The New York Sun
August 6, 2007 Monday
Convulsive Beauty In a Powerful Voice
by STEVE DOLLAR
Garbage trucks rumbled past a street corner cafe on Second Avenue one
recent morning as Diamanda Galás sipped her espresso. She was dressed
like a crow, in black from head to toe, and enthusiastically began a
conversation that ranged from her affection for Spanish horror films
to the time, in the early 1970s, when she decked the critic Stanley
Crouch in the midst of an argument about the blues.
"I smacked him right across the face and made his mouth bleed," the
singer, never one to avoid life’s visceral moments, said.
Ms. Galás isn’t the first performer to take a swing at a critic, but
her fighting spirit is definitive. Ever since her 1981 debut album
"Wild Women With Steak Knives," the San Diego native has been a
defiant force, applying her three-and-a-half-octave range to
everything from American folk ballads to the famed Greek composer
Iannis Xenakis, transforming much of the material into something that
can be at once terrifying in its intensity and spellbinding in its
vision. "Beauty will be convulsive or not at all," Andre Breton
wrote. Listening to Ms. Galás, you can understand what he meant. She
sings with a power that is shattering and sublime.
She is also unpredictable. For a series of concerts that begin
tonight at the Highline Ballroom, Ms. Galás intends to survey several
different traditions. She’s devoted two evenings to romantic
standards, French ballads, and the "homicidal love songs" from her
pending November release "Guilty, Guilty, Guilty" (Mute), which
features surprises such as O.V. Wright’s classic R&B weeper "Eight
Men and Four Women." A third concert will be built around the
Amanedhes, improvisatory cries of sorrow that reflect on the singer’s
Greek heritage, as well as rembetika songs, the "hashish music" of
Greek and Armenian outlaws exiled from Turkey.
The programs are a hint not to trust appearances, even those as
dramatic as Ms. Galás’s, who has been favorably compared to "a lizard
queen" and "a demon going to war." She doesn’t seem to mind the
labels, even when they are inaccurate or sloppy. But it does make for
confusion
"When you’re considered the kind of freak that I’m considered to be –
lesbian, dyke, goth, screamer – and then I sing Jacques Brel, some
people are like, ‘What is that?’ or, Juliette Greco, ‘What is that?’"
Appropriately, the 51-year-old singer is as aware of her audience as
it is of her.
"What are they going to make of Ralph Stanley?" she asked, alluding
to a new recording of the bluegrass legend’s conversation with the
Reaper, "O Death," which found new popularity on the soundtrack of
the Coen Brothers’ 2000 comedy, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"
"Especially my version! I don’t want to do Ralph Stanley the way
Ralph Stanley does Ralph Stanley, because we don’t need that. If
you’re going to do it in a respectful way, who needs that? If
anything can be learned from Ornette [Coleman], it would be that. He
was playing the blues, and people would say to him, ‘It’s obvious you
never heard of John Lee Hooker the way you play the blues.’ He would
look at them like they were an idiot."
Ms. Galás, who began singing professionally at 13 with her jazz
pianist father and made her performing debut in 1979 at France’s
Festival d’Avignon, really loves this topic.
"I worship the singers who sang it straight," she said. "They
actually knew the melody. They knew the changes. They could sing over
the changes. They weren’t just going up there and doing their thing
over the top of it. That’s disgusting. That’s what you hear on
‘American Idol.’ I can play it as straight as Doris Day. Love her.
Best legato in the business. And from there you can take the song to
another place."
That’s an ideal way to describe what happens in "O Death." Ms. Galás
accompanies herself on piano, playing gutsy, rippling notes that hang
in the air like a deftly poised dagger in a New Orleans bawdy house.
She introduces the lyrics as if her lungs were a dark, forgotten
cave, the words sepulchral, final. Before too long, she launches into
a succession of improvisations – dizzying variations in pitch,
piercing wordless leaps up the scale, ecstatic, explosive, an extreme
aria that loops stratospherically and plunges back into bluesy vigor.
"I was reading a forensic book about a good ol’ boy in Louisiana who
has a body farm," Ms. Galás said, offering a roundabout perspective
on her creative choices. "He was a forensic pathologist who had seen
so many horrific murders of women and children. So he has a body farm
where he lays the dead bodies out in different climactic situations,
where he could determine how long it takes for the body to rot to the
bone. I was reading that and working on ‘O Death.’ I was in Hollywood
with this drag queen buddy of mine, and he was reading the book out
loud in his Bermuda slacks. He has a coffin laid out in his living
room, with all these death things, a whole New Orleans-Kentucky
funereal decor."
When the singer returned to the studio, she came up on the line
"flesh and worms will have your soul." "And there it was," she
continued. "There’s this section where I go into what some people
call vocal multiphonics. I’m pitching it, that came out of nowhere.
But it was based upon that reading somehow. You know, when you’re
singing multiphonics on a scale, you’re using the resonance cavities
in your body to make three or four notes at once. When you start
talking about resonance cavities, then you’re back to that forensics
guy. The music is on a scale, which is like walking along a path, the
inescapable path that death is leading you on."
She paused for a moment and considered the analysis, then offered a
disclaimer. It’s not as if she plotted all this in advance.
"I can’t think like that," she said. "But basically it’s as if you’re
singing and suddenly you get hit upside the head by something."
Just ask Stanley Crouch.
Ms. Galás will perform tonight, August 12, and August 19 at the
Highline Ballroom (431 W. 16th St., between Ninth and Tenth avenues,
212-414-5994).