I Can Kind of Sing

Essay: Colin McEnroe | Photograph by John Groo

One day in 1994, I was teasing the singer Maureen McGovern in a radio interview and suddenly she said, “OK, come to the Bushnell tonight and sing with me.”

“Um. OK,” I rejoined.
“Our Love Is Here To Stay. Know it?”
“Of course I know it.”

What followed were many hours in which somebody should have backed down but nobody did. All day long, however, a voice whispered in my head, just on the wrong side of audibility. “Sssssssomething sssssomething.”

I arrived at The Bushnell that evening for the performance. No rehearsal. “Sississomething,” whispered the voice.

I walked out on stage during the encore. The Hartford Symphony was behind us. 2,700 people sat before us. There was a mike and a stool and a spotlight waiting for me.
The orchestra kicked up the first few bars of the song, and I had a funny little twinge. And the inaudible whisper suddenly got very clear.

“Maureen McGovern has a famous four-octave range,” it said.
We started to sing the song. It was in an impossible key, and I quickly discovered I had no choice but to sing the high notes in a low octave and the low notes in the high one. It sounded like I was yodeling Gershwin.

I could sense, out in the seats, a kind of creaking agony. Flop sweat oozed from my pores, and the room filled with the smell of a performer melting like a candle.

Do you have those dreams in which, somehow, you are opening that very night in the lead role of Hamlet but have never read the play? I stood there wishing passionately that this was one of those dreams and knowing it wasn’t.

As we walked offstage McGovern said from the side of her mouth, “Not a great key for you, huh?”

My friend Peter Shapiro met me at the stage door, laughing.
“Move to Canada!” he said. “You can’t live here anymore. Leave now!”
The night, one of the worst meltdowns by a singer ever, is like Woodstock. Everyone was there. I’m sure I’ve talked to 7,000 people who saw it, 4,300 more than Bushnell capacity.
Oddly, it did not persuade me that I could not sing.

Singing is so intimate. It comes out of your mouth. Singing is also something people feel comfortable insulting in each other. A person who would never say you were fat or clumsy or badly dressed or poorly groomed or in need of an orthodontist will think nothing of telling you your singing sounds like someone performing surgery on an un-anaesthetized camel.
Most people think they cannot sing well. Most people also think they can sing. It is possible somehow to have both ideas at once. If only people could hear you the way you really sing, right? Because in the car, in the shower, you can sing.

A few years later, I was in Waterford, on a magazine assignment, writing about the Cabaret Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. The O’Neill Cabaret program attracts as “students” 35 up-and-coming singers, many of whom are already working. My year, one of the students was Paula West, months away from a recording career and the best New York venues and even some movie work.

Nonetheless, I told the organizers to let me slip in among the students and participate in the opening ordeal in which each singer sings one song for the entire faculty and student body and then is critiqued.

I know. I had learned nothing.

Except this time I was really good. Or, better put, the other singers were too good for their own good. They had fabulous pipes and satchels of tailor-made arrangements. I had to get one of the conference piano players to fake a version of (Gershwin again) They All Laughed. I delivered the song honestly and straightforwardly. I didn’t really have a lot of other artistic options.

In the faculty section Margaret Whiting shot to her feet.

“That’s what we’ve been asking people to do! Really sing the song. You remind me a little of Fred Astaire. He didn’t have the greatest voice in the world. But he could really put a song across.”

Margaret Whiting! Then the crowd made me sing the song a second time. Nobody else was asked to do this. They did the “ha-ha-has” with me.

Later, when my cover was blown, Jeffrey Klitz, an occasionally sharp-tongued New York music arranger, said to me: “You know, you could just stay here among us. You’ve got incredible timing.” I considered it.

Thirteen years later, I would estimate that I think about that day, oh…twice a week.

Because singing is so personal, so intimate! Who wouldn’t want to be good at it?

I didn’t stay and pursue a life in New York cabaret, but I continued to sing, sometimes in public. I recall an interview in which Stephen Sondheim explained that he did not, originally, intend to write a song like Send in the Clowns for A Little Night Music because he thought the actress who played Desiree would be mainly a glamorous movie star type who could not sing. Then Glynis Johns got the part and, said Sondheim, “Glynis could kind of sing.” So he wrote her that song.

I could live with that. “Colin? Yeah, he can kind of sing.”

I was born in 1954, and this year, I am 54, until October 15. That’s called your Beddian Year, when your birth year and your age are the same. I decided, at some point, that my Beddian Year would be a time when I did one or two things that represented impractical dreams as opposed to realistic notions.

And then Dianne Mower, a jazz recording artist and vocal coach, called me out of the blue.p> “I’ve been thinking about you,” she said. “You can kind of sing. We should work some songs up, and maybe you could join me in my act once in a while.”

Um. OK.

We started rehearsing. Breathing, posture, phrasing, attitude, words, letters, vowels, consonants, notes, harmony, handling the mike. In the room with us at all times was an extraordinarily patient young pianist named Matt DeChamplain.

And I learned, sometimes painfully, that you cannot learn to sing if you cannot find a place where you can go and stink, if you do not have a group of people who are willing to listen to you stink, if you don’t have the nerve to stink and stink and stink in front of those people until you stop stinking.

You’re going to hold a note differently, open up a vowel as you never have before, dive into a phrase in a way that, even alone in the shower, you would not attempt. When doing those things, you are occasionally going to sound like an ostrich squeezing out an unusually large egg. You can’t play it safe if you want to learn. You have to lay that egg, laugh it off and sing the damn thing again.

After a couple of lessons, a new possibility surfaced.

“Dave Brubeck is doing a show at the Infinity Hall in Norfolk,” Dianne said. “It looks like we might have the opportunity to do a number as part of that show.”

Um. OK.

To tell the truth, this sounded an awful lot like a Maureen McGovern accident waiting to happen. The Brubeck repertoire is not full of vocals of any kind and what’s there is … difficult. Dianne’s first idea was Cable Car Love, a quick, tripping piece in which we singers would be snapping out vocals to the notes of jazz solos, a style sometimes called “vocalise.”

“Is there anything that’s more like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star?” I asked.

There was. Well, sort of. Brubeck’s lone musical, The Real Ambassadors, contains a duet called One Moment Worth Years, written for Louis Armstrong. The tune is reasonably straightforward. The lone available recording features Armstrong and Carmen McRae. The lay listener may think of Armstrong as mainly an engaging and cheerfully serviceable singer, but that assessment would be wrong. Armstrong’s froggy, much-lampooned voice masked a subtle, supple singer given to bold choices in phrasing. The only way to sing this song was going to be, insofar as was possible, to completely forget the one recorded version of it and put Satchmo as far from my mind as possible.

In the weeks that followed, I sang the song several hundred times, starting, stopping, starting, stopping as Dianne fiddled with the way I paced certain phrases and the way I sang certain words. It’s close to the truth to say that pretty much every word and note was, at some time or another, taken out of the song, weighed and considered and then put back in. Of course, the more you do that, the harder it is to get back to any kind of holistic understanding of the song, but Dianne had a plan for that. I sang my part of the song many, many more times, until one afternoon I made her cry (in a good way).

“I think it was the way you sang ‘yield,’ ” she said, dabbing at her right eye.

I think Matt was going to cry too (in a bad way), if we made him play the song one more time. As the performance drew near, we added jazz guitar legend Norman Johnson to our rehearsals. So suddenly, we were a tight little jazz ensemble, except for the guy who didn’t know what he was doing.

It’s almost impossible to convey how many things have to flow together to create the illusion of effortless singing. I had one bad habit in particular.

“You’ve listened to a lot of Sinatra,” Dianne said during the second rehearsal. “I can tell, because you’re landing on your consonants. When you sing, you have to sing vowels. Sinatra could do the other thing because he was Sinatra. You’re not.”

It’s true. When Sinatra has the world on a string, he sings that “ng.” When he wants to take it nice and easy, he sings the “s” sound in “nice.” It sounds really cool. But if you’re not Sinatra and you really need to shape those notes, you have to sing the vowels, which means you have to open everything up, which means you might make a funny sound.

It came to pass that, on a Friday night, I found myself in Norfolk, an hour before showtime, standing out on a side porch. The only other person there was Brubeck, who is 88. It’s a different kind of Beddian Year for him. His age is the number of keys on a piano.

“Excuse me, Mr. Brubeck,” I ventured. “I’m the guy singing One Moment Worth Years tonight. Do you have any advice?”

He looked me up and down for a moment.

“No,” he said softly.

Up onstage, with the lights shining down, about 80 percent of what I had learned went wafting out of my brain and off to an undisclosed location. Fortunately, Dianne had loaded about six times more instruction into me than the job required. So I was OK. She, the pro, sang beautifully. But she was so carefully monitoring me that she missed the first few notes of her final entrance, and I actually covered them until she joined me.

I didn’t nail it. But I thumb-tacked it more or less where it was supposed to go. And even if I didn’t, Brubeck and his quartet came out onstage immediately and blew the room away, to the extent that people promptly forgot about me.

I was backstage gathering up my stuff when the big kids finished up their encores. I stepped into the hall as the quartet filed past. As Brubeck walked by he cut his eyes over at me and whacked me on the butt, like a star quarterback acknowledging a third string receiver who caught a few passes in the last minutes of a blow-out.

I’ll take it. It means I can kind of sing.

Colin McEnroe’s talk show airs at 1 p.m. weekdays on WNPR and online at www.wnpr.org.