JSngry

Whoa, Jerry Vale!

We'll call you when it's time to board, and then again a week later when it's time to board!

She had a nice way wih lyrics.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

May he remain Wayne-y for as long as it is there to be had. Much love.

definitely NOT: although possibly, but hopefully not: But if so, rest assured, we have a special relationship with: Nevertheless, y'all be smart, be safe, and stay alive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/arts/music/bea-wain-star-singer-of-the-big-band-era-dies-at-100.html?emc=edit_th_20170825&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=25913738 Bea Wain, one of the last surviving vocalists of the big band era, whose four No. 1 hits included a swing adaptation of a Debussy melody, died on Saturday in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 100. “The impeccable Wain never fails to captivate us as Clinton’s brassmen play natty little curlicues around her,” Will Friedwald wrote in his book “Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices From Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond” (1990). In a short-lived recording career (curtailed by a two-year strike by musicians over royalties that began in 1942), Ms. Wain was voted most popular female band vocalist in Billboard’s 1939 college poll. (Ella Fitzgerald was second.) She had No. 1 hits with versions of the standards “Deep Purple” and “Heart and Soul” as well as “Cry, Baby, Cry” and, most notably, “My Reverie,” an up-tempo version of the classic Debussy piano piece “Reverie” with lyrics by Mr. Clinton. Ms. Wain was among the first singers to record “Over the Rainbow,” but MGM, which owned the rights, barred the release of her version until the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” which included Judy Garland’s performance of the song, opened in August 1939. By mid-September, four versions, including Ms. Wain’s and Garland’s, were in the Top 10. Although it would become Ms. Wain’s signature song, “My Reverie” was almost scrapped when Debussy’s heirs learned to their horror that the music had been adapted for a pop audience with a brisk tempo and lyrics. But when Mr. Clinton sent them his recording, she recalled, they replied, “If this girl sings it, O.K.” Still, she expressed skepticism to the bandleader that his challenging multisyllabic lyrics (“Make my dream a reality/Let’s dispense with formality”) would bode well for the song’s chances of becoming a hit. “I said, ‘To be a popular song these days, the kids who are delivering groceries have to be able to sing it, and they’ll never be able to.’ I said, ‘It will never make it.’ ”

But seriously...it reads to me like another in a long line of "where jazz went wrong" pieces, this time from a younger(ish) person. The undertone being that all these educated white folk took a living culture and turned it into something you could learn by simply...get ready...DOING THE MATH! Well OF COURSE you can do the math. The question is - whose math are you going to do? The correct answer is that nothing "went wrong" as much as it is just that shit happened, and will always continue to happen, so cast your lot in line with where you want to end up and own it, period. Not saying to not evolve, but...keep your core even as you build out from it. This bit, however, cracks me up beacuse it's at once so accurate and so...snobby: The pianist and composer Anthony Coleman, who followed the Ellington band in their last few years and heard them at the Rainbow Grill many times, told me recently that Evans’s approach makes “In A Sentimental Mood” dangerously close to the banal: “Those cutie-pie hits together forty seconds in, for example, send me into a reverie where Jamal degenerates into Ramsey Lewis, with Oscar Peterson nodding approvingly towards André Previn, and Johnny Mandel observing the whole thing.” I mean, ok on the one hand he's "bemoaning" the loss of the connection between the street and the academic, the popular vs the esoteric, and then he turns around an allows for the dissing of people who were VERY popular, and here again, I think he's aiming wrong. I know I've mentioned a few times that the cool thing about a Cannonball Adderley gig in the 70s (which was when I saw him was that there was a buttload full of different "audience4s" all in the same room at the same time and they all came away with something that was what they came for. This kind of popularity has nothing to do with "art" and everything to do with a msuic being able to exist in many different forms simultaneously, with points that converge as readily as they diverge. But...it's too late, what's done is done, looking back gets us nowhere, let's do shit now. Well, not me, because I've gotten to the point where I seriously don't give a fuck anymore. But you know, people that are doing it, just fucking DO IT. Do. It. I can't believe this shit is still dragging on, that we're using 50 year old comparisons to do what, exactly? Scold? Bitch? Presentate? Collect a fee? Gain profile amongst people who want to be hip by being told what's not hip? That's for the old and useless. That's o-baord level shit, not The New Yorker. Or maybe it is, hell, Whitney Balliet. Like the man says, tell me something I don't know.

That between Bill Eavans and "jazz education", jazzzzzzzzzzzzz has largely become a codified music for dorks and nerds who can't get laid except among their own kind? I mean, he's essentially right, but he's also waaaaaaay late to that game, which in itself is full of the delicious irony of unintentionally proving it's own point?

Horace Smith David Wesson Florence Henderson

Dick Shreve sounds like he's having him some fun of his own. OMG! Dick Shreve was Durwood Douche! THE Durwood Douche!!!! GENIUS!!!!

totally non-essential (Dick Shreve, Monty Budwig, Colin Bailey, 1964), but who knew? not me. Goodman himself, as per usual, sounds like he's having fun just playing, nothing spectacular, just BG off in his own little happyworld. And Dick Shreve sounds like he's having him some fun of his own. I'd readily pick this up as, like, a $4.99 used LP.

Is this current outsourced shipper the original outsourced shipper, or are they somebody new? William B. Meyer, since 1915!

I want to remember Mosaic as Willie Mays the Giant. This current shipping thing is reminding me of Willie Mays the Met. Either way, though, (say) hey - Willie Mays!

Willie Mays was once the most amazing baseball player in the history of the world. But as happens to us all, he aged, got slower and less amazing, and finished up with the Mets, where he showed flashes of the old brilliance, but also showed (more often) that he could never again be the marvel he once was. It was still a pleasure to know that he was still playing the game, but it was also sometimes painful to watch him play with a noticeably deteriorated skill set. Here's the Willie I want to always remember:

See? Grown folk can talk to each other like that and not have it get all emo. Take note, world!