I want to kick this blog off with an obvious observation, to wit: great vocal performers often don't stick to the melody. I actually have a very specific memory of discovering this concept because I was-- I guess it must have been, like, nine? Ten? My mom was recording an album, and she was practicing a song she'd written (this one) and I'd heard her write it so, you know, I knew she was singing it wrong. I mentioned this to her. She sort of looked at me. She explained that in the jazz idiom it is normal to vary the melody, even in the original recording of the song when people don't know the melody yet. Yes, she was sure. I was skeptical but I reserved further comment for later. After twenty years of thought I am ready to admit I was wrong.
So. Anyway. Great vocal performers screw around with the melody. Do they? No. No rule of expression is uniform. It's possible to stay right on the money and keep the listener's interest. Take Nobody by Mitski for example. This melody is very unusual and she delivers it precisely so we don't get lost. There are small variations, but mostly she's right on target: each note lands soft and clear. It gets its emotion from the way she plays with volume, timing, and expression (she's just a little slow in the first verse, straggling against the driving drums)-- and from the simplicity of the plea of the chorus, which is served by how simple the delivery is.
But, yes, usually, vocal performance is variation, in an incredible variety of ways. Melisma is one: skipping around within a given syllable to a variety of notes. There are lots of extremely famous melismatic singers who reshaped the industry. People looooove melisma. Also (presumably different) people complained about it for years like it was killing the concept of pop. I remember this discourse with baffled fascination! Mostly these complaints were framed in re: the Star-Spangled Banner. "Just sing the anthem," people would say. "Don't go on a fourteen minute vocal run," people would say. That's because people are cowards. Here is Mariah Carey singing melismatically. "You make me feel sOOOooOOooOOOOoOOooooooOOOoo," she says. That's a melisma.
Because of Mariah and Beyoncé melisma is most closely associated with R&B, but my favorite melismatic singer of the moment, in a completely different genre, is Silvana Estrada, for which check out any track off her album Marchita. Or her new single, Brindo (this is her doing it as a Blogothèque Take Away live acoustic show).
At 1:15-1:18, for example, when her voice spirals around the words 'cada vez', putting about eight notes in each: that's melisma. It's still a very precise way to sing, she's landing on every note in the melisma exactly, but she's jumping around a lot instead of singing one note per syllable. (I don't know if Estrada is intentionally drawing from great Arabic vocalists like Umm Kulthum. That's one of the most famous contexts in which Estrada's style of melisma gets deployed. In an interview Estrada said she does it because otherwise she'd get bored.)
Rather than hit a series of notes in a row, you can instead slide from one note to another. Melisma treats the voice as an instrument with individual buttons to push, like playing scales on a piano; slides treat the voice like a trombone or a violin, where you always have the option to find any note on the scale and vrrrm between them. Slides are a constituent part of the blues idiom and its heirs. Rhiannon Giddens, a folk musician who revives blues and country traditions, deploys vocal slides when she's working more to the blues end of the scale.
At 1:17 in that track, on bluuuuue, she slides from F to F#/Gb to G. All of those notes are "correct" for this song, they're all part of the scale (even the F#/Gb because this is a blues scale!), she's just very intentionally transitioning between them.
So those are some options a vocalist has while they're varying the melody but staying in tune, but wait, there's more. Miya Folick is an indie rock artist who recently released a new EP. Her studio sound is very good and also not very much like her live sound. The closest studio recording of hers that approaches the experience of watching her live is Give It To Me off her album of the same name in 2017. It's very common for artists to use autotune in studio recordings, and sometimes live. I don't know how common this knowledge is, that probably just about everyone's tuning their voice to some extent. Totally ubiquitous aspect of production. I did. You usually can't tell. So when a singer leaves a raw edge on her recording-- like is present on the Give It To Me track-- it is notable. Folick doesn't always hit the note she is going for; she overshoots or dips under. That used to be just like a thing that happened on recordings sometimes! Now you gotta go to a bar to get it. Or listen to this particular track.
Folick fucks around even more live.
I've started this video (I hope) at her performance of Deadbody. She's really throwing away those first few notes, she barely puts in enough voice to make the pitch clear. It's even more marked in the second verse where she's sliding in and out of them at the same time. And then she starts yelping and building to the chorus and it is possible all those very audible notes aren't in the key in question, which: whatever! She sacrifices her obviously highly-trained, highly-skilled precision for energy and expression. It rules! I love it! Highly recommend!
And then finally we have the world of vocal performance where vocal artists who do not have highly-skilled highly-trained voices use the fact that they couldn't consistently 'hit the right note' if they wanted to or like 'sing in a pleasant way without running out of breath and dying' to make, usually, punk music. For example: London Calling by the Clash is almost entirely just the single note B. He usually hits that particular note and near-misses most of the other ones when they come up. Here's his isolated vocal. It's on purpose! Also he couldn't sing very well. It's still on purpose!
My dark suspicion is that this particular mode of expression is more easily open to male vocalists than female ones; I have not, however, empirically tested this. I would love to be overwhelmingly proven wrong by links to the weirdest female vocals you can think of. On Twitter, though, because I'm not putting a comment section on this blog. That sounds like I might have to learn how to code and then also moderate. No thank you.