Showing posts with label Jazz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jazz. Show all posts

Saturday 10 April 2010

Various Artists - 'The Singing Detective'

I have no idea when, where or why I bought this. I'm not sure I've ever played it, sampled it or danced to it. Although it's a perfectly nice collection of jazz standards, compiled from original period recordings, it doesn't move me.

I watched a couple of episodes of 'The Singing Detective' a few years back. Despite remembering it as being groundbreaking and a bit creepy, I wasn't crazy about that either.

Sorry, not a fan.

Catalogue Number: BEN 608

Tracks: Peg o' my Heart. Limehouse Blues. Blues in the Night. Dry Bones. Rockin' in Rhythm. Cruising Down the River. Don't Fence Me In. It Might As Well be Spring. Lili Marlene. I Get Along Without You Very Well. Do I Worry? Accentuate The Positive. You Always Hurt The One You Love. After You've Gone. It's A Lovely Day Tomorrow. Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall. The Very Thought of You. The Teddy Bears Picnic. We'll Meet Again.

Sunday 4 April 2010

Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong - 'Ella and Louis'

I don't really know anything about this record - for me, it's a really cool recording of two people at the top of their game, effortlessly swinging through a few standards. But maybe connoisseurs know this to be a cheesy commercial cash-in - whatever, I love it. There's a sleepy, languid quality to a lot of this. Even when they step it up on 'They Can't Take That Away From Me', you get the impression that they're both still sitting down.

I think I bought this from the now defunct chain 'Our Price' while living in Salisbury in the late 1980s. When I got it home, I was blown away by the warmth and intimacy of the recording. I'd just started getting into to hip hop, and this was the opposite of processed, sequenced music, a record in the truest sense - a recording of a performance. They probably knocked this out in an afternoon. To me, brilliant, warm, and deeply soulful.

It reminds me of sunny autumnal Sunday mornings in a bedsit in Salisbury, a rare moment of quiet between work and play. Which, thinking about it, meant being hungover and freezing.

Tracks: Can't We Be Friends, Isn't This A Lovely Day, Moonlight in Vermont, They Can't Take That Away From Me, Under a Blanket of Blue, Tenderly, A Foggy Day, Stars Fell on Alabama, Cheek to Cheek, The Nearness of You, April in Paris.

Catalogue Number: Verve 825 373-1