To anyone who has listened to any part of his body of work, it isn't a surprise that Marvin Gaye was a huge jazz fan. You can hear it the most in his vocals. It was his love of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn and Frank Sinatra along with the stirring choruses of vocal harmonies that surrounded him as a member of The doo wop group, The Moonglows, and his hebrew pentecostal background that served as his vocal influences. And for his first twenty years as a performer he thrilled audiences by forging an artistic style that combined exquisite phrasing and intensely personal vocal interpretations along with the ritual of discovery and submission through extravagant praise that he heard as a boy; that need to reach and be reached, to touch and be touched, to heal and be healed through majestic prayer to one's maker. You could hear that fusion in his immaculate 60's singles, those Motown machine concoctions that were as simple and as complicated as winter or spring. That fusion was the core that fueled the humanism that made "What's going on" such a compelling work and it was the glue that held his sex suites together, commanding them to a world stage.
But he wanted to do more. He had started his career in the very early 60's making jazz albums for Motown with lackluster at best results; covering Sinatra, Lee, Como, Martin and Holiday songs they way most modern soul vocalist cover his standards, by imitation and not interpretation of the songs themselves. As his soul singles began to sell hundreds of thousands of more copies, he shelved his jazz leanings, but the genre never left his musical vocabulary. It was jazz structures and conceptual tone poems that served as as the foundation of the amazing musical subtlety and sophistication of "What's Going On." And it was Jazz's improvisational structures served as the backdrop for Marvin to create funk groove after funk groove throughout his 70's oevure. But for the longest time, his dream to make it as a jazz artist laid beyond his grasp. Finally in 1978, ripped to emotional shards by two divorces, ailing from a maddneing cocaine intake, and with a wealth of acquired knowledge under his belt, he recorded seven jazz standards, which he would form into an album called Vulnerable. Released in 1997, it is a concept album of tortuous romantic estrangement, where Marvin lays out all of his romantic torments and calls on his higher angels to help absolve him of his misery, aided by his own noble self revelation, free of ego or selfishness. And the result is one of Marvin's finest musical moments, a movable feast of amazing vocal skill and yet another example of Marvin Gaye's massive talent.
Article comments
1 - Tim Pernell
I had to comment. I definitely agree with your review. In terms of the many concept albums he put out (or didn't put out) in the 1970s, this one ranks alongside What's Going On, Let's Get It On, I Want You, Here, My Dear and In Our Lifetime as one of his best conceptual masterpieces though it took 20 years before it really got recognized. I'm sure somewhere in Heaven, Marvin is smiling. This is a masterpiece.