crisp

Actually, those are just the sort of tunes I would expect him to play. He's always been drawn to offbeat songs. Lots of Al Jolson for some reason. However, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil's Here You Come Again surprised me.

I won't let class issues put me off a work of art (and in any case, most of the opera we hear in England is imported), but I have always been impatient with it. I see it as a rough draft for the far superior operetta, which in turn was improved further into the Broadway musical, the pinnacle of musical theatre. However, I very much like Mozart's operas, even though I'm not keen on most of Mozart's other work. And I'm drawn to Wagner for some reason -- I don't *think* that isn't a sign of Nazi tendencies (at least I hope not)... But, yes, for me it's that leaden stuff that follows Jazz Record Requests (after the obligatory 30 minutes of chat). I usually turn Radio 3 off whenever it -- or medieval music -- comes on. Although those Go Compare ads don't contain any opera. The original song was by George M. Cohan.

The Bessie Smith date hasn't changed.

I wouldn't call Rodgers later music 'staid'. It might sound staid because it became one of the middle-of-the-road sounds by the 60s. But it's very rich harmonically - there are some heart stopping modulations. I was listening to Harry Allen's version of South Pacific yesterday and what I noticed was how the jazz versions actually iron out much of that richness in order to make it jazz-worthy. In its orginal form 'My girl back home' is a wonderful evocation of nostalgia for home, brilliantly evoked in the music; in the jazz version that tristese is lost. I think that's much closer to the mark. Those musicals are extremely sentimental - I wouldn't go near 'The Sound of Music' for decades after an infatuation with it as a ten year old. But I watched it again a couple of years back and was enchanted. The streetwise wise-crackers of Rodgers and Hart songs are always going to have more kudos than nuns and kids dressed in curtains. But I think that disguises a richness in Rodgers music that the knowing music fan often misses but the general public gets without even thinking about it. I stand by the staid comment, although that doesn't mean I don't love R&OH -- I do. I pretty much agree with all the remarks above on these and other GAS songwriters. The last R&OH show I saw was The Sound of Music at the London Palladium. What's incredible about these shows is the sheer overwhelming force of the talent involved: great song after great song with barely a pause between them. Hammerstein was also a great book writer: the songs are intricately woven into the story and carry it forward without a break. I remember the first of their shows I saw was the famous National Theatre production of Carousel; the Carousel Waltz ballet opening was one of the few times I wept, for want of a better word, at the beauty of a piece of theatre, and I'm not the weepy type. The show kept up that standard throughout. I just think that some songs are so much a part of their origins -- in this case the stage -- that they resist translation to other genres. Doesn't mean they can't be transported, but it's a challenge few rise to. That's surely true, although for some of those musicians the very "corniness" is a challenge. I'm thinking of Lee Morgan doing All At Once You Love Her or even Coltrane's My Favourite Things. Some musicians, Sonny Rollins for example, seem to specialise in unlikely show tunes; all those Jolson numbers...

What's curious about that though is that Hammerstein adopted the same approach earlier on with Jerome Kern. Yet Kern and Hammerstein songs have much more readily become jazz standards: All the Things You Are, Why Was I Born, Old Man River, etc. And apparently these tunes are often very harmonically complex (Kern worried that All the Things You are wouldn't register with the public, for instance). Rodgers seems to have allowed his music to become a lot more staid under Hammerstein's influence than Kern did.

I always assumed it was because Rodgers and Hammerstein songs don't swing. They are closer in spirit to operetta than to modern Broadway; a bit more formal. The only ones that get seem to played regularly are Surrey with the Fringe on Top, My Favourite Things and It Might as Well Be Spring. That said, I love it when a jazz musician tackles one of the others, eg, Howard McGhee with The Sound of Music.

http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-kindle-paperwhite-might-be-most-paper-like-e-reader-ever-7000003846/ Good. When it's just right, I'll happily buy one.

The death of the CD would be OK if lossless downloads were widely available, but for most music the only way you can avoid compression is to buy a CD and rip it yourself. Of course, the answer to that might be, if you are an audiophile, buy vinyl, but some of us prefer the sound of CDs.

Hot Water by Wodehouse was superb, so I've started on the next one in my list: Luck of the Bodkins. I'm pleased to see it's also set in France (where I think the author was living at the time).

I like the idea of the e-reader, but having used an iPad regularly at work and sampled a colleague's Kindle, I'll reluctantly pass -- at least until either is improved. I find the iPad interface too slippery and distracting and the Kindle screen too grey and the buttons not responsive enough (I get the odd bout of RSI and don't want to encourage it). In fact, formatting content for the iPad is now a part of my job, and I hate it, but even without that association that I wouldn't want to use one as it currently is. I'm the same with music downloads: great idea, but the technology just isn't good enough yet.

Ah, I didn't know about Kinsey's link with That's Life. Thanks for that. George and Mildred had two theme tunes during its run, the first by jazz bassist Johnny Hawksworth (similar in spirit to his Roobarb theme), the second by Roger Webb (more mood-music-y).

I know it's crass, but being a child of the Eighties, I always associate Tony Kinsey's name with this.

I wouldn't usually recommend a PD release but this, which I'm currently listening to, is excellent and I believe ticks all your boxes.

What about these days, though? I don't think I've ever heard Body and Soul played at a gig. Or My Funny Valentine. They seem very much of their time. Autumn Leaves, on the other hand, comes up a lot.

Seriously, why not just pay for it? Newspapers aren't very expensive.

I'm with Allen Lowe on this one. I recently re-watched Airplane and barely laughed. Two-dimensional characters enacting corny puns in a shallow genre spoof doesn't cut it for me. Laurel and Hardy films make me laugh the most. Then W.C. Fields, Buster Keaton and Jerry Lewis. Movies with characters and situations you can identify with, however exaggerated.

I would assume more cock-up than conspiracy. My dealings with Popmarket suggest to me that its either a very incompetent outfit or a seriously understaffed one.

Probably lots. Vocalion has had a long relationship with Universal and has recently resumed its relationship with EMI. The label has also licensed the odd Sony release as well as library recordings. Did you order at HMV? I'm still waiting for mine, although they were posted last week.

PS Just noticed that, although the Armstrong box, like the Bessie, replicates the order of the Columbia Masterworks releases of about 20 years ago, the Popmarket site says "Contains the best sound ever, having been remastered by Sony’s multi Grammy-winning engineer, Mark Wilder, in conjunction with producer Michael Brooks." Maybe the Bessie has been redone too? Who knows?

In spite of all the caveats on here (which I do take seriously), I've preordered the Bessie set. The individual Frog sets work out a lot more expensively, and although I appreciate Bessie's genre-transcending greatness, blues isn't much of an interest of mine. So for me it's just a cheap, easy way to get the lot, poor sound notwithstanding. If it turns out to be remastered after all -- and if I can actually tell if it has been -- I'll let you know. Re Ellington, I'm hoping that it's just a matter of time before Sony repackages and reissues the complete RCA set of about 15 years ago. I was a bit hard up when that one came out and I reluctantly passed on it without realising it was a limited edition. A nice mini-box version of that would be fine.

There was that boiling hot weekend a couple of weeks ago, plus it was quite nice for most of the Olympics. The days and days of rain at the start of summer were incredible. I never complain about unpredictable weather, though. It's one of the many things I love about living in England. We could easily get some real summer weather in September.

I started reading him because I liked the Everyman hardback editions and fancied collecting them. I was rather unenthusiastic about his writing at first, being an English graduate used to literary fiction, but as I kept buying them and reading them I gradually began to get it. Much of his humour is about repetition, such as using lofty quotes to describe facetious situations, and you also laugh whenever one you've seen in one story recurs in another. Just reading a list of them, such as the one here, makes me smile. I can do without the repetitive dialogue, however.

Just finished another Wodehouse: Doctor Sally. Adapted from a play, which makes it more interesting (in a technical sense) than especially good. At least it was short, and would have been even shorter if he hadn't padded it out with so much repeated dialogue, eg, "I'm angry" "You're angry?" "I'm angry." I'm working through the gaps in my Wodehouse knowledge. Hot Water is chronologically the next unread title, so I'll read that then possibly look for something more substantial.

They are exact copies, but I thought the Evans would be like the Tatums I have in the same series: double jewel cases in a slip case. It's basic, but no more cheap than zillions of other boxed sets out there, including Mosaic Selects.

Yeah, the titles of the first seven are the same as the Columbia Masterworks releases of ages ago, eg these ones. I only recently got rid of my copies of these when I bought the Complete Masters box from Universal, so I'm not buying them again!