I said in a song somewhere once “I’ve been a lot of places, I’ve seen a lot of faces, and now and then a woman smiled at me” and though I didn’t mention it in that song, as I travel about, I’m often asked about my favourite music. It’s not an easy question to answer because a lot depends on your mood at the time, and also some piece of music you’ve never heard before will later pop up and grab you, so the list is always changing. Plus, more than the music or the song itself, the answer often has more to do with the treatment of the piece, how it is played, the acoustics of the place, the arrangement, the tempo, and even the audio levels throughout. In brief, the answer will vary. As background to this, I have early memories in Canada of a recording by Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong where in the middle of a saxophone solo by one of the band members one could hear Satchmo’s voice in the background proclaiming “Modulate, Daddy, modulate” in relation to what he had just heard. As a youngster, searching for ways to improve the music I was dealing with in my very first group, a trio, I remember the impact that information from the jazz man had on me. I would later notice singers such as Nat Cole, Frank Sinatra, Edith Piaf, Roy Hamilton, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, among others, using that variety in volume to pull you in. The late Nina Simone, a gifted pianist as well as an enthralling singer (actually, my favourite singer) is a prime example of it, delivering George Gershwin’s I LOVES YOU PORGY with the last word in the phrase gradually fading away into almost a whisper of wistful love. Technically, modulation can be defined as “varying the strength, pitch or tone of a musical note, sung or played,” so it could be a variation in volume, or tone, or even a change of key used so effectively by many singers in the middle of a tune, sliding from one verse into another. It is very effective in capturing audience attention and in establishing a mood, or in changing it, and I’m attaching a link below so you can go on the web and hear for yourself the Skiffle Group, a Trinidad steelband, displaying it in style.
