lack of lyrics, Rachmaninoff replied: “What need is there of words, when you will be able to convey everything better and more expressively than anyone could with words by your voice and interpretation?”
“Vocalise” has been performed often, on a variety of instruments and often without the vocals. The lasting impact of Rachmaninoff’s composition is evidenced by a performance by rock guitarist Slash.
Another progenitor of vocalise we can look to is none other than Duke Ellington. In 1927, Duke and his orchestra recorded “Creole Love Call,” “with vocal refrain,” as is referenced on the Victor 78 rpm label. The vocal refrain was by the amazing Adelaide Hall, who in 2003 entered the Guinness Book of World Records as most enduring recording artist, having performed and recorded in eight decades.
Indeed, in the 1980s she was back in demand after the release of the movie The Cotton Club. Even with such a long career, “Creole Love Call” remained her most famous recording, as Hall was showcased in the first popular recording to feature wordless singing. It would also be the first big hit for Duke Ellington.
Unlike Kay Davis, whom we will discuss shortly, Adelaide Hall was not a regular member of Ellington’s Washingtonians. Rather, her transatlantic career featured work with a panoply of greats such as Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, and many others. This was in addition to her own career as part of the Harlem Renaissance, of which Ellington was also a part. She subsequently took her talents to France and then to England, due to racism in her native United States.
The concept is simple – compose for the vocalist as though the singing voice is an instrument. In “Creole Love Call,” Hall’s sometimes guttural evocations are part of a call and response with the clarinets. She does similarly on “The Blues I Love to Sing,” also released in 1927.
Kathryn McDonald Wimp, who recorded and performed as Kay Davis during her time with Ellington, attended Northwestern University in her hometown of Evanston, Ill., part of one of the very few Black families in the Chicago suburb. At Northwestern, Davis earned a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree in 1942 and 1943, respectively. Ellington met her in 1944 at a recital, at which a friend of Kay’s dared her to audition for Duke.
That she took the dare likely did not surprise her friends, as Davis had shown daring resolve when she sang a love duet with a white male student at Northwestern University during a time when African-Americans were not even allowed to live on campus. As it turned out, she was invited into the band by Duke Ellington himself, and for the next six years, Kay Davis’s operatic training was an inspiration for Ellington to return to composing for wordless vocalization. She left the band in 1950, married, and never returned to her music career.
Ellington wrote about Davis: “She had perfect pitch, could sight read, and had all the gifts, so we decided to use her voice as an instrument.” Contemporary artist Candice Hoyes agrees: “She had perfect pitch, a very strong intellectual passion, and a great technical facility. She was a real consummate artist, and she sings with so much soul and so much warmth and personality.” David Schiff added that “Davis’s vocal purity would suit Rachmaninoff’s famous ‘Vocalise.'”
Davis performed several wordless vocals with Ellington, including an “operatically oriented remake of ‘Creole Love Call.’” Among other Ellington vocalise tunes sung by Kay Davis were “On a Turquoise Cloud,” “Minnehaha (The Beautiful Indians),” and “Transblucency.”
The challenge of incorporating Davis’s voice in the instrumentation created the opportunity for innovation. An example was shared by versatile Ellington trombonist Lawrence Brown: “We had to find some way to shade her voice down without destroying her delivery. So, I finally rigged up a metal derby, which we use in orchestra work, and put a cloth towel inside the derby, and let her sing with this right directly in front of her mouth. When you hear this record it sounds like she is open like the rest of the horns, but actually she is singing into a metal derby with a towel inside.”
Another example, “Transblucency,” is the song that inspired this exploration. I was not familiar with it as I was “Creole Love Call.” I cannot say just what it is about “Transblucency” that captured my attention, but certainly the title did before I listened to it – and purchased the 78 rpm record on Ebay for a $4.99 bid! Ellington and Brown were the co-writers, in 1941. Brown’s trombone solo on “Blue Light” in 1938 laid the groundwork for “Transblucency.”
Indeed, as David Schiff wrote in The Ellington Century, “Ellington reworked ‘Blue Light’ over a decade, creating a variegated gallery of related nocturnes: ‘Subtle Lament,’ ‘Dusk,’ ‘Transblucency,” and ‘On a Turquoise Cloud.’ Like Monet’s series of haystack paintings, these works bathe identical subjects in changing light; heard back-to-back they might be termed “blues-as-process.” They demonstrate how small changes in instrumental combinations or in their ordering can transform musical signification.”
“Transblucency” (sometimes written as “Transbluency”) is subtitled, “A Blue Fog You Can Almost See Through,” which enunciates the coloratura aspect of the soprano’s role. Kay Davis’s “elegant and haunting” voice set a standard that has inspired and challenged later singers to record vocalise. Considering that Duke Ellington would allow only Davis to sing the 1940s updated “Creole Love Call,” one wonders what he would think of these later attempts at “Transblucency.”
Maria Muldaur titled her 1986 studio album Transblucency, on which she offers her interpretation of Ellington’s 12-bar blues. Referring to the song as “evocative,” Muldaur in 1986 told the story of her connection to “Transblucency”: “That is a piece that I must have heard 20 years ago when I lived in Cambridge. I performed it live with Benny Carter, but had never put it on a record. I enjoy giving people a taste of something they haven’t come across. I like to dig a little deeper and find the undiscovered gems.”
Candice Hoyes’s 2015 debut album, On a Turquoise Cloud, features the singer on “Transblucency” and 12 other Ellington tunes, which she spent months selecting, having even explored rarities in the Duke Ellington Collection of the Smithsonian Institute’s Archives Center in Washington, D.C. Referring to Duke, Hoyes says: “His use of the voice is luxurious, womanly, and bold.”
In May 2020, the 10-piece “Prohibition-era jazz band” Lizzy and the Triggermen covered “Transblucency” on their album, Good Songs for Bad Times, with Lizzy Shapiro on vocals and featuring Dan Barrett, who played and arranged for Benny Goodman. “Mood Indigo” and “Creole Love Call” are better-known Ellington songs, but clearly the atmospheric “Transblucency” has proven to long inspire those who seek it out.
Ellington would revisit vocalise again in the 1960s with what he cited in his memoirs, Music Is My Mistress, as “the most important thing I have ever done.” The Second Sacred Concert: Freedom was the second of three “sacred concerts,” and premiered at New York’s St. John the Divine cathedral, which overlooks Harlem. Here Ellington turned to “the Swedish version of Julie Andrews” Alice Babs (nee Hildur Alice Nilsson), whose “voice combined the classical quality Ellington admired in Kay Davis with a range that matched the stratospherics of Cat Anderson’s trumpet,” as described by Schiff.
Such was her unique quality that when she was unavailable, Ellington would hire three singers to take her place, and she was the only singer he requested to sing at his funeral. She declined to sing, feeling that she would have difficulty controlling her emotions, but she did attend.
Babs’s range and reach into the stratosphere can be heard on “T.G.T.T.,” which stands for “Too Good to Title” and is part of the Second Sacred Concert. In the concert’s program notes, Ellington writes that that it was too good to title “because it violates conformity in the same way, we like to think, that Jesus Christ did. The phrases never end on the note you think they will. It is a piece even instrumentalists have trouble with, but Alice Babs read it at sight.”
Once again, we have Duke Ellington composing for the particular soloist. As Thomas Lloyd wrote about “T.G.T.T.,” “there is relatively little room for improvisation, because Ellington has written out a melody that looks like the transcription of an improvisation, which is how he often worked with instrumental solos as well.” Having worked with Babs in Europe when she was a fast-rising teenaged star, Ellington perfectly paired performer and performance, as he had done with Adelaide Hall and Kay Davis over the course of the previous 40 years.
As reported by New England Public Radio, Babs told author Stanley Dance that she was especially moved by Ellington’s sacred music. “There were times during the performances [at Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, and venues in New Canaan and New Britain, Conn.], when I had trouble controlling my emotions. In the cathedral it was very beautiful, the lighting and the massive congregation. I had to remind myself I was not the one to be moved, that the message was designed for the listeners.”
There are numerous other examples of vocalise, particularly from the jazz world. However, I feel it is appropriate to end an essay with the Sacred Concerts of Ellington after beginning with “The Great Gig in the Sky,” and its end-of-life connotations and wails of grief. After all, in its early formation and prior to adding vocals, a portion of what became the “Great Gig in the Sky” was known as “The Mortality Sequence” or “The Religion Song.” Each of the women chosen by the bandleaders to sing their wordless parts teach us that powerful messages can be conveyed without lyrics, just as did John Coltrane with his sheets of sound or Ellington himself with feather light touches on the keyboards.
Some of their phrases follow the melody played by the inanimate (yet animated) instruments, others are contrapuntal – independent yet equally articulated phrasings of voice and instruments. We are left with a handful of adjectives we can use to enunciate feelings that emerge listening to Torry, Hall, Kay, and Babs – sublime, ethereal, haunting, atmospheric, anything but ordinary. Of course, Kay Davis retired from her artistry in 1950, but each of Duke Ellington’s three vocalise singers lived into their 90s – perhaps emblematic not only of “Ellington’s century,” but of the timeless quality of their work.
