ARCHIVE

by Ann Belser
reprinted with permission.

Ann Dolan still dreams of recording a hit record, the through the years somehow that dream has changed.

For her the concept of jazz and popular singing goes beyond standing in front of an audience with a microphone and looking pretty.

Dolan, a voice teacher at Berklee College of Music, has been singing for as long as she can remember, and has been singing professionally since she was twenty.

"I've always sung." She says, "My nickname was 'Annie Bird' when I was a little girl."

Now, Dolan realizes that the road to becoming a capable singer isn't as short as she had thought.

"Reality is so far from fantasy that very few stay for the long haul."
She smiles, "At twenty everyone wants to get a hit record. You don't realize its a long organic process. It's getting to a full three octave range without any breaks.

"You see these singing stars who get these fantastic sums of money," Ann points out, "well they should. They earn them."

A woman of eclectic tastes, Ann's favorite singers are Tony Bennett, Bette Midler, David Bowie, and Julio Iglesias. Of all her favorite singers and musicians Dolan has noticed a common thread. "They all have a totality, a naturalness, a vibrating presence. They are just connected people." Then she adds, searching for the right words, "How do you define spirit?"

It's that spirit that Dolan looks for in herself, her students, and her favorite singers. But that's not the only ingredient in being a successful popular singer.

Along with creating that spirit, the singer also needs to develop a good vocal range in which the majority of the songs will lie in the middle.

Dolan explains that singers must focus on their voices. Lower tones are focused in the chest and the higher tones are focused in the head. The difference in focusing areas often causes a break in the tonal range when the singer must shift from "chest voice" to "head voice."

"You can explain tht. Can't you put into workds that it sounds like this?" And she bursts into a run of notes, beginning wiht a low tone and ending on a high note. There's not a break in the sound quality at any point. Her voice just slowly moves from her chest to her head: a clear tone with a light vibrato.

Since most popular songs are sung inthe tonal area of the break, pop singers have to develop their voice so that the break is smooth and the tone quality is relatively consistent.

"I don't think most musicians appreciate what a singer has to do," says Dolan. Now, years after she began her training, and, after raising four children, Dolan is still singing. She released... "Boston Shine"... which has a swing style jazz sound (which) has gotten a good amount of air play on local radio stations, especially for a song which according to Dolan, is only her first release.

"The song was adapted from a classical composition that I had written, then I put the words to a jazz rendition." She adds, "I thought it was time for a Boston song, so I did a tape."

"The Boston Shine" could possibly be a new theme song for the city of Boston. "Mayor White's office was very interested and encouraged me," she says. ... "We're re-releasing it to appeal to a more popular market. ... I've been writing and re-writing."

According to Dolan the new release is a slower popular style ballad. She's looking for a known singer to give the song a lift. What Dolan is really looking for is a singer and arrangement which will place the song somewhere between "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," which was popularized by Bennett, and "New York, New Yor" which was made popular by both Liza Minelli and Frank Sinatra. "Tony gives me goosebumps," she says of Bennett.

Dolan's all-time favorite singer is Billie Holliday. "I think of Billie Holliday as Leontyne Price compressed. A really good pop/jazz singer like Holliday has to fulfill all of the fine points of singing within a smaller framework (than opera.) You have to put an edge on it. It's more contained, focused, and very expressive."

Dolan really began her career by winning a radio competition that started her singing with bands. And it was around that time when she began her training. Dolan admits that she didn't know what she was looking for when she started, but she was lucky enough to stumble across some very fine teachers, including Robert Gartside. ...

Dolan has been involved with various concerts. ... She sang on the ship The Pride of Baltimore which was docked in Boston Harbor in order to promote tourism between the two cities. "On board I sang American folk and jazz. It's funny how the people responded to the combination. The jazz seemed to blend in."

Dolan has also (sang) at colleges and has participated in a concert from which proceeds were donated to promote nuclear disarmament, which to her (was) the most important political issue of the time.

Dolan illustrates he beauty and strength of one voice with Broadway show "Cats." The show, which was a technological extravaganza, feaured one scene in which an alley cat, Grisabella, sat alone in a spotlight and sang the song "Memories." Dolan noted, "Amidst that enormous production was the human voice of Grisabella singing of a new dawn, and new hopes and enlightenment which only that human voice could bring out against all that technology. It was a human voice that brought the audience into the humanness of that extravagant production."

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*very minor edits were made to this article in its transcription.*