I agree with you - she sings with a joy that is palpable (from within). I think the thing that blows me away about Sarah Vaughan here is that it is just so intimate. I almost feel like she is singing to me and only me.
Yes you've expressed that perfectly. It feels like one-to-one even though I know it's not. As if she's saying: 'And by the way, I'll tell you this very personal thing about how I feel about singing this song...'
About Sita - I hadn't realized this was part of a movie. I watched it from GMG (when I went to youtube I saw all the other snippets). This is something I'm just not familiar with, so anything you have to add would be of interest.
I think under normal circumstances I'd be very dismissive of a 'cartoon' musical. Such a thing wouldn't interest me at all. So it's quite something to discover not just that it won me over, but that it's become one of my very favourite movies. Here's the story:
Sita Sings the BluesThe movie was created almost single-handedly by a graphic artist, Nina Paley. She'd had the grim experience of being rejected by her husband, and in the course of dealing with her misery she'd stumbled across two different art forms: the vulnerable (underlying the apparently cheerful) singing of Annette Hanshaw, and the ancient Indian legend of Rama and Sita recounted in the
Ramayana. She saw parallels between her own experience and both these art forms - each drawing on archetypal notions of injustice and loss - and she started to piece them together to make a composite art form, using four different styles of animation to bring a kind of creative visually dissonant energy to the whole. She tells the modern story of her own experience in one; she has three shadow narrators discussing the meaning of the Ramayana in another; the basic narrative of Rama and Sita is played out in another, reminiscent of Indian paintings; and finally Sita sings the songs of Annette Hanshaw in a fourth graphic style ( the one you've seen).
Having made the movie, over several years, she discovered that the copyright situation with respect to Hanshaw's recordings was far more complicated than she'd assumed. And rather than line the pockets of the lawyers, she decided to buy a licence ($50,000) which enabled her to give the movie away for free, and hope that by inviting donations and selling
Sita-related merchandise she'd recoup her losses. It turned out that she actually made more money by this method than she'd have made through more traditional methods.
The movie won lots of awards (and deserved to, in my opinion). She invites those interested not merely to download it or view it for free, but also to copy it and give copies away - on the grounds that copying is not stealing; it's an expression of love. Whether or not one agrees, the movie is available, and is (at least for me and many others) sheer delight. It haunts me. I've watched it several times over and love it more each time. And anything that enables me to listen to lots of Annette Hanshaw can't be bad.
Download link:
http://sitasingstheblues.com/wiki/index.php?title=SitaSitesStreaming link on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8LvBnz7oRAMerchandising site:
http://questioncopyright.com/index.htmlDistribution ethos:
http://questioncopyright.org/sita_distribution