TL:DR – Some tips on singing from the vocal jazz maestro Pete Churchill.
Years ago, I and a bunch of singing friends did a couple of vocal technique workshops with jazz maestro Pete Churchill. He had lots of words of wisdom to dispense. I put together a cribsheet for our choir and for anyone else who might have a need for singing tips:
Get into the groove, feel the beat, get with the swing, get off the page! [No looking down at scores (and if you really must, not highlighting pens!), watch the musical director and keep an eye for the audience].
Understand the “form” (structure) of the song, don’t count bars, feel the rhythm, and know where the repeats and codas fit
Be aware of what the other singers and musicians are doing, from the top sops and right to the bottom bass via the altos and tenors, if you lose your place you can always revert to the main melody
Be aware of your breath, use your breath, it’s part of your voice, especially in folk/jazz/pop/rock singing as opposed to classical singing, but especially Pete’s type of jazz singing
Use the percussive plosives, the buh, pah, bah sounds for expressive emphasis, but obviously not on every b and p, give your singing dynamics
You can hold the consonants not just the vowels, make them rich, “Fall in Llllllove” sometimes, don’t “Fall in Luuuuuv” every time. This is more of a jazz nuance, but useful to have in the back of your mind for bluesier/jazzier songs
Start your oohs and aahs with a hushed “h” (h)oooooh, (h)aaaaah to protect your voice from hard ah, eh, ooh sounds that clack your vocal folds (cords), this applies to the starts of lines not only to the harmony ooooohs
You can hold vowel notes a little longer by changing the vowel sound as your breath expires, it does work, although I reckon it’s partly psychological but possibly just changes breath rate enough to give you extra time, it also sometimes leads to a bit of vibrato which helps you to sustain a note too because the vibrato, or is it tremolo, is putting in extra energy
Feel and learn the sounds with your mouth, this is an ongoing thing for learning any song…and ties in with the following in terms of expressiveness and knowing a song better
Here’s the non-vocal bonus tip from Pete:
Your eyebrows can transmit emotion to your audience, facial expressions hinge on the eyebrows and you can get away with a bit of exaggeration when singing to engage the audience in the song people expect emotion from singers not deadpan stares, so go for it
We’d all done a couple of classical singing workshops with John Rutter, prior to the Pete Churchill jazz workshops, and some of us had done some classical recording with Karl Jenkins at Abbey Road Studios, as well as sung one of his choral works at the Royal Albert Hall. There were numerous singing tips from those happenings too, they were commonly about dynamics, not looking down, lifting one’s chin to allow a low not to resonate, and other such matters.
During covid lockdown when we couldn’t sing together, we had a chance to chat to various composers and performers on Zoom with our choir, including Mike Batt (The Wombles), Aled Jones (The Snowman hit), Phil Coulter (composer of Puppet on a String), Howard Goodall (choral composer and lots of TV themes, such as Blackadder, QI, Red Dwarf, and the Not the Nine o’Clock News comedy songs), Thomas Hewitt Jones (composer perhaps best (not) known for Silly Song on social media) , and Eric Whitacre (Seal Lullaby etc).
Whitactre had a great tip regarding vocal warmups. He suggested that instead of doing the usual doh-rae-me exercises and arpeggios and stuff, that singers should all just immediately jump into the song they’re hoping to perform. Not full blast from the top, gently, everyone just chugging along on the melody and maybe heading for their harmony parts, but warming up, like gentle jogging before a proper run.
I hope I do utilise some of these experiences and vocal techniques and singing tips in my own live performances with the TyrannoChorus and bigMouth choirs, with my band, C5, and when I perform solo.