Whitney Houston and Why One Note is Worth a Thousand Words

            I went to hear her sing at the Park West, as did many others I knew, sometime after the first album had come out. After that tour, no venue was big enough. I doubt that a singer in Chicago, or for that matter any musician in Chicago, hadn't heard that record and sung or played half of the tunes. Many were there that night. The one criticism I remember of that album (though I didn't totally buy the criticism) was that it sounded too tame, too controlled, that somehow they didn't let her sing. The arrangements were, no doubt, pop. The Michael Masser production was evident everywhere: lush strings, simple grooves, and yeah..not too much extemporaneous licks from Whitney. Maybe there was some truth to those observations. After all, she came out of the church. She had to be able to just let go. When you heard her in Lincoln Park that night there was no doubt she could cut through the music like a knife through butter when she wanted to. 
         But she also did have another, very subtle side to her voice that you could hear on the album - a texture that I had never really heard before in my life. It was a clear, bright, airy sound that she could twist in perfect intonation and leave in your ears, while she wandered off somewhere else, and she had the ability then to slip in and out of it at will. It was evident that night at the Park West, a venue that allows for more finesse, while still offering a room where a singer could belt. And that night she did belt. Man...did she. If there were any there who hadn't thought she could, they got taken to church real quick. You could feel the waves knocking people' s hair back (even what I had of mine back then). That is what people had said they didn't hear on the record. My theory, and I'm not the only one who thought this, was that maybe they (Masser, Clive Davis or whoever) just didn't want to take too many chances. She was young and they wanted to make sure this album stuck in the ears of everyone. They wanted to be sure Whitney was a pop star from the beginning. Well, they got their wish. I don't know if she got hers. 
          In the end it isn't that record that now rings true to me. She was always much, much more than that and what she gave everyone that night was something you cannot ever replace in music..the memory of a performance that you can still hear in your ears over twenty-five years later.