A cappella harvests newest cash crop

A host of groups have put out CDs during the last couple of years—this fall alone, the Spizzwinks (?), the New Blue, Mixed Company, and Tangled Up in Blue have released new albums. If the Spizzwinks (?) website is correct in its claim that the group has released a new CD roughly every four years since its inception in 1914 and now releases new albums even more frequently, then many at Yale must be asking the same question: given that even the most popular chart-topping commercial artists often don't release more than two or three albums in a decade, where is the demand for all these amateur Yale recordings coming? And furthermore, how good are they?

If you're looking for measures of quality, it's no shock that Four Score Seven has its fair share of songs that don't fit into any of the genres that you might find in the world of commercial music today. After all, it's hard to squeeze traditional Yale songs like "Wake, Freshman, Wake" and the swaying-snapping-clapping style of "The Other Woman," sung by Ray Shem, ES '03, on a continuum among alternative, funk, R&B, pop, and country. But that's somehow the point, it seems. It's not that Yalies get together in a cappella groups just to hear their own voices pouring from the speakers of their friends' stereo systems, but rather, that it gives them a chance to indulge in music-making that's often idiosyncratic or even downright weird—not exactly the stuff that you'd fill an entire CD binder with.

Four Score Seven, in fact, is a typical a cappella CD because it acts as a self-conscious anthology of various kinds of music united simply in its appeal to members of the Spizzwinks(?), who must like the songs enough to painstakingly arrange them, and learn them in all their unique arrangement.

And the inspiration for CDs like Four Score Seven results from the natural desire of a cappella members to see their hard work at Yale tangibly accounted for, in plastic. It gives them something real and permanent to take back to their high school music teachers, as if they were nothing less than autograph-worthy celebrities. There's no doubt that every performer who passes through Yale, from the principal violinist in the Yale Symphony Orchestra to the harmonica player in Tangled Up in Blue, would appreciate a few seconds to himself on a musical track, if for no other reason than to be remembered. "For most of us, this our only chance to be on a CD," Vikram Swamy, PC '03, said of the Spizzwinks(?). "We have to take advantage of it."

For most groups, it's a simple fact that parents and close friends play a part in supplying the much-needed bucks that finance tours and CD production. Alice Goldman, business manager of the New Blue, Yale's oldest women's a cappella group, revealed that parents dropped around $500 on the group's new CD, Lucy, at the Parents' Weekend jam. Lucy, however, is certainly more than just a vehicle for each of the group's members to let her voice be heard. Featuring many arrangements of hits by soulful women like Roberta Flack, Tracy Chapman, Lauryn Hill, Ani Difranco, and Stevie Nicks, it's an album that, surprisingly, does anything but scream for attention. At times languorous and introspective (especially on Tracy Chapman's mesmerizing "Fast Car," with a solo by Christy Sholes, BR '04) and at times lightly exuberant (it's nearly impossible to resist clapping to the beat of "I Say a Little Prayer," sung by Katie Vagnino, BR '03), the CD unfolds smoothly.

As New Blue and the Spizzwinks(?) demonstrate, there are some very professional a cappella CDs out there. But the question remains: is anyone really buying them? Do CD sales reach beyond the obvious demand of parents and close friends to the greater Yale community?

According to Derrick McBride, BR '03, business manager of Mixed Company, the need to produce CDs that will sell off the group's website or to audience members who see the group on tour definitely shapes the music that the group selects for the CD. It may sometimes happen that monetary concerns tend to discourage groups from being wildly adventurous with their music.

"Each CD is like a puzzle," he said. "We're trying to match soloists to the songs that best showcase their voices, but we're also trying to select songs that will please the most audiences, in order to make the CDs profitable." Commercial artists, of course, often have the same concerns in mind—Madonna can't deny that topping the billboards tends to boost a singer's career—so it's not surprising that some of Mixed Company's current greatest hits, like the Indigo Girls' "Ghost" and Marc Cohn's "Walking in Memphis" (arranged by Dave Lerman, PC '03), take pride of place on the group's new CD—Molly Pitcher.

On New Blue's Lucy, too, the group's classics, including "Black Water," "Sweet Love," and "Killing Me Softly," reappear even though they've been recorded on several earlier albums. Still, the overwhelming, almost palpable richness of the group's sound in "Black Water" makes it an arrangement worth recording repeatedly.

Mixed Company's Molly Pitcher, like Lucy, Four Score Seven, and many other a cappella CDs, includes mainly covers of pop songs that are for the most part filtered into the expected solo-chorus arrangement. The CD offers an unusually boisterous hour or so of listening; singers like Caren Perlmutter, ES '04, on "Ghost," Lerman on "Walking in Memphis" and McBride on Stevie Wonder's "Don't You Worry" help to make a cappella a genre in its own right rather than merely a parody of commercial hits (Fortunately, there aren't too many of the saccharine "dooohs" and imitatively percussive "ch-k-ch-kahs" that initially seem to turn off many freshmen to the a cappella scene).

Perlmutter's voice — alternating between a deep, dark purr and a soaring pure tone—can evoke the knowing, almost jaded, glance of the mature lover as easily as the frustrated innocence of the young girl.

With soloists like this, it's easy—for a second, at least —to forget that you're listening to some college kids having a good time, rather than to an early recording of Stevie Wonder, still testing just how far his voice can stretch and bend. Graphic by Rebecca Rosenthal.

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