Today is Janis Siegel’s birthday. She has spent more than fifty years helping define the sound of vocal harmony, with The Manhattan Transfer and through a remarkable body of solo work and collaborations.
Janis is, of course, also the co-host of WBGO’s Singer’s Unlimited. I've known her since I was a kid. Over the years we've recorded together, written songs together, laughed a lot together. Looking back through my archive for her birthday, I found two conversations with Janis separated by almost thirty years, and two generations.
The first was recorded by my father, Ben Sidran, in the mid-1980s, just after the Manhattan Transfer's groundbreaking Vocalese album. Ben asked Janis where jazz first entered her life.
"To me, jazz is the ultimate expression... that's the way I've always felt since age fourteen when I heard A Love Supreme," she told Ben.
Thirty years later, when Janis joined me on The Third Story Podcast, I heard that same curiosity. We talked about songs, arranging, producing and about harmony itself.
"I think people respond to harmony. They attach a meaning to it,” she told me. “Like, these people get along. These people are blending. Even though they're different, they're raising their voices together and sublimating, for the moment anyway, their own personal desires to make this other sound... to make a fifth sound. They look at it... as a sign of hope in the world."
Today, sixty years after she first stepped onto a stage, Janis Siegel is still listening with the same openness she described to Ben all those years ago. Still chasing songs that surprise her. Still believing in the expressive power of the human voice.
Happy birthday, Janis.
