Sometimes outsiders understand a musical culture more profoundly than natives.
Thus the best jazz film ever made, ” ‘Round Midnight,” was directed by a Frenchman (Bertrand Tavernier), and the best jazz festival on this continent is located outside the United States (in Montreal).
To this list of sublime jazz originating on foreign shores one now must add The Real Group, a glorious, a cappella vocal quintet from Sweden that sings American music more idiomatically, more sensitively and more knowingly than many of its counterparts in the States.
True, The Real Group’s five vocalists speak English with an unabashedly lilting Swedish accent, as they established during their performance Tuesday night in Hammerschmidt Chapel at Elmhurst College. Yet these artists sing American jazz, classic pop and even light rock as if it were their mother tongue.
More than that, the members of The Real Group idealize American musical styles as few home-grown groups would bother to do.
In other words, to Americans, the swing rhythms of jazz, the pungent dissonances of the blues and the breezy phrasing of ’40s and ’50s pop represent somewhat routine, everyday forms of musical expression.
To The Real Group, which performs its Basie-to-Beach Boys repertoire with the zeal of a convert, these intrinsically American idioms are to be celebrated. They do so by offering a ravishing ensemble sound and a somewhat stylized, but utterly endearing approach to phrasing and rhythmic accent.
At the core of this quintet’s repertoire are the standards on which every jazz artist, foreign or domestic, eventually must prove his mettle. To hear The Real Group swing their own transcriptions of big-band Basie classics, to hear them dispatch their harmonically plush version of Bill Evans’ “Waltz for Debby” was to marvel at their understanding of the nuances of this music.
Further, the plush chords and sophisticated voicings they brought to the venerable ballad “There Will Never Be Another You” and the ethereal textures they achieved in “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” represented nothing less than classic renditions of timeless repertoire.
And in a Real Group novelty called “A Cappella in Acapulco,” the quintet finessed Latin-jazz idioms with characteristic elegance.
The singers ventured beyond the jazz tradition as well, articulating the buoyant rhythms and easy spirit that drive songs in the pop vein by the Beatles and the Swedish band Abba.
Though The Real Group has been singing around the world for the past decade, it’s only now attempting a major assault on the U.S. If its subsequent concerts go as well as this one, the group should be reaching a wider audience soon.
