December 8, 2003

Two Studies in Finding the Soul of a Song

wo splendidly willful singers, Al Green and Cassandra Wilson, shared the bill at the Beacon Theater on Saturday night. What they had in common, beyond their Southern heritage, was the confidence that their voices could make every impulse sound soulful. They were right.

Mr. Green, in white from his suit to his shoes, preached a lesson in singing. "Every note you hit can't be pretty!" he declared with the percussive cadences he uses as a Baptist pastor at his Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis. He added: "Sometimes I get so choked up with those songs I can't say it no more. I get kind of full, and I have to back away from them and start laughing."

He constantly fractures and reassembles his songs: sustaining a phrase in his reedy, imploring tenor, breaking off a line with a laugh, pausing and then letting words rush out, teasing with a suspenseful decrescendo, vaulting suddenly into his rapturous falsetto and plunging immediately afterward into a growl. He'll hold a microphone at arm's length and silence the room with his pearly tone; he'll pass a song off to his backup singers while he tosses roses to the ladies.

Through the years Mr. Green, 56, has sometimes let his group and his fans do most of the singing at concerts. But his magnificent voice is undiminished, and at the Beacon he put it to work.

Mr. Green has just released a new album, "I Can't Stop" (Blue Note), produced by Willie Mitchell, who arranged his indelible early 1970's soul hits; they used the same Memphis studio, Royal. After recording gospel albums since 1977 — though continuing to sing his soul hits in concert — Mr. Green has returned to secular love songs on "I Can't Stop." But he still refers to himself as "the preacher," and at the Beacon his transitions between songs were bits of gospel-style oratory. He declaimed that in Saturday's snowstorm his plane had been turned back from La Guardia to Washington, and he had arrived by Amtrak: "The train!" he exulted.

Mr. Green's set placed songs from the early 1970's alongside songs from the new album. The style is unchanged: midtempo Memphis soul, with a steady backbeat and the punctuations of singers and a horn section. The new songs are less memorable than the oldies; there is less ambivalence in them, less struggle to do the right thing. But alongside 1970's songs like "Let's Stay Together," "Tired of Being Alone," "For the Good Times" and "Love and Happiness," a song like "Rainin' in My Heart" still testified to the eloquence a great voice can bring to wholehearted longing.

Opening the concert, Ms. Wilson came across as the inverse of Mr. Green. She, too, was singing love songs, most of them from her recent album, "Glamoured" (Blue Note), and like Mr. Green she drew songs from soul and country. But she has evolved a style at the opposite extreme from Mr. Green's volatile extroversion, finding a sultry, melancholy serenity instead.

Where Mr. Green dispenses staccato bursts, Ms. Wilson lingers over preternaturally elongated notes. Where he ascends into falsetto, she dives into her deepest, roomiest contralto. And where he jumps in and out of a song's mood, she immerses herself in it, even as her quietly limber band — a customized folk-jazz hybrid with bass, acoustic guitar or banjo, harmonica, drums and percussion — shifts grooves.

What she shares with Mr. Green is sheer unpredictability. She could cling lovingly to a melody, as she did in Willie Nelson's "Crazy," or toss it away, as she did in Bob Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay." She could unveil the unexpectedly lonely core of a song, as she did in the Monkees' "Last Train to Clarksville," or tease it toward jazzy abstractions, as she did with Sly Stone's "If You Want Me to Stay." She made every whim sound like a glimpse of wisdom.