Janis Siegel and Alan Paul reflect on half a century on stage and in studio with the 10-time Grammy jazz and pop vocal quartet.
When the Manhattan Transfer formed in October 1972, singer Janis Siegel says she and the other three singers in the vocal quartet initially kept their day jobs.
The Manhattan Transfer includes, left to right, Trist Curless, Janis Siegel, Cheryl Bentyne, and Alan Paul. One night the conga player in the band got into Hauser’s cab after a gig, and on learning Hauser was a musician, too, invited him to the show’s after-party. “That was the first time I really started to listen to jazz,” Siegel says. “He was the beginning of my education. And when I heard four- and five-part harmony, the top of my head blew up.Paul, despite loving how the three sounded when he first heard them sing, was not thinking about joining them to complete the quartet.
Two hours later, after talking about the kinds of music they all loved, vocal groups and swing and doo-wop among them, and how the New York City scene was changing from the folk clubs of the ’60s to the cabaret and rock clubs of the early ’70s, Paul was in. While that New York Dolls might seem an unusual comparison, Siegel and Paul both note that the early days of the group were far from the top hats and black or white tuxedos and ball gowns they eventually adopted.
“Nobody would sign us,” he says. “We were too different, and nobody wanted to take the risk. Then came Ahmet Ertegun and everything changed overnight.” Life in the group continued apace for the group’s first decade after its 1975 breakout. The 1977 single “Chanson D’Amour” went to No. 1 in the United Kingdom and Top 10 across Europe, making them stars on the continent.
“The first priority was to pick songs that we felt could benefit from an orchestral treatment,” she says. “So something like ‘Boy From New York City’ obviously wouldn’t work. And other things that were maybe more pop or R&B-oriented would. Some of the Brazilian stuff like ‘Agua,’ and certainly ‘God Only Knows.’”