One of the most powerful things I have learned about singing jazz is that sometimes you don’t need to sing. I have often heard new singers sing over the rests in the music as if they are trying to fit in too many words. The truth is, the rests are just as important as the words. They are moments to breathe, to focus, and to add drama to your performance. So often, a single note will mean much more when it comes after a rest than when it is surrounded by eighth notes. When you use the rests to allow your line to breathe, it draws your audience in. They have to listen harder and it feels more personal.
It takes practice to learn how to play with silence. Take a tune you know well and try leaving out notes that you normally play — maybe don’t play the pick-up to the head, or hang back and resolve the phrase one beat late, or just stop playing altogether at the end of a phrase and don’t play anything else until you come to the next phrase. If you’re like most of us, the silence will sound uncomfortable and naked at first, like you’re not playing something you should be playing. Don’t fill in the space right away. Listen to the rhythm section playing and breathing and moving forward behind you — the bass player walking, the piano player comping. The groove feels good in that moment of space, and your instrument sounds more powerful because you’re not stepping all over it.
Silence has an emotional language that is perhaps best understood in the context of a ballad. The drama of a rest following the word “love” or “gone” can be as expressive as a dozen notes. Holiday was the queen of rests. Her rests told a life story. Her rests made the most mundane lyric significant. If you sing a song with rests and focus on the way you feel when you pause, you will notice how your body releases, how your breathing drops, how your thoughts stop long enough for you to connect to what you want to express in the next breath. When you share this feeling with the listener, you share the authenticity of the moment, not the ingenuity of the vocal arrangement.
Finally, when you improvise, there’s a big difference between “hesitation” (which is accidental and results from thinking while trying to sing) and “space” (which is intentional). Experienced vocal improvisers often sing a rest before a surprising note (perhaps the first chromatic passing tone in a solo) or will suddenly move to pianissimo after a high phrase. These sorts of dynamics in the solo will help hold the listener’s interest. If you tape your practice sessions, you can learn where “space” sounds good to you – perhaps for dramatic contrast or to enhance the meaning of a lyric – or where it might be nice to just let the chord hang. Eventually you’ll learn to just know when to sing and when not to.
Ultimately, the command of space and silence is what elevates an accomplished vocalist to a masterful narrator. In jazz, the singer is a conversationalist, not a monologist, and the most engaging conversations include reflective moments of stillness, where the significance of the message may resonate and a fresh perspective unfold. The voice that has faith in what goes unsung gains stature, profundity and sincerity that an endless barrage of material can’t offer. Sometimes the light that surrounds the fully evolved jazz vocalist burns most radiantly in the moments of rest, where the essence of the song and the singer are revealed.