In an industry that’s faced one existential crisis after another at least since the advent of file sharing back at the turn of this century, one element remains absolutely unalterably central. At the core of all popular music stands the human voice. You can process it, you can multitrack it, you can even autotune it, but without the distinctive, fingerprint-like uniqueness of the individual voice, you might have a track, but you won’t have a song. And, with only the small handful of exceptions that prove the rule, you definitely won’t have a hit. Nothing drives the emotional attachment that makes music stick in your mind like a hauntingly recognizable individual voice. From Aretha to Beyoncé, and from Sinatra to Drake, it’s the voice that makes the impressions that we can’t and don’t want to shake.
Take this unchallenged organic fact of musical life and put it onstage, unadorned, accompanied by an acoustic instrument, and you’ve got the approach favored by Mendeleyev Allan Blitz, the talented young singer/songwriter whose upcoming virtual concert from the Marjorie Luke Theatre premieres on Friday, September 18, at luketheatre.org . The artist, who grew up in Santa Barbara, has developed an international following over the last several years thanks to the way his creamy baritone wraps the listener in a rich, layered sound experience. It’s a voice that, once you’ve heard it, is impossible to forget.
Take that same fact — the primacy of the human voice — and costume it, make it up, light it, and produce it until it gleams and glows with every gimmick known to contemporary network television, and you’ve got NBC’s long-running vocal competition series The Voice, now entering its 19th season. Combine the two, however, and you get one hell of a story.