Aretha Franklin - Sweet Bitter Love (1982) [1989, Digitally Remastered Reissue]

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Aretha Franklin - Sweet Bitter Love (1982) [1989, Digitally Remastered Reissue]

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This anthology has a distinct purpose-to demonstrate that while at Columbia Records, Aretha Franklin did some exceptionally fine, even memorable, ballad singing. Aretha's early pop career has been consistently denigrated. The conventional line has it that while at Columbia, she was drowned in a sea of strings, her sensibility withered by a steady diet of Tin Pan Alley material more suitable for Nancy Wilson or Diahann Carroll. Lord knows there were many bloated, catastrophic recordings during those years. And even some of her most sensitive ballad readings were hindered by arrangements and orchestrations that were far from sympathetic-either too lush and overblown, or prosaicly simple. For these reasons, this album is more an anthology of great moments than of fully realized productions. But these tentative excursions by a former gospel singer into a strange new world possess a rare delicacy and fervor. The two sides of this anthology represent two very different aspects of her ballad singing. The first side catches her working in the stately morose, sometimes repressive confines of the late fifties rhythm-and-blues tradition. Most of the tunes could be classified as blues ballads. All these cuts, save one, were done under the supervision of John Hammond, the man who discovered Billie Holiday, recorded Bessie Smiths last sides, and considered the 18-year-old Franklin to be a comparable genius. Therefore, tradition weighed heavily on her. Aretha was also very much under the influence of the reigning queen of the blues, Dinah Washington. She appears to be slowly paring down the gospel and nightclub R&B traditions to their essentials. There’s a chilly precision in Franklin’s phrasing that one never hears in her later work. Her use of melisma (the gospel-derived technique of stretching one sound over several notes) is restrained. Everything here is straightforward and without guile. Aretha had not yet learned to mix genres or to operate at more than one emotional level at once. The mournful songs like Van McCoy’s “Sweet Bitter Love,” and the songs of yearning like Cleveland’s “Nobody Like You,” remain at one persistent, somber level. The late-adolescent naked quality of this approach is mirrored in the simple, repetitive piano triplets and basic gospel chordings that accompany her. Like haiku, they can be heartbreaking ... especially the concluding lines of “Sweet Bitter Love.” The second side of this anthology features Aretha adrift in Tin Pan Alley under the wing of producer Robert Mersey Mersey was rarely content with less than 50 violins and a 40-piece vocal chorus. In a funny way though, Tin Pan Alley meant freedom for her-a chance to escape from the confines of traditional R&B. She was given the opportunity to tackle the intricate chord changes in “Skylark,” and the ambiguities involved in Billie Holiday’s “God Bless The Child”. In searching for the five pop ballads for side 2, we listened to close to 50 of the Mersey-Franklin collaborations. There are many clinkers in the bunch, tunes where Aretha was sunk in arrangements that didn’t allow the lyrics to take hold. But on these five, something happened. The clash of styles, of temperaments, of sensibilties, sometimes stirred her imagination. Casting her as Queen Guinevere on the Lerner- Loewe “If Ever I Would Leave You” is a case in point. Admittedly, there are portions in her reading of this rather cumbersome opus that are listless. But then an individual line comes along and strikes her fancy... .“Your hair streaked with sunlight” or “I see how you sparkle.” Her voice goes up an octave or more. But she invariably screams out the word that comes right before the word she really wants to emphasize. Then she pauses at what seems to be the most unlikely moment. Finally, she slowly, delicately, quietly stretches out her key words-“streaked” or “sparkled.” Her timing is so unexpected, and the release of a tension so great that these phrases are remembered decades later. (In fact, Curtis Mayfield named the album he produced for her Sparkle as homage to her version of this song.) It’s with these somewhat awkward, unwieldy pop ballads that Aretha really developed her own style of soul. Here, truly, she does operate on several emotional planes at once. Ten years ago, I saw her at the Apollo during one of her many comeback tours. At this stage of her life she had already tired of the uptempo numbers. Though she performed “Rock Steady” and “Chain Of Fools,” her heart was in the ballads. My friend Paul said, “Her real gift isn’t blues or gospel technique. It’s that she’s one of the only artists who actually conveys what can happen between two people... those rare moments when everything’s rght”. This anthology shows how she developed this gift, this art.

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Aretha Franklin - Sweet Bitter Love (1982) [1989, Digitally Remastered Reissue]

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Aretha Franklin - Sweet Bitter Love (1982) [1989, Digitally Remastered Reissue]

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