Judy Collins, Chi Coltrane & the Art of Singing

Two albums that exemplify the power of the female voice

Welcome again music lovers!

For this edition of Listening Sessions, I am spotlighting two albums I recently picked up crate-digging and immediately took to: Judy Collins’ In My Life and Chi Coltrane’s self-titled debut. Both are fierce demonstrations of the power of the female voice. I hope you enjoy the essay and will share your thoughts on the music too.

Recently, I was pleased to be asked by

NickS (WA)

to contribute some thoughts to a piece he wrote on British folk in the seventies (read it here - it’s excellent). I especially enjoyed checking out the performance by Pentangle that Nick shared with me. Pentangle is a band I know of but am not really familiar with and now, I already have one of their albums in my collection. There will be more. Thanks Nick!

As well, Dominic Umile, a Brooklyn-based writer and editor, got in touch with me to share a piece he wrote on Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay that quotes from the essay I wrote earlier this year on the early, rambunctious CTI. He unearths some some great tidbits about the album as well as the continuing cultural relevance of what Creed Taylor did with the label. It’s a solid piece (read it here). Thanks Dominic!

I’ll be in touch at the end of the month with my next paid post. Free to all will be a round-up on new and upcoming music I think you’ll love as well as some of my favourite pieces I’ve recently read on Substack. Behind the paywall will be a look at some of the stuff I’ve been listening to in my record room over the past few weeks as well as an update on the state of my newsletter. A paid subscription to Listening Sessions is $50/year or $6/month (Canadian funds), and will help support my work (for example, already this year, I’ve listened to 121 new albums, and I have an idea for my Substack that I hope to put into action this summer) spreading the joy of listening to music.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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There’s a quick harpsichord hit before the first of 12 withering put-downs is sung: “He’s the kind of guy puts on a motorcycle jacket / and he weighs about a hundred and five.”

This guy's a hapless poseur. He’s a surfer with a “ho-daddy haircut,” a Maserati owner who has no idea how to turn on the car’s ignition, a cowboy so slow off the draw he puts a bullet in his foot and a sorry excuse of a bohemian who “can’t grow a beard.” And yet—and it’s here where things take off like a runaway locomotive—”when he comes in for bowling / he’s an expert at rolling / sets the pins up and lays ’em right down.” And that’s just for starters.

This guy is catnip to women. In the original recording of the song, ‘Hard Lovin’ Loser,’ by Mimi and Richard Fariña for their second album, Reflections In a Crystal Wind, Richard sneers a “mannnnnn!” as he and Mimi catalogue the guy’s flaws over a quintessential folk-rock background.

When Judy Collins got a hold out of it soon after Richard’s untimely death in a motorcycle accident, she took a more pensive pose that remains even in the rave-up of the resolution of the verses. Any force she puts into her vocal here seems as much about trying to keep up with the band accompanying her than reflecting the irony of Fariña’s lyric.

It’s an exciting recording as it ping-pongs between its two disparate moods. Released as a single in late 1966, it was Collins’ first appearance on the Billboard Hot 100. It was also included on In My Life, her sixth album on Elektra.

It was preceded on the LP with the opening cut, an especially striking version of Dylan’s ‘Just Like Tom Thumb Blues.’ Collins’ interpretation treats it as a minstrel would have during the baroque era. Providing the arrangement was Joshua Rifkin who, in the same year that In My Life was released, began a series of recordings for Nonesuch, a label founded by Elektra head Jac Holzman which became a fount of albums dedicated to pieces outside of the established classical repertoire and a pioneer of world music.

Nineteen sixty-six was a big year for Elektra as it began to shift its focus from folk to psychedelic rock—in effect, mirroring or, maybe more accurately, helping to facilitate the shift between the two genres as a dominant expression of the music counterculture through albums like the Butterfield Blues Band’s East-West, Love’s self-titled debut and Da Capo, and Pat Kilroy’s Light of Day.

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Judy Collins had been recording for Elektra since 1961. She trod the path of many in the folk field, initially recording traditional numbers with her on guitar accompanied by a second guitarist and a bassist, and gradually adding more and more from the repertoire of her contemporaries who were songwriters. Her fifth album for the label, titled simply Fifth Album and released in 1965, signified her drift away from this formula. She sings ‘Lord Gregory’ over a string background. Richard Fariña, Danny Kalb and John Sebastian guest. The album is a notable showcase for the warm and subtle power of Collins’ voice, just about as arresting as Joan Baez’s.

In My Life was a more definitive point of departure. The Bachian ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ and the head-long drive of ‘Hard Lovin’ Loser’ are just the first signs of the album’s bold imagination.

There is a nerviness to the repertoire selected for it. Collins wasn’t the first to interpret ‘Pirate Jenny’ from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera—that was Nina Simone—but her icy performance is head-turning, the feeling of a remarkable aura surrounding In My Life taking shape.

There are ebbs and flows to the album that accentuate the sublimity of the quieter moments. There is a fragility to Collins singing ‘Suzanne’—here, she is the first to record a song that became one of Leonard Cohen’s signature pieces. The return to the bucolic sound of just guitar and upright bass accentuates its longing. There is a slight rise in her voice as sings the immortal lines “and you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind” that suggests the emotion without her becoming didactic.

That control also anchors her reading of Randy Newman’s ‘I Think It’s Going to Rain Today’—here, she is second only to Julius LaRosa, of all people, interpreting it on record. Contrast the way she treats the word “lonely” as a shout out into the void with the resignation attached to its resolution in the lyrics, “tin can at my feet / think I’ll kick it down the street / that’s the way to treat a friend.”

Any good singer should demand being listened to. There must be a quality in his or her voice that compels attention, whether it be for technical or interpretive reasons or both. I think with Collins on In My Life, it isn’t about being besotted with the prettiness of her voice or hearing it transformed into something tougher or darker. To that point though, in addition to ‘Pirate Jenny,’ she finds a balance in the chanson of Jacques Brel and Alasdair Clayre’s ‘La Colombe - The Dove’ that doesn’t dilute its message in histrionics and the delirious medley of selections from Marat / Sade by Richard Peaslee on which Collins to take glee in using the word “ass” as an expletive (surely one of the first examples of profanity on a non-comedy LP) is deliciously subversive.

It is instead about hearing how Collins will interpret a song. What choices will she make? On Donovan’s ‘Sunny Goodge Street,’ she takes his jazzy and somewhat downcast recording and turns it into a carnival ride. Rifkin’s arrangement of the harp brings out a calliope quality and Collins adds a series of “la-la-la”’s anticipating a felling of bliss that may still be attached to what was then the coming Summer of Love.

And there’s another thing that reinforces In My Life as an important album. In its use of orchestration, it foreshadows how it would soon dominate pop music in the rush to replicate and comment upon Sgt, Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And yet, the album ends with the sound that it had almost entirely eschewed.

There are only guitars and a bass on the closing title track. It’s quietness is that of a benediction and an entreaty to consider the perfection of John Lennon’s lyrics. Collins’ unadorned performances takes the parallel nature of the words (“some are dead and some are living / some have gone and some remain”) as her central principle, fashioning out of it something truly touching and moving. It’s a quiet close to an album that is, on the balance, a fierce and forceful statement.

Those words also describe Chi Coltrane’s self-titled debut on Columbia in 1972. If one has heard of her, it’s likely because its lead-off track, ‘Thunder and Lightning,’ was a fairly big hit.

It is one heck of an entrance with its hopped-up beat, aggressive horn lines and a verse-chorus structure that starts fairly heated and then boils over in its resolution. All that and no mention yet of Coltrane’s voice, one of the most intriguing and interesting of the many female singer-songwriters of the early seventies. It is full of power and laser focused on the beat. It generates the kind of soul that makes you leap up in your seat and take notice—no surprise that all it took was a six-song tempo for Columbia to sign her. But, here’s the thing: voices with full-throated power are tricky.

Hold back too much and one is run of the mill. Pour it on to excess and words like shrill, piercing and strident quickly come to mind. Many singers have navigated this tightrope but I doubt many have walked it with such precarity as Coltrane. On her debut, she often begins a song by singing lightly before opening up her voice for a declaration that becomes ever more striking because of what she has withheld before making it.

Take, for example, ‘Time to Come In,’ a paean to resolve and rebirth. As she sings the chorus and proclaims “it’s time to come in from the rain” twice, she then pushes even further to sing “ain’t gonna let it pour” with a slight growl. Some may call this over singing but it doesn’t feel that way to me, certainly not in the way that, say, Barbra Streisand could, on occasion, in the sixties go beyond the boundary of what was needed to get a song across to the listener. Indeed, even when Coltrane takes it to limit on ‘Feelin’ Good,’ her sense of syncopation and how it dovetails with the band on the album (an all-star group of musicians appear with her: Jim Gordon, Larry Knechtel, Dean Parks, Victor Feldman and others) mitigates any reservations over the extraversion applied.

The exhilaration of hearing Chi Coltrane's debut is not solely in how it is a treatise on powerful singing. It’s additionally in how that power meets a lyric line like “we just can’t go on together” on ‘It’s Really Come to This.’ The cumulative effect cuts deep.

It’s also in the deeper meaning that Coltrane laces into some of the songs. Back to ‘Time to Come In,’ she confesses that “I’m looking for a better way.” There is righteous fury to the polemical ‘I Will Not Dance’ directed to President Nixon. Not only is it that “the people are all sick of following you,” but Coltrane imagines Nixon at the Judgement seat and all she can offer as consolation is “God help you “public servant.””

Religious imagery is also strong on ‘The Tree’ and transcendent on ‘Go Like Elijah.’ How could it not be as Coltrane imagines exiting this mortal coil like the Old Testament prophet Elijah whom it is written rose up from the earth to heaven. It may be the ultimate test as to whether Coltrane’s music will strike a chord as she tears through lines line, “I don’t want no tombstone above my head / and I don’t want no pine box as my bed, oh no / and I don’t want anyone to say I’m dead, oh no.” The chorus shifts into a two-step Baptist beat.

‘Go Like Elijah’ may be about as cosmic as some of Judee Sill’s music but whereas Sill always seemed to sing from the vantage point of someone in private conversation with God, Coltrane is instead ready to convert any and all souls up for the taking.

Her debut throbs with that kind of spirit. It’s every bit as original as Judy Collins’ In My Life. They make about as good a double shot of the power of the female voice as I’ve heard in a long time.

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