New York Voices: The Grand Finale in the Valley

by Ricard Torres-Mateluna, Journalist, Northampton Jazz Festival Board member, Papeles de Jazz Magazine (Chile), editorial Board Member and North American Correspondent, Member of the Journalist Association of America.

For over three decades, New York Voices has stood at the pinnacle of jazz vocal artistry, blending intricate harmonies, improvisational brilliance, and genre-spanning versatility over their ten acclaimed albums. Formed in 1987, the GRAMMY-winning quartet, Peter Eldridge, Lauren Kinhan, Darmon Meader, and Kim Nazarian, has enchanted audiences worldwide, collaborating with jazz legends like the Count Basie Orchestra, Paquito D'Rivera, and the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band. What began as a college vocal ensemble at Ithaca College in upstate New York, evolved into one of the most influential and technically masterful vocal groups in jazz history, performing at iconic venues from Carnegie Hall to the North Sea Jazz Festival while maintaining a commitment to education through masterclasses and vocal jazz camps. The quartet embarks on their much-anticipated final tour, "The Grand Finale," marking the end of an extraordinary era in vocal jazz.

The Boston Herald has praised them, noting that "New York Voices lives up to its reputation as the most exciting vocal ensemble in current jazz," while The New York Times shared "The New York Voices have a smooth blend and a comfortable mastery of pop-jazz harmony.” Today we are lucky to have them at the Northampton Jazz Festival!

A Conversation with the group’s Director, Darmon Meader on Three Decades of Vocal Jazz Excellence

What was the aha! moment when you first heard vocal jazz harmony that made you think, “this is what I want to do with my life?”

I probably would say it was hearing a Manhattan Transfer recording. When I was in college, I got turned on to Manhattan Transfer, and I was already playing jazz as a saxophonist, and I was a choir kid as well. I was playing in big bands and hearing four-part jazz harmony being sung, the way instrumentalists tend to think of that kind of harmony, a saxophone section or four horns. I was kind of knocked out by the whole concept.

In your career, you’ve worn many hats: tenor, composer, arranger, educator, saxophonist. Which role feels more like home to you, and does that change depending on the song or the moment?

They're all so interconnected for me, New York Voices was the perfect scenario for me to do everything that I like to do. I love playing saxophone, but I don't feel like I'm one of those people that was put on the planet to be a saxophone virtuoso, and I love singing as a soloist, and I like singing it in a harmony group even more. When it all comes together, my favorite thing is to sing songs that I arrange rather than somebody else’s.

Your arrangements are known for the sophisticated harmonic structures, which, by the way, our own local Valley Jazz Voices have sung your arrangements. Do you hear these complex vocal parts in your head fully formed or is more like solving a musical puzzle piece by piece? What is that process?

I'm going to have to say it's somewhere in the middle because yes, I hear conceptually where things will go, and I can hear what harmony I'm looking for, but then I sit at the piano and double check to make sure of the structure of it. I'm guessing that’s the way an architect might work, you have an artistic concept like the way a building is constructed, but then you still have to follow the laws of physics and figure out how are we going to make that happen, how are we actually going to make all of that stay in place and last for hundreds of years! I might have a concept of harmonically what I want, but then I have to do what jokingly I call the “math”. I have to do the musical math and see what structurally is going to make that hold together.

New York Voices has this incredible ability to make the most intricate arrangement sounds effortless. What is the secret sauce or the math that you mentioned? Is it telepathy after all these years or do you still surprise each other?

We sometimes joke that we're like a four-headed old married couple. We can finish each other's sentences; we know how each other is going to musically phrase. We can almost predict it, because we know each other's patterns, and when we're learning a new piece, we can practice that mostly on our own and come together and put it together quite quickly because we can anticipate what the whole thing's going to feel like collectively, because we've done this together for so long. It’s very different than in the beginning, when we were all living in New York and would get together and practice for hours and really dissect and talk about each little nuance. Most of those things happen pretty organically at this point.

I love this flow. So after decades of making music together, how do you keep the creative spark alive? You talk about being this four-headed married quartet. Do you ever have those moments where you are mid-performance and think, wow, we just did something completely new?

As far as the creative side, one of the things that has kept us together for so many years, and to still be able to add creative energy to the group, is that it's a full-time priority, but it's really a part-time job. We're all performing regularly, but we're not a band that's out there doing 150 concerts a year. We're doing more like 40 or so, and that means, Peter Eldridge is teaching full-time at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Lauren teaches at Queens College and NYU, Kim teaches at Ithaca College, and I'm doing guest-artist-things all over the place and also doing a solo gig here and there. We’re classic freelancers in a certain sense, except we do have this one big important priority, which is New York Voices.

Vocal jazz has evolved so much since New York Voices began. How do you see the group's role in that evolution? And what excites you most about where the genre is heading?

It's so much fun to see younger arrangers, younger groups, younger performers come up with new and different ways of taking this four-part concept and moving it forward. Vocal jazz repertoire doesn’t have to be just the great American songbook, or Duke Ellington or Antonio Carlos Jobim, it could be Paul Simon tunes, or it could be a James Taylor song, or you could do something interesting with a Stevie Wonder song, or sometimes just take a pop tune that you would never think of as being something that could be translated into jazz. Take it, reinvent the song, and do something creative. In a lot of ways, the lines have been blurred as to what you call jazz. This is not unique to vocal jazz. This is totally true for instrumentalists as well. So those blurred lines have been one of the big parts of the evolution and, with that, there's always some push back, too.

This takes me to my next question. All of you, in your educational work, have influenced countless vocalists. What's one piece of advice you find yourself giving over and over to young singers trying to find their place in jazz?

First of all, just really learn to be a good vocalist. If you want to have your voice working for many decades, you need to take care of your voice; you need to sing properly: be a good, healthy vocalist; take care of your voice and have good support and good technique. Follow your creative instincts and see where it goes, because that's the beauty of jazz. Then support it by listening to other music. Learn the music theory behind it.

Festival audiences are often discovering vocal jazz for the first time through groups like yours. What do you hope they take away from experiencing New York Voices live?

We hope they experience the energy of the music, the heart behind the music, the musicality behind the music, and the fun of it. People who really like harmony singing can get really excited about groups like ours. Jazz audiences sometimes aren't really thinking that way, but we are hopefully bringing as many jazz elements to the experience as the experience of hearing four part harmony! We are having a blast doing it, and hopefully that's infectious for everybody in the audience.

What can the Northampton Jazz Festival-goers expect from your upcoming performance? Any surprises in store or perhaps a sneak peek at new material or a Stevie Wonder song?

There could be a Stevie Wonder song, we have a couple in the book. We're in a funny place right now because we’re retiring soon. We're putting out a few new pieces, but we're also rebooting pieces that we haven't done for 20 years. We'll definitely be doing our “Big Blue Rondo,” a Dave Brubeck piece, and some Cole Porter. There will probably be a James Taylor song, a couple of originals and some Ellington, maybe some Paul Simon tunes. It's going to be a wandering through the genres, tied together with our four-part sound.

For someone who's never experienced New York Voices before, how would you describe what they're about to hear in a way that will make them lean forward in their seats?

They're going to hear four people singing music that you're used to, that’s familiar. You're going to hear jazz vocalists singing instrumental sounds but with lyrics, and the heart of the song coming through those four vocalists!