Although pop singing has developed a highly standardized vocal technique, those textbook techniques are often learned and imitated by pop singers in any country and region around the world. Therefore, in any singing talent show, in addition to a very small number of personalized singers, the type of singing voice that the audience can hear is basically fixed.
However, the standard technique of routineization does not completely obscure the stylistic characteristics of pop singers. We can still distinguish the typical regional style through the vocal characteristics of some iconic singers. For example, among the female singers of the same era, Iceland's Björk and France's Elena Horley are obviously very different types, and they are very different from North American pop singers such as Canada's Celine Dion.
Many top pop singers are able to interpret a unique cultural connotation through their own singing style or singing skills. Pop music transcends national boundaries, but the singer's singing style often blends the linguistic traditions and regional characteristics to which they belong.
Compared with later rock music, the regional color and ethnic culture contained in early jazz are undoubtedly more prominent. The black tradition that originated in New Orleans is evident in the three jazz divas Billie holiday, ella fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. In these pioneering female singers, listeners can appreciate the distant and pure jazz singing skills.
With the development and spread of jazz, this singing style, which originally had distinct regional and ethnic cultural characteristics, gradually evolved into a universal musical language. After the older generation of classic divas retired from the stage, the black tradition of jazz girls has not been interrupted, but what really pushed jazz girls to the wider market are some female singers with charming appearances and pop idol temperament, and can attract the attention of listeners just by relying on record covers.
In some ways, they inherited a tradition that originated in New Orleans, but the improved vocal style made their music more popular, thus eliminating the "limitations" of the classic jazz female voice. For example, female singers from New York, Jane Monheit and Norah Jones.
The slightly blessed Zhen Menghai has an opera girl-like grace, and Nora Jones is more like a singing girl next door.
Diana Claire
But it's not just popular jazz that has a wider audience. Diana Krall, who holds the classic style, is perhaps the most unique of the jazz girls who have escaped the cultural characteristics of the region. The Canadian singer not only competes with popular jazz artists in the record market, but also enjoys a higher degree of professional recognition.
Industry insiders have listed her alongside Cassandra Wilson and Dee Dee Bridgewater, two middle-aged black female singers inherited from the older generation of divas, as the three most important female vocalists in today's jazz scene.
Regardless of the evaluation system, Diana Crane is a representative of contemporary jazz female voices.
While the young Jane Dream Sea and Nora Jones had to record pop songs frequently for the sake of record sales, Diana Crane still adhered to a more pure jazz style, and with her outstanding appearance and mature temperament, captured a large audience outside of traditional jazz. Several of her major albums have sold platinum in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Portugal and other markets.
Time magazine described her as "beautiful blonde hair and depressed eyes, and a dangerous past", and the unique coldness, dullness and depth of her voice contains a lingering urban tone. Perhaps in the eyes of the most senior jazz fans, her singing voice is not yet comparable to the three great divas, but in the era when classic jazz is declining and cross-border integration is prevalent, it seems that only she can bring the old-school jazz female vocal tradition into the public hearing range.
This tradition has influenced generations with the golden age of jazz. Today, the de-regionalization of jazz has enabled singers from different national, linguistic and cultural backgrounds to inherit this classic style. In addition to English-speaking countries, the Chinese music scene is no longer a wasteland for female jazz singers, and starting with Wang Ruolin a decade ago, young singers who have inherited the New Orleans tradition in some ways are no longer rare.
However, few people are as traditional as Diana Crane, who usually incorporate more diverse musical elements. The universalization of jazz female vocals is often accompanied by popularity – gone are the days when they belonged to the older generation of classic female singers.
Diana Crane, who debuted, like later Jane Dream sea and Nora Jones, sought a fusion between jazz and pop. The process didn't last long, and she soon returned to the classic spectrum of jazz: on many albums, especially in live concerts, it was always necessary to show the audience the original jazz playing, and she also liked to perform familiar songs to the accompaniment of jazz bands and even orchestras.
Throughout the world of contemporary jazz music, Diana Crane is an absolute star. None of her contemporaries, who adhered to the pure jazz style, performed as widely as pop stars; few in the pop music market, which dominated rock, pop, country, folk, and rap, few released jazz records that were high on billboard charts.
As a result, she is one of the very few musicians who can carry out jazz and marketization at the same time. She let the jazz female voice really enter the era of popularization, but the pure jazz female voice is still difficult to be popularized.
She has a higher profile and more commercial artistic image than Kassandre Wilson and Di Bridgewater, who are older than her, and her achievements are even more valuable than the fact that Jenmond Sea and Nora Jones, who are younger than her, must rely on popular jazz styles to win the same market sales.
In the territory of contemporary jazz, she is a singer who inherits the past and is also the singer who is most difficult to be copied.