Crossing Over with Michael Bublé

Michael Bublé. Photo by Olaf Hein. Courtesy Warner Music Canada.

The record industry is filled with buzz phrases, but surely one of the most persistent is "crossover appeal." It’s the dream of every record exec: to find that one concept that will transcend genres and captivate the widest possible cross-section of music consumers.

On rare occasions, a hit just happens - witness Outkast’s 2003 left-field single Hey Ya, a joyous fusion of rock, funk, soul and hip hop that blew up across the radio dial. The rest of the time, record companies experiment with combinations in the hopes of reaping similar good fortune. The best current example is Over and Over, an unlikely collaboration between rapper Nelly and country phenom Tim McGraw; the single is a brazen, though not wholly insufferable attempt to bridge the chasm between hip hop and country music. (It seems to have worked: the song currently sits at #30 on the Billboard Pop 100.)

Crossover strategies are legion. But like the stock market, musical tastes follow a pattern of surges and corrections - and when it comes to crossover success, the only blue-chip concept you can rely on is the crooner.

Straddling jazz and pop, the crooner enjoyed his greatest popularity in the post-war years, before rock ‘n’ roll became the prevailing expression of youthful vitality. Since the heyday of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, pop music has splintered into a number of sub-genres, from disco to punk to hip hop, leaving the august interpreter at the mercy of a capricious public. From time to time, the crooner will be outshone by more faddish acts. He simply has to bide his time. As a notion, the crooner is extraordinarily resilient, always returning to the spotlight. Given the current chart domination of Norah Jones, Diana Krall, Britain's Jamie Cullum and Vancouver smoothie Michael Bublé, one can only deduce that we’re experiencing another crooner moment.

Why the recurring fascination with this most hoary of musical concepts? Much of it has to do with projection. Suave yet salubrious, the crooner embodies a bygone era, satisfying a collective longing for the good old days (even if there’s no agreement on when said days might have been). It’s tempting to try to peg the perpetual return of the crooner to some catalyzing shared event (9/11, say), but it has more to do with trends in pop than geopolitics. Artists like Krall and Bublé offer a refuge for listeners troubled by music’s growing licentiousness: the cussing, the T&A, the garish spectacle of the MTV era.

A triumphant crooner can appeal to multiple generations. The current owner of the number 2 single (Home) and the number 2 album (It’s Time) in Canada, Bublé shows every sign of being that guy. On a technical note, he possesses a superb tenor and a flair for phrasing. With his scrubbed if slightly doughy mug and faux-forlorn gaze, he also looks like he’s never entertained an unsavoury thought in his life. His hair, a sort of modified pompadour with bedhead undertones, is with-it enough to appeal to young women, but not so radical as to dismay Aunt May.

In the liner notes to his breakthrough album Two Shots (2004), fellow Canadian crooner Matt Dusk articulated a desire to make “a record that can be enjoyed without offending.” Indeed, a crooner’s greatest offense would be trying something new. Revivalists like Dusk and Bublé are much happier steering us back to a genteel, rarefied period when the melody of a Cole Porter or Jerome Kern was the height of sophistication and entertainment.

Not surprisingly, then, most modern crooner albums - from Harry Connick, Jr.’s Come By Me to Diana Krall’s The Look of Love - sound anachronistic. It’s Time is no different; it’s clear from the recording that Bublé and über-producer David Foster went to great lengths to insulate the material from modernity.

Yet nostalgia only goes so far in explaining why most crooners sound like they’re trapped in the ’50s. The crooner also symbolizes our uneasy attitude to jazz; close to a century after it first emerged, casual listeners have only a limited tolerance for it. Something light and jaunty is de-lovely. But anything too edgy or harmonically dense, and mainstream listeners start to panic.

As a result, crooners give jazz standards the standard treatment, defaulting to one of two modes: lusty, brass-heavy big band or plaintive piano trio (where the drummer inevitably opts for brushes rather than sticks). Even when a singer essays an original composition or something reasonably new - Buble has covered George Michael; Matt Dusk has done U2 - the arrangements don’t acknowledge anything that’s happened in jazz since 1960. Crooners allow casual listeners to experience something “jazzy” or “jazz-like” without having to suffer through all those fancy chord changes and tedious, squawking solos.

To be fair, people shouldn’t be forced to listen to the outer-limits free jazz of John Zorn or David S. Ware. And there’s something fundamentally enjoyable about a timeless song sung well. Crooners like Bublé and Dusk are clearly populists by nature; others, like Diana Krall, however, end up sublimating their jazz purism. The formidable technique on early albums like Steppin’ Out and All For You got lost when Krall and her handlers discovered her marketability as a sexpot.

The biggest problem with most crooners is their reluctance to expand the accepted repertoire. In this respect, Jamie Cullum is perhaps the most enterprising. Although he works the same cozy coffee-house vibe as his forebears, he’s at least cognizant of contemporary music. By covering more recent singles like Jeff Buckley’s Lover,You Should’ve Come Over, Radiohead’s High and Dry and - most audaciously - the Neptunes’ Frontin’, the 25-year-old Cullum is trying to establish a new set of standards.

Are listeners buying into his musical activism? Given that his sophomore disc, Twentysomething, has sold more than two million copies, it’s fair to say yes. Besides, a cover of High and Dry means one less version of Fly Me to the Moon. And for that we should all be thankful.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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