Off the Shelf: Ella Fitzgerald

The CD plucked off the shelf this week is another cheap disc I picked up during my high school days:  Ella Fitzgerald: Flying Home.  It is a compilation of recordings of the great jazz singer.  The liner notes are lacking (that is, there aren't any) so I had to do a bit of fact-checking.  The second track on the disc is a song that is now virtually owned by Fitzgerald: How High the Moon (it is also one of about three songs that I've ever done the karoake thing to.  Tee hee.)  There is a story behind the scat-singing on that track, but as I haven't found a documented source of that story yet, I can't tell you whether it's true or not.  The story goes like this:  During a concert, performing said song, Ella forgets the lyrics, and so makes them up.  However, other accounts tell me that she didn't forget the words, but instead uses the tune as a way of forging and refining her style to integrate into the bepop scene (she in fact, quotes several bars of Charlie Parker's Ornithology, a song that shares the chord progression with How High the Moon).  Ella fully embraced the bebop movement.

The nonsense syllables are called "scatting," and are similar to the non-lexical vocables that we learned about with Mr. Trololo (see the post about Trolololo-ing).  It is a technique that requires the singer to impersonate musical instruments.  Fitzgerald happened to be very good at this, and she used it extensively in her later recordings.

She had a consistently successful career as a jazz singer, her lovely voice contributing to recordings of covers of songs by Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, and Duke Ellington.  She worked a lot with Louis Armstrong, recording several albums with him.  On the 3rd track of my cheap CD is Basin Street Blues, she does an impersonation of Armstrong's distinctive singing voice.  He sings with her on A Foggy Day and Moonlight in Vermont, and you can hear his trumpet skillfully navigating the changes on several other tracks.

I suspect the recordings of Oh Lady Be Good and How High the Moon are the famous 1947 versions, and the Flying Home track was recorded in 1945.  My personal favourites are Angel Eyes and Lullaby of Birdland, two songs that always made me dream of becoming a jazz singer (Peggy Lee has had the same effect on me).  But I can't scat sing.  At least not with the ease, inventiveness, and grace of Ella.  In 1987, she was presented with the much-deserved National Medal of Arts, and a few years later France awarded her their Commander of Arts and Letters award.

Ella Fitzgerald left this world on June 15, 1996.  She was 79 years old.

Blue moon of Kentucky

Getting psyched for my impending Kentucky trip.  I will be attending the 2-day Jamey Aebersold Improvisation seminar at the University of Louisville.  This will be my first road trip South (well, if you don't count the trip to Florida that I took with my high school band.  Riding in a charter bus for 22 hours doesn't really count as a road trip for me.)

In preparation for my trip, I've looked into some well-known musicians from the state of Kentucky.  It's no surprise that many country, Christian, and gospel singers hail from Kentucky: Steven Curtis Chapman, Achy Breaky Hearted Billy Ray Cyrus, Loretta Lynn (the coal miner's daughter), Naomi Judd, Wynonna Judd, and Ricky Scaggs.  Kentucky is home to a rich history of folk and country music, and it's just a hop and a skip away from another major music hub: Nashville, TN.  From Rosine, KY comes "The Father of Bluegrass Music" Bill Monroe.  According to his website, he invented, labelled, and propelled bluegrass style into modern America.  Through the inception of his band, the Blue Grass Boys, he defined the bluegrass tradition with close harmonies, instrumental virtuosity, and driving tempos. 

In Monroe's own words: "To me, bluegrass is really THE country music.  It was meant for country people."  With that quote, it's easy to wander off into the murky depths of country and folk music history, in an attempt to come up with an intellectual definition of "country" music.  [Here we go, down the rabbit hole.]  What is country music?  As opposed to pop music?  Or blues?  How is modern country music different from modern pop music (leaving out hip-hop for the moment)?  Same instruments, some of them even electrified.  Same themes in lyrics, same chord progressions.  All that's different is style and a bit of twang.  Throw in a lap steel guitar, a twangy voice and a violin solo and any tune can become a country tune.  Or is it really that easy?  Probably not. 

The difference comes from the history, I think.  The tradition that has been passed down from one musician to the next.  In some parts of the country, folk musicians took a turn onto the path of blues and then ragtime and then, eventually, Tin Pan Alley.  Jazz musicians rely on traditions too, but are usually trying to break out them; constantly moving towards new sounds.  In other parts of the country, like in the South, the music and musicians retained that unique identity.  Of course it evolved, but it stayed closer to its roots.  Therefore, Bluegrass is country music with lots of caffeine.

That's the way I see it, anyway. 

A bluegrass band is traditionally a small string orchestra, with guitars, banjos, perhaps a mandolin, a violin or two, and a bass to keep it all grounded.  Like jazz, it is a uniquely American art-form.  Also, like jazz, there is an element of improvisation: band members will trade blazing solos over choruses of folk tunes.  Rounding the corner, to make the full circle, jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton was born in Louisville, though he considered Birmingham, Alabama is home.  And, how could I leave out Boots Randolph, saxophonist extraordinaire (Yakety Sax).  He was born in Paducah, and was part of the "Nashville sound" for most of his career.

Now I know what music to pack for the drive.

Once more, with feeling

I picked up Glen Hansard's new solo album.  Kind of an impulse thing, while waiting for my coffee at the local Starbucks (No, Mark, I don't get all of my music from Starbucks!).  Hansard is an Irish singer-songwriter who is featured in the 2006 indie film Once.  I was impressed enough by his vocal style and songwriting talent to keep tabs on him since I saw the movie.  The music for this film was mostly written by Hansard in collaboration with lover-turned-friend Marketa Irglova.  The movie has since become a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical.  I like all of the songs from the movie, but my favourite one is Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy. 

Hansard dropped out of school at an early age and was busking the streets of Dublin when he was 13.  I am attracted to singers with big voices (the opening sequence of Once features him singing a song alone on the street, in true busker style, with enough power to reach the far end of Ireland) but his most recent release, Rhythm and Repose, is more like a smolder than a barn burner.  This isn't a turn off, though, as the songs presented are solidly written.  The orchestrations are particularly nice, and we do hear a bit of what he's capable of in the tracks High Hope and Bird of Sorrow.  The rest of the album just seethes.

With Irglova, he's half of The Swell Season, and he's guitarist and singer for the Irish band, The Frames.

Off the Shelf: KT Tunstall

Scotland born Kate Victoria "KT" Tunstall made the world take notice with her 2004 album Eye to the Telescope, which is this week's Off the Shelf.  The big hits from this album include Black Horse and the Cherry Tree and Suddenly I See.  Listening to it again, I realize how diverse her sound can be.  She is perfectly capable of the pop-song hook (ex. Suddenly I See-which can also be heard in the opening credits of the 2006 movie The Devil Wears Prada) but can deliver interesting atmospheric style music too (Under the Weather).  Since her 2004 debut, she has released follow up albums, Drastic Fantastic (2007) and Tiger Suit (2010).

Yummy Rummy

If you like pina coladas,
And getting caught in the rain.

This tune has been stuck in my head for the past couple of days.  It was written by Rupert Holmes and released in 1979 as the single from the album Partners in Crime.  It's commonly referred to as "The Pina Colada Song", but its actual title is Escape, (and later referred to as Escape (The Pina Colada Song).

The song is about a man who is unhappy in his marriage and so peruses the personal ads.  He notices one ad in particular that outlines several intriguing interests.  He responds in kind with another personal ad and arranges to meet the woman who placed the original ad.  When the pair finally meet at a bar named O'Malley's, they discover that they are already married and actually do have more in common than they had realized.  The song ends on a cheerful note, despite the fact that both partners were seeking new relationships.

This song made Rupert Holmes famous, with the cruel irony that it became his defining success.  Holmes is also an accomplished author and composer, and has a long list of acclaimed works that have nothing to do with coconut-flavoured beverages.  He is the first person in Broadway history to win Best Book, Best Music and Best Lyrics for his (The Mystery of Edwin) Drood, which also won a Tony award for best musical (1985).  He has published two novels (one of which has been made into a movie with Kevin Bacon).  It's actually embarrassing how he is best known for one pop tune, when so much of his work has appeared in television, movies, and on the Broadway stage.

In reference to the song, though, the line was originally If you like Humphrey Bogart, but, because he had decided that he was using a lot of movie references in his work, he chose to change it to a different form of "escape."  At almost the last minute, he changed the lyric to one of the first exotic-sounding cocktail he could think of: pina colada (made with rum, pineapple juice, and coconut cream).

Now we know.

The other waltz king

I met a saxophone this week.  Not a player of saxophone.  The horn itself.  The sax in question belonged to Wayne King, the "Waltz King."  Johannes Strauss, Jr (1825-1899) was, of course, the original Waltz King (there's a post here somewhere about him), but the later King was the bandleader of a notable and successful "sweet" band.  His style has been compared to that of Lawrence Welk, with a soft, dreamy feel.  He was best known for novelty tunes, sentimental songs, and waltzes.

Wayne King's saxophone.  It's a Beuscher.

Wayne King was a Savanna, IL native, near the Quad Cities, and most likely the reason for the horn's visit to Davenport.  He composed some songs, but mostly in collaboration with other writers.  Some better known tunes by King, et. al., include: Goofus, The Waltz You Saved for Me (his band's appropriate theme song), Beautiful Love, and Josephine.  The Wayne King Orchestra recorded with RCA/Victor starting in 1929.  Several albums were released, all featuring the slow, danceable, King style.

Between 1948 and 1952, King even had his own TV show.  It was sponsored by Standard Oil Company, and broadcast over NBC.  The program featured King and his band, and his female vocalist, Nancy Evans, who sang with his band between 1945 and 1983.  He also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the Radio category.  King died in July of 1985.

I was certainly fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time to have had the opportunity to see this piece of  big band history.

Off the Shelf: The Roots of Swing and Jive

This week's installment of Off the Shelf takes me back in time.  In my high school days, I was a bit obsessed with finding authentic big band sounds, which, sadly, was pathetically difficult in my tiny hometown.  Somewhere, I ran across a couple of compilation discs with tracks of big band standards. These were called The Roots of Swing and Jive: Jungle Swing and The Roots of Swing and Jive: Jumpin' at the Woodside.  I was drawn in by the inclusion of Cab Calloway, one of big band's great showmen and some other recordings of the Duke Ellington and Basie bands.  These were most likely low-budget releases intended to capitalize on the late-1990s swing revival.

Like a baby bird, these were the recordings and sounds that I imprinted with as I began my journey into the tangled jungle of jazz and swing music.  These weren't the first jazz CDs I'd picked up, nor were they the only ones I had to listen to, and the quality of the recordings isn't always great, but the content was exactly what I was looking for.  Even now, I'm always on the hunt for "authentic" and "true" music; my reasoning then and now is: I can learn the most from the greats who set the standard for greatness.  And these bands set the standard high.  At the time, I didn't know who Les Brown was, or the prodigious talent of Artie Shaw, or even how influential Woody Herman was as a musician and bandleader, I just liked the music. 

Starting with the "novelty" tunes, like Herman's Caldonia (who I was stunned to later learn was the singer of this rough and rollicking tune), and Calloway's Jungle Swing (a cute song-story about a monkey and a lion), I then studied the Glenn Miller sound and familiarized myself with Ellington's sax section.  Louis Armstrong was a source of endless fascination: he was so versatile and inventive with his solos.  He had a sound that was instantly recognizable and I dreamed of one day being good enough to have my own sound and being smart enough to get around a set of chord changes without getting too confused.

What probably bears noting is, there is a distinction between "dance" music and "jazz" music, though big band music fits under the grand heading of "Jazz Music".  Embarrassingly, I didn't really understand this distinction completely until about five or six years ago.  Dancers want reliable tempos with strong beats that are easy to dance to.  In the big band heyday of the 1940s, many musicians were employed to play in dance bands.  The Glenn Miller Orchestra was the quintessential dance band of the time; smooth enough, with a bit of a swing, and a high level of musicianship.  Other notable dance bands of this type of swing include Paul Whiteman, Jean Goldkette, Rudy Vallee, and Guy Lombardo.  This style of swing is light on improvisation, and heavy on form and section playing, often using a string section to round out the main band.  Goodman and Herman (among other bands) both helped to push the style from "sweet" dance music to "jazz" music. 

In other words, not all jazz music is danceable.  And some of it isn't meant to be.  (A telling quote from Artie Shaw:  "I made it good enough to listen to.")  This becomes more apparent as jazz music progressed from the big band tradition into bop and fusion.  The music on these two discs is closer to the danceable tradition, and what most people think of when they hear "big band".  The progression wasn't linear, historically; it was concurrent.  True jazz music was on solid ground post-ragtime and dixieland style of the 20s and 30s, but the big band style pushed it all to the front of the stage, so to speak, albeit a bit diluted for the dancing masses.  And electrification would soon bring it all crashing down.

This post could easily turn into several volumes of rambling jazz history, so, for now, I'll leave at this.  The recordings on these two discs are a fair representation of the Golden Age of big band swing.  Not exhaustive, but a  reasonable mix of prime movers in the big band tradition, who retain a significant reputation for setting the standard of greatness.

Trololololoooo

Music doesn't usually make its way into meme-hood.  For the uninitiated, a meme is an idea or item that is spread throughout culture through repetition, much like the biological transmission of genetic material (think "viral" videos).  The dancing banana/Peanut Butter Jelly Time meme is the first musical one that comes to mind (and one of the first true Internet memes).  The other major music meme that comes to mind is the Trololo guy.  If you've ever been "Rickrolled," that's another example of a meme.

The Trololo guy is really Eduard Khil, a popular Soviet singer of the 1960s and 70s, gained worldwide stardom several years ago when a video of him singing nonsense syllables over a chirpy melody hit the YouTubes.  The melody Khil is singing is the tune of a song called I Am Glad, 'Cause I'm Finally Returning Back Home.  The song was written by Arkady Ostrovsky, with sentimental lyrics about a cowboy riding across the prairie, thinking about his sweetheart.  These lyrics, apparently, irked the Soviet censors, so Khil removed the lyrics and sang trololos over it. The technical term for this kind of lyric is a "non-lexical vocable".  In jazz music, we call it "scat singing," and several other cultures use this type of singing in some form.  Other common types of non-lexical vocable-ing include a capella singing, beatboxing, and doo-wop.

Mr. Khil died on June 4 of this year, at age 77.  He was largely unaware of his Western popularity, remarking that he "never earned a kopeck" from his sudden fame.  He will now be remembered for his rich, baritone voice and radiant, infectious smile.

Trolololololololololo trololololooooooo!!

First Lady of Bass

Somehow, I keep circling around The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album.  This isn't a bad thing, but it must be the Universe's way of telling me to do a proper research.  I will, Universe, I will!  Promise!  Just not yet.  Instead, I want to tell you about a bass player.  The bassist in mind is Carol Kaye.

Carol Kaye is responsible for the bass line on The Beach Boys' Wouldn't It Be Nice (First track from Pet Sounds.  See what I mean?).  You've probably heard her playing in lots of other songs too.  Spanning a 55 year career as a session musician, Kaye can be heard on recordings from The Beach Boys, Phil Spector, The Doors, Joe Cocker, Frank Sinatra, Quincy Jones, John Williams, and about a zillion others.  Also a guitar player, she can be heard on Ritchie Valens' La Bamba.

She's also a teacher.  In 1969, she wrote and published a bass method book: How to Play the Electric Bass.  Since 1949, she played and taught guitar professionally, and got into session work accidentally in 1957, with Sam Cooke recordings.  An impressive career, all in all.  The First Lady of bass continues to perform and teach.

Did you know...

CDs (compact discs) have a capacity to store 74 minutes of audio.  This non-round number of minutes was suggested by Sony's vice-president, Norio Ohga, so that German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler's recording of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 (recorded in 1951) would fit on a single disc.

Beethoven yields to no technological format!

Off the Shelf: Candy Dulfer

Starting a new feature here at Music Zombie.  "Off the Shelf" will feature music and artists plucked, mostly at random, from my CD collection.  Let's kick it off with Sax-a-Go-Go (1993) by Candy Dulfer.

I first heard of her a few years ago while gigging with Project Pickle Farm, a local funk-rock band.  Between sets, the guitar player would play music.  For a while, he chose a smokin' saxophone player.  I finally tracked down who the alto sax player was and it turned out to be a Dutch smooth jazz artist by the name of Candy Dulfer.  She started playing saxophone at age six and started her first band, Funky Stuff, at age 14.  Her style is on the smoother side of funky, but she certainly burns up the horn.

Since her debut solo album, Saxuality (1990) she has performed with numerous acts, including Lionel Richie, Tower of Power, Prince, Beyonce, Pink Floyd, Chaka Khan, David Sanborn, Van Morrison, Blondie, and many more.  She started touring worldwide when she was 20.  Is there any question why she's a hero to me?  She's doing what I dream of doing.  And she is an inspiration for me to get out there and keep putting myself in new musical situations, even the ones where I feel out of my league or uncomfortable.  If I can become even half the player she is, I'll be on the right track!

Anyway, she's worth looking into.  Check it out!

Band Stand Boogie

Hey!  I started a photo blog!

Here it is:

fromthebandstand.blogspot.com

Aaaand, go!

(I told you I'd do it, Julie!)