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Remembering James Ingram

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Famed R&B singer and songwriter James Ingram has died. He was 66. Ingram scored eight Top 40 hits, won two Grammys, and was nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Original Song. He also collaborated with a host of musical legends, including singers Linda Ronstadt, Patti Austin, Michael McDonald, and Donna Summer.

Great artists always make it look easy, but Ingram’s career—like his singing—seemed effortless. Growing up in Ohio during the early 1960s, he learned piano by watching his brother Henry play. “When he’d get up from the piano,” Ingram told the Chicago Tribune, “[I’d] sit down and start banging. And when I got older, I started banging better and better.” As a teenager, he joined the choir of his father’s church “to keep my mother from pinching me when I was talking,” but never sang solo.

Wen Ingram moved to Los Angeles with his band Revelation Funk in the 1970s, he stayed there after his bandmates moved back home. Soon he was playing session piano and singing background vocals for Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye. He also wrote and recorded demos for $50 a song in a studio on Sunset Boulevard. One of those tunes, “Just Once,” caught the ear of famed producer Quincy Jones.

“I hung up on Quincy,” Ingram remembered of their first phone call. “I was never no singer. I never shopped a deal, none of that. My wife said, ‘James, that was Quincy.’ He called back, and we started talking.” Jones put Ingram’s “Just Once” and “One Hundred Ways” on his 1980 album The Dude. For the latter, Ingram won the Grammy for Best New Artist.

Even at this early stage of his career, Ingram’s voice was fully formed. He sang with a quiet authority and communicated powerful emotions with restraint. His falsetto was clean and slightly feral. Although clearly from the church, Ingram was primed for crossover fame, at a time when black artists were being marketed to a white audience. He was smooth but always soulful.

Jones was producing a new Michael Jackson album and asked Ingram to contribute a song. “P.Y.T.” hit the mark and appeared on 1982’s monster-selling Thriller. Ingram attended the recording session.

“Michael was dancing while he was singing,” Ingram recalled. “I’m not talking about just moving a little bit, he came out and he was sweating.” Jackson asked Ingram if he was singing it right. “Man, you’re killing it,” Ingram replied. To date, Thriller has sold an estimated 66 million copies. “It’s almost like I got the chance to go to Oz and Quincy was the Wizard of Oz and Michael Jackson was who he was dealing with in his world,” Ingram said of the experience.

Jones mourned Ingram’s death, saying, “There are no words to convey how much my heart aches with the news of the passing of my baby brother James Ingram. With that soulful, whisky-sounding voice, James Ingram was simply magical.”

Beginning in the ’80s, Ingram embarked on a series of successful collaborations. “Baby, Come to Me,” his 1982 duet with singer Patti Austin, reached No. 1. He teamed up with the Doobie Brothers’ blue-eyed frontman Michael McDonald for 1983s “Yah Mo B There”—Ingram’s keening falsetto in that song’s opening bars is absolutely haunting. He collaborated with Linda Ronstadt on the hit “Somewhere Out There” (another Grammy winner), and paired beautifully with jazz singer Anita Baker on “When You Love Someone.” He even sang with Dolly Parton, because he could. And it worked.

Ingram also struck gold in popular film soundtracks from the ’80s, contributing songs to An American Tail, The Color Purple, and City Slickers, among others. His contributions to Beethoven’s 2nd and Junior each earned Academy Award nominations.

The production values of these tracks is dated, to be sure; there’s a kind of easy listening blandness to the thin-sounding drums and brittle keyboards that hasn’t aged particularly well. However, the melodies that Ingram wrote, and the emotional directness with which he sang them, still sound as fresh and intimate.

Ingram scored his own No. 1 with “I Don’t Have the Heart” in 1990, the end of more than a decade of extraordinary achievement. His recorded output slowed considerably after that, culminating in 2008s gospel album Stand (In the Light).

Ingram’s crossover ability, though, brought its own kind of limitations. “It’s frustrating at times when I release a record and they tell me it’s not black enough for some radio stations,” he said in 1982. “It’s like telling the black audience they’re not important, like I’m not interested in them.”

Tellingly, musician Questlove remembered Ingram for his blackness, crediting his career with setting the stage for Dr. Dre’s rap album The Chronic. “It’s a GIFT,” Questlove wrote, “to navigate a thin line of EXPLICIT blackness..and still occupy a space that the Pendergrass and Marvin Junior’s of the world never got to enjoy…as we dwell further into auto tune abyss his brand…of sho nuffness will be missed DESPERATELY.”

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Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

The Paths of Rhythm

Pfife, Q-Tip, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest in the recording studio in New York City on September 10, 1991. Michael Ochs Archives / Getty

Hanif Abdurraqib Go Ahead in the Rain | University of Texas Press | February 2019 | 17 minutes (3,425 words)

 

In the beginning, from somewhere south of anywhere I come from, lips pressed the edge of a horn, and a horn was blown. In the beginning before the beginning, there were drums, and hymns, and a people carried here from another here, and a language stripped and a new one learned, with the songs to go with it. When slaves were carried to America, stolen from places like West Africa and the greater Congo River, with them came a musical tradition. The tradition, generally rooted in one-line melodies and call-and-response, existed to allow the rhythms within the music to reflect African speech patterns—in part so that everyone who had a voice could join in on the music making, which made music a community act instead of an exclusive one.

Once in America, where the slaves were sent to work in America’s South, this ethos was blended with the harmonic style of the Baptist church. Black slaves learned hymns, blended them with their own musical stylings that had been passed down through generations, and thus, the spiritual was born. In the early nineteenth century, free black musicians began picking up and playing European stringed instruments, particularly violin. It started as a joke—to mimic European dance music during black cakewalk dances.

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The Cabin

Photos courtesy of the author / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Lavinia Spalding | Longreads | January 2019 | 13 minutes (3,805 words)

 

The old rancher stood on the porch of my log cabin, shuffling his boots. Then he lowered the rim of his cowboy hat, squinted, and delivered the news I’d been dreading — the news that had probably been inevitable from the start.

Though I say the cabin was mine, I should confess it was really his. The rancher’s. Still, I felt possessive. I’d lived there only months, but I loved the wide covered porch where I’d hung my rope hammock, bought for 20 bucks in Mexico. I loved the woodstove and my nascent ability to make a half-decent fire on a chilly night. I loved the view from my picture window, past bright green fields and golden sandstone mesas, all the way to a distant blue triangle of mountain. A herd of deer grazed insouciantly in my yard each evening, a chorus of coyotes sang late at night. I loved everything about my cabin — especially what it represented: something that had eluded me my entire adult life. Read more…

How Diderot’s Encyclopedia Challenged the King

The encyclopedists meet at Diderot's home. Hulton Archive / Getty

Andrew Curran | an excerpt adapted from Diderot: The Art of Thinking Freely | Other Press | January 2019 | 19 minutes (5,105 words)

Denis Diderot’s incarceration at Vincennes took place exactly halfway through his seventy years on earth. Prison became the dramatic pause that gave shape and meaning to both sides of his life. Before prison, Diderot had been a journeyman translator, the editor of an unpublished encyclopedia, and a relatively unknown author of clandestine works of heterodoxy; on the day that he walked out of Vincennes, he was forever branded as one of the most dangerous evangelists of freethinking and atheism in the country.

During Diderot’s three-month imprisonment, his jailer the Count d’Argenson and the count’s brother the marquis had looked on with amusement while this “insolent” philosophe had bowed and scraped before the authority of the state. In a diary entry from October 1749, the marquis related with glee how his brother the count had supposedly broken Diderot’s will. Solitary confinement and the prospect of a cold winter had succeeded where the police’s warnings had failed; in the end, the once-cheeky writer had not only begged for forgiveness, but his “weak mind,” “damaged imagination,” and “senseless brilliance” had been subdued. Diderot’s days as a writer of “entertaining but amoral books,” it seemed, were over. Read more…

Dance Battle! Meet the Warring Milli Vanilli of Italo Disco

Longreads Pick

It was not a high point for music; even Italians try not to remember Italo Disco. Den Harrow was one of its biggest stars… but who is Den Harrow, exactly?

Source: GQ
Published: Jan 26, 2019
Length: 18 minutes (4,533 words)

Edward Gorey: A Highly Conjectural Man

Edward Gorey posing with a set piece he designed for the Broadway production of "Dracula," 1977. Jack Mitchell / Getty

Bridey Heing | Longreads | January 2019 | 8 minutes (2,151 words)

 

Edward Gorey’s small illustrated books, many of which are collected in his Amphigorey anthologies, are seemingly quite simple and often morbid. Children are befallen by terrible fates. Parents disappear and reappear too late. Danger lurks nearby, as dusk makes its way across the moors. All of this sinister mischief is told in black and white pen-and-ink drawings, with occasional color highlights thrown in (which somehow only serve to make the image more dreary and doom-laden). The characters differ little in appearance, and the prose — when there is any — is often a few rhyming lines near the bottom of the page. Looking closer, one can see the intricacy of the cross-hatching, the careful etching-like strokes that, alongside Gorey’s fragile humor, underpin the darkness.

Edward Gorey, like his art, was at once mercurial and precise. His interests, hobbies, dislikes, and habits are well documented, from his late-in-life love for TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer,to his devotion to George Balanchine’s work with the New York City Ballet, to his undying love for the cats with which he lived. His physical appearance — over six feet tall, with close-cropped hair and a long beard, draped in a huge fur coat, with rings on multiple fingers and scuffed up white sneakers on his feet — is as much part of the lore of Gorey’s work as the nonsensical creatures who populate his illustrations. Read more…

Shelved: Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine

Paul R. Giunta / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | January 2019 | 17 minutes (3,315 words)

 

The remarkable thing about Fiona Apple’s album Extraordinary Machine is that it’s actually two albums. Each has its own fans and critics; each was reviewed in the mainstream press; each is available to the casual listener.

Upon closer inspection, the story of Extraordinary Machine becomes a room made of mirrors: The album was shelved, perhaps by Apple’s label, or, according to her own admission, by Apple herself. That version of the album, produced by longtime collaborator Jon Brion, was leaked to the internet. It’s called the “Jon Brion version,” but in actuality is a pastiche of original sessions and new material. The official release was mixed without the presence of either of its two producers. The first version was shelved in part because Apple didn’t feel the songs were fully her own, and partly because her label didn’t believe it had commercial potential; the released version proved them right, at least by yielding no hit singles.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Bryan Singer. (Photo by J. Vespa/WireImage)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Alex French and Maximillian Potter, Wesley Morris, Ruxandra Guidi, Robert Caro, and Mark Abley.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Pulling Out All the Stops to Understand a Distant Father

Interior, Hallgrímskirkja Church, Reyjavik, Iceland. Photo by Krista Stevens.

At The Walrus, in an excerpt from his book The Organist: Fugues, Fatherhood, and a Fragile Mind, Mark Abley deconstructs the pipe organ, examining its components, appearance in history and popular culture, and its powerful capacity for meaning via sound as he recounts his distant father Harry’s obsession with the instrument and with musical composition and arrangement — often at a cost to his personal relationships.

Above all, my father was a musician. He played, he conducted, he taught, he accompanied, he composed. When I was a boy, he would sometimes appear at the dining table with a pencil behind his right ear and an abstracted distracted look in his hazel–green eyes. After a few bites of food and a cursory exchange of words, he would excuse himself, return to the piano—the central item of furniture in each of his many homes—and play, over and over, some musical phrase. Just a few bars at a time, with tiny variations. Listening to him, short sighted as I was, I thought about how my optometrist would keep toying with the refractor’s glassy settings to arrive at a correct prescription. When a melody or chord had been fixed to my father’s satisfaction, and he had scribbled it down on the back of a used envelope or the previous Sunday’s church bulletin, he would resume his meal. My mother could be a stickler for proper manners and polite behaviour. But she tolerated these whims without complaint, knowing they were anything but whims. When my father was composing music—for choir, organ, solo voice, or piano, and occasionally, for other instruments too—he was happy, or something approaching it. Those were the good times, the times when nobody had to worry about his state of mind.

In each of their homes, my mother placed a crucifix on the living–room wall, and my father hung a portrait of Bach on the wall above his desk. Music ruled his life.

It did not rule mine, and therefore, his was a life I could not fully enter. I never took an organ lesson; maybe he was waiting for me to ask, or maybe I was waiting for him. More likely, he needed to maintain a private space away from the demands of his family, just as I needed to create an imaginative world in which my parents would not be dominant. An organ, any organ, no matter how shrill its tone or limited its range, would give him the space he craved. Not every organ held stops that allowed my father to speak with both the voix céleste and the vox humana. Yet he was a master at coaxing beauty out of unlikely vessels, making even the weakest instrument sound sweet or strong. To his wife and child, the language he lived and breathed was a foreign tongue: the language of a distant nation. The language of organists.

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Learning to Forgive My Distant Father

Longreads Pick

In an excerpt from his book, The Organist: Fugues, Fatherhood, and a Fragile Mind, Mark Abley deconstructs the pipe organ, examining its components, appearance in history and popular culture, and its powerful capacity for meaning via sound as he recounts his distant father Harry’s obsession with the instrument and with musical composition and arrangement — often at a cost to his personal relationships.

Author: Mark Abley
Source: The Walrus
Published: Jan 18, 2019
Length: 13 minutes (3,383 words)