The undisputed King of Voiceovers - since the 1940's this guy with the 'impossible baritone' has been a radio standard voicing over every product made from toothpaste to Taster's Choice coffee. (Do they still even make that stuff? I loved the weird close-up of that guy's face on their packaging - almost as much as I think it's '19' cereal the one with a picture of two people's faces for no apparent reason on the box. I'll have to look into that...)Eventually he got bored and invented, starting writing, and performed what he called 'Word Jazz' - it can hardly be described without hearing it yourself. The first time I heard him I was half-asleep in a red Saab somewhere in South Dakota in spring of 1992 driving back to Minneapolis from Seattle and it was playing quietly on public radio and I woke up having no idea what I was listening to or whether I had been dreaming. The car went out of range of the radio signal and it took me ten years to figure out what or who it even was.
One of his CDs, Colors has him scatting a song for each color in the wheel, meticulously describing and even berating the 'personalities' of some of them. Though he started to show up artistically early in the Beat generation era, he's been described as more akin to Edgar Allen Poe and Kafka than Ginsberg or Kerouac. If you've heard William Burrough's Dead City Radio (and if you haven't, you should) you have some general idea. Enjoy.
