#the jazz singer 1959

[cosmic60s]

I haven't been able to stop thinking about how devastatingly handsome Jerry is in The Jazz Singer, and this is the result of that. Enjoy <3

[luzzarm]

Jerry LEWIS as Joey Robin in Startime, Ep. 2 (The Jazz Singer) — 1959

[reckonslepoisson]

Du chant à la une !… (1958), N° 2 (1959), L'Étonnant Serge Gainsbourg (1961), N° 4 (1962), Serge Gainsbourg

As a first plunge into the world of Serge Gainsbourg, his opening decade remains both an easy entry point and remarkably illustrative of charms that persisted throughout his career. Du chant à la une !... [Singing on the Front Page!...], N° 2, L'Étonnant Serge Gainsbourg [The Amazing Serge Gainsbourg] and N° 4 sit comfortably between chanson, exotica, cabaret and vocal jazz, all capturing Gainsbourg’s beauty, his knack for snap and sark, his agility, playfulness and boundless melody.

Pick(s): ‘Le Poinçonneur des Lilas’, ‘L’anthracite’, ‘En relisant ta lettre’, ‘Black Trombone’

[hotdaemondtargaryen]

TOM GLYNN-CARNEY PHOTOGRAPHED BY MATTHEW LEIFHEIT FOR VULTURE MAGAZINE.

TALKING ABOUT HIS CHARACTER ARC IN S2.

Aegon is confident, politically savvy, and even affectionate with his children from sister-wife Helaena (Phia Saban).

“Showing that he has the potential to love was interesting to me. I wanted to investigate that.”

Glynn-Carney, who read the book after a season one conversation with Condal and Sapochnik about Aegon's overall arc, praises the development for its shock factor and the attention it gives to Saban, who says it is "sensational in all its forms."

There’s something about Aegon in his eyes when he admits: “I’d probably go a little more graphic about the gore. I could have done with, ‘Oh, I can’t look at that!’ The sadist in me needed it.”

TALKING ABOUT MUSIC.

The playlist he made for Aegon (he makes one for all his characters) helps get him in the right mercurial mind-set, he tells me at Rough Trade.

It includes some contemplative classical and punk rock like the Undertones, Stiff Little Fingers, and the Sex Pistols.

“Ironically,” he says with a smile. “fuck-the-patriarchy, fuck-the-monarchy stuff.”

In his own life, Glynn-Carney makes “lyrically driven, quite folky” music, citing Tame Impala, Bon Iver, and, of course, Garvey as influences.

He grabs a copy of Jeff Buckley’s Grace because he’s worn down his current edition from listening to it so much. He treats Chet Baker’s 1959 album Chet gently, like a holy object, when he tells me he’d love to play the cool jazz musician in a biopic one day.

“There she is,” he says, as if greeting an old friend, when he sees Patti Smith’s Radio Ethiopia.

“Anyone who says they don’t like music, you can’t trust them. Bodies under the floorboards, isn’t it?” he says.

OLIVIA COOKE TALKING ABOUT TOM GLYNN-CARNEY'S ACTING STYLE.

His acting style is instinctual, a function of his theater training that feels particularly well suited to Aegon’s own impulsiveness.

When filming their first scene on the show together, Glynn-Carney encouraged Cooke to actually slap him in the face:

“The first go, I did it really haphazardly. I only caught his chin with my fingertips, because I was too nervous. And he was like, ‘No, Olivia, just, like, really go for it. Just really go for it.’

“I went for it, and the ringing sound that came from the slap reverberated all through the Red Keep. Tears are springing to his eyes and his chin is wobbling.”

SPOILERS!! S2.

OLIVIA COOKE TALKING ABOUT A SCENE OF AEGON AND ALICENT IN S2.

In a scene they share in season two during which Aegon grieves the loss of a relative:

“He was throwing himself around the room in just the throes of despair. It sort of took me out of the scene a bit. I was like, Bloody hell, Tom’s doing well.”

ABOUT THE PERSONALITY OF KING AEGON II.

“massively bipolar.”

That emotional volatility, fueled by shame, guilt, and an obsessive need to prove himself, becomes a major driver of this season’s increasing bloodshed and brutality.

“Aegon wants to be loved and feared at the same time. But I think it’s a dangerous cycle.”

“We’re not going to get to the core of what’s going on. We’re just going to go round and round and round and round and round until everything burns and everyone’s dead."

ABOUT HIS SCENES WITH RHYS IFANS IN S2.

One of his favorite days on set this season reminded him of the live energy of performing onstage.

They were shooting episode two, when Aegon challenges his grandfather Otto’s decisions and remains steely and resolute in response to Otto’s insults:

“I’ve always wanted to do a play with Rhys, and that felt like the closest thing I’ll get to it for a while.”

“It was an empty set, a big room, like a stage. We were allowed complete free rein of the space.”

TALKING ABOUT HIS FAMILY.

He came from a creatively inclined family: His paternal grandparents were an opera singer and a choirmaster, and his mother sewed all the costumes for his sister’s ballroom and Latin dance competitions.

They were supportive of his acting dreams, he says, but urged a plan B — a suggestion he rejected:

“I remember being so precocious and being like, ‘If I have a plan B, I’m preemptively failing it.’ My mom probably thought, Little dickhead.”

“I always had my eyes on the prize, and sometimes you’ve just got to be like that, haven’t you?.”

[cartermagazine]

Today In History

Miriam Zenzi Makeba, internationally renowned singer was born near Johannesburg, South Africa, on this date March 4,1932, during a time of economic depression. Her mother, a domestic worker, was imprisoned for six months for illegally brewing beer to help make ends meet, and Miriam went to prison with her as she was just 18 days old. She grew up in Nelspruit where her father was a clerk with Shell Oil.

Makeba began her music career singing for her cousin’s band, the Cuban Brothers, but it was only when she began to sing for the Manhattan Brothers in 1954 that she began to build a reputation. She toured South Africa, Zimbabwe (former Rhodesia) and the Congo with the band until 1957. After this Makeba sang for all-women group, the Skylarks, which combined jazz and traditional African melodies. Makeba’s appearances in the films Come Back Africa (1957) and as the female lead in Todd Matshikiza’s King Kong (1959) cemented her reputation in the music industry both locally and abroad.

“Empress of African Song”

CARTER™️ Magazine

[abwwia]

Sarah Vaughan, New York, 1959

Photo by W.Rizzo

Sarah Lois Vaughan (Mar 27, 1924 – Apr 3, 1990) was an American jazz singer.

Nicknamed "Sassy" and "The Divine One", she won four Grammy Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award. She was given an NEA Jazz Masters Award in 1989; "one of the most wondrous voices of the 20th century". via Wikipedia

photo via www.facebook.com/TheWorldOfJazz

#SarahVaughan #womensart #artbywomen #PalianShow #womeninmusic

[monicareconstructed]

Pat Barrington.

Pat screamed feminine sex appeal, like 'I AM WOMAN!!' at top decibels.

Not such a happy childhood, and lived the life of a stripper with a few forays into film. But her looks and body - oh, my! I would have loved to have her body in her prime!!

Her web bio:

Pat Barrington was an extremely buxom, curvy, and drop-dead gorgeous blonde topless dancer who popped up in a handful of enjoyably trashy softcore sexploitation features throughout the 1960's, often for producer Harry H. Novak's Boxoffice International Pictures and directed by William Rotsler.

Barrington was born Patricia Annette Bray on October 16, 1939 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her mother Willie Jo Bray had a fling with a local man named Claude Weidenhause and became pregnant at age sixteen. Weidenhause had already left by the time Barrington was born. Pat moved with her mother Willie Jo to Richmond, Virginia when she was only two years old. Willie Jo married another man, Eugene Lee Barringer. But the marriage was short-lived and Pat found herself moving once again with her mother to Hyattsville, Maryland. Willie Jo subsequently married a former Marine suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Upset with the unstable situation at home, Barrington left her mother and went out to fend for herself after her sophomore year in high school.

Pat relocated to Baltimore, Maryland, where she hooked up with an Italian-American mobster named Bob. Barrington got married for the first time in the late 1950's. But Pat soon left her first husband after the relationship became abusive. Bob helped Barrington get back on her feet by securing her a job as an exotic dancer. Pat then made a name for herself in Washington, D.C. dancing under the name of Vivian Storm. Barrington caught the eye of local jazz musician Melvin Rees and moved into Rees's abode in Hyattsville, Maryland in 1959. Pat moved down south with Rees in 1960. Alas, Rees was found guilty of murdering a Virginia family and was sentenced to life in prison.

Barrington moved to Los Angeles, California in 1962 and promptly got a job dancing at the prestigious nightclub The Classic Cat. Pat then decided to pursue a modeling career and subsequently started posing in spreads for various men's magazines as well as numerous commercial layouts. After an ill-advised foray into dancing in Las Vegas, Barrington returned to Los Angeles and resumed her career as a model while still dancing on the side. Pat eventually began auditioning for film work in the mid-1960's. Barrington achieved her greatest cult cinema fame as the female lead in Stephen C. Apostolof's unintentionally hilarious horror camp hoot Orgy of the Dead (1965), in which she also performs one of her patented steamy nude dances as the painted Gold Girl. Barrington had another rare substantial starring part as a bored housewife who works as a high-priced call girl in the seamy Agony of Love (1966). More often, though, the stunning and spectacularly alluring Pat was relegated to secondary roles as a go-go dancer in such delightfully down'n'dirty low-grade fare as Lila (1968), The Girl with the Hungry Eyes (1967) and Sisters in Leather (1969). She appeared as herself in both the lurid mondo item Hedonistic Pleasures (1969) and Russ Meyer's blithely silly documentary Mondo Topless (1966). During this time Barrington was briefly married to cinematographer Robert Caramico.

After calling it quits as an actress, Pat left Los Angeles and moved to New Jersey with a singer named Romeo. Barrington soon found gainful employment dancing in clubs up and down the East Coast under the pseudonym of Princess Jajah. In the mid-1970's Pat branched out into topless dancing. She settled down in Cliffside Park, New Jersey in 1980. Barrington eventually dumped Romeo and became involved with a much younger man named Robert. Pat moved with Robert to Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1984. Pat worked as a stripper using the name Yvette at assorted seedy clubs throughout Florida. After retiring from dancing in the early 1990's, Barrington went on to work as a telemarketer. In her later years Pat also helped local animal rescue groups (she was a lifelong lover of animals). Barrington died from lung cancer at age 74 on September 1, 2014.

[the-mic-drop]

World Events & Hazbin Characters

@shokolandish this is your fault.

1800s

1840s- Sir Pentious is born (approximately maybe)

1841- The word 'dinosaur' is coined.

1861- The American Civil War begins

1869- The Suez Canal is completed

1873- Blue jeans are invented

1879- Thomas Edison invents the lightbulb

1888- Sir Pentious dies

1888- Jack the Ripper murders occur

1890s- Husk is born (approximately maybe)

1890- 1st use of the electric chair

1892- Basketball is invented

1896- The Olympics are revived

1900s

1900s- Alastor is born (approximately maybe)

1910s- Angel Dust & Vox are born (approximately maybe)

1912- The Titanic sinks

1914- Panama Canal opens & WWI begins

1918- WWI ends

1920s- Niffty is born (approximately maybe)

1920- Prohibition begins in the U.S.

1923- Time Magazine is first published & Disney is founded

1927- The first sound film "The Jazz Singer" is released

1929- The Great Depression begins

1933- Alastor dies & U.S. Prohibition ends

1937- The Hindenburg Disaster

1939- WWII begins

1945- WWII ends

1947- Angel Dust dies

1948- Gandhi is assassinated

1950s- Niffty & Vox die

1953- 1st color TV is produced

1954- Rock & Roll hits the American mainstream

1959- 1st documented AIDS cases

1960s- Cherri Bomb is born (approximately maybe)

1960- The Beatles are formed

1967- The New Orleans Saints football team is formed

1968- MLK Jr is assassinated

1969- 1st moon landing

1970s- Husk & Valentino die

1977- Star Wars is released

1980s- Cherri Bomb dies

1982- Michael Jackson's album Thriller is released

1984- Radio Ga Ga by Queen is released

1985- The Macintosh 128K is released

1990- The World Wide Web begins

A few takeaways:

They all died before the the internet as we know it began.

Vox died just before color TV came around

They all could have worn blue jeans in life

Angel Dust and Vox lived through both World Wars and they were likely at an age to be drafted into service during WWII. Maybe that's where Angel got so good with Tommy Guns? And MP-40s, come to think of it...

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Joni Mitchell - Both Sides Now (Orchestra Version)

+

"FEW contemporary voices have aged more shockingly than Joni Mitchell's. The craggy alto on "Both Sides Now," her intermittently magnificent new album of standards (including two of her best-loved original songs), is so changed from the sweetly yodeling folk soprano of her earliest albums that it hardly seems possible the two sounds could have come from the same body.

In refusing to fight or try to camouflage the ravages of time, Ms. Mitchell belongs to an interpretive school that includes Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, whose vocal deterioration brought them greater emotional depth and realism. Studying a chronology of their records is like following a road map of their lives that takes you deep into the mountains over increasingly rugged terrain. The bumpier the road gets, the longer the view. In the opposite school are supremely polished technicians like Mel Tormé and Sarah Vaughan, whose voices remained distinctively beautiful (even as they darkened with age) until the ends of their lives.

Listening to Ms. Mitchell, who is 56 and has smoked heavily for decades, you can hear the toll of all those cigarettes in her shortened breath, husky timbre and inability to make fluent vocal leaps. At the same time, that very huskiness lends her torch singing the battered authenticity we expect of middle-aged jazz singers with their years of after-hours living and accompanying vices." New York Times, February 2000

+

Mitchell has said that "Both Sides, Now" was inspired by a passage in Henderson the Rain King, a 1959 novel by Saul Bellow.

I was reading ... Henderson the Rain King on a plane and early in the book Henderson ... is also up in a plane. He's on his way to Africa and he looks down and sees these clouds. I put down the book, looked out the window and saw clouds too, and I immediately started writing the song. I had no idea that the song would become as popular as it did.

[singonavine71]

Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan; April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday had an innovative influence on jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills. Holiday won four Grammy Awards, all of them posthumously, for Best Historical Album. She was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame. After a turbulent childhood, Holiday began singing in nightclubs in Harlem, where she was heard by producer John Hammond, who liked her voice. She signed a recording contract with Brunswick in 1935. Collaborations with Teddy Wilson produced the hit "What a Little Moonlight Can Do", which became a jazz standard. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Holiday had mainstream success on labels such as Columbia and Decca. By the late 1940s, however, she was beset with legal troubles and drug abuse. After a short prison sentence, she performed at a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall. She was a successful concert performer throughout the 1950s with two further sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall. Because of personal struggles and an altered voice, her final recordings were met with mixed reaction but were mild commercial successes. Her final album, Lady in Satin, was released in 1958. Holiday died of cirrhosis on July 17, 1959, at age 44. In 2000, she was also inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as an early influence; their website states that "Billie Holiday changed jazz forever". She was named one of the 50 Great Voices by NPR; and was ranked fourth on the Rolling Stone list of "200 Greatest Singers of All Time" (2023). Several films about her life have been released, most recently The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021).

[justforbooks]

Martial Solal

French jazz pianist who loved to improvise and wrote the score for Jean-Luc Godard’s film A Bout de Souffle

A squint through the metal fence around Martial Solal’s tree-shrouded villa, in Chatou, the suburb of Paris known as the “ville des impressionistes”, could have confirmed that the great French pianist was not the average jazz musician. Solal, who has died aged 97, was the most famous jazz musician in France from the 1950s onwards, and widely known across Europe and the US.

The breakthrough that paid for that Chatou villa came when Solal – then a little-known club pianist – wrote the score for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film A Bout de Souffle (Breathless). The commission came out of the blue via Godard’s jazz-loving friend and fellow director Jean-Pierre Melville, and Solal collected royalties on it for ever after. “It’s like I won the Lotto,” he said in 2010. “Because back in 1959 when I did it, I was mainly just known for being the house pianist in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés jazz club.” Godard had few ideas about the music he wanted, beyond joking to Solal that he might compose a piece for a banjo player, to save money. The pianist promptly produced a soundtrack for big band and 30 violins.

Solal went on to work on several more films, and was one of the first Europeans to perform at the Newport jazz festival in the US. Into his 80s, he could still walk the tightrope of unaccompanied improvised performance, and his compositions had a signature as personal and harmonically idiosyncratic as Thelonious Monk’s. Solal, who liked stop-start melodies and constant rhythmic changes, wrote elegant pieces that slowly coalesced out of scattered fragments. He loved peppering classic jazz material – even as sacrosanct as Duke Ellington’s – with disrespectful quotes going all the way back to his danceband days in Algiers, the city where he was born.

Solal’s mother, Sultana Abrami, an amateur opera singer, introduced him to classical piano as a child. During the second world war, under Nazi race laws, Martial was excluded from a secondary education because his father, Jacob Cohen-Solal, an accountant, was Jewish. He took jazz clarinet and piano lessons from a local bandleader, with whom he was soon performing tangos, waltzes and Benny Goodmanesque swing. Soon, Fats Waller, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum and the bebop virtuoso Bud Powell began to displace Chopin and Bach among Solal’s keyboard models.

He moved to Paris in 1950 after his military service, and teamed up with the American bebop drums pioneer Kenny Clarke in the house band at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés club. The young pianist’s nervous recording debut was in April 1953 with the jazz-guitar genius Django Reinhardt, who turned out to be playing on his last; Reinhardt died the following month. That year, Solal recorded Modern Sounds with his own trio and also recorded unaccompanied. After working with Sidney Bechet in 1957, he received the commission for the Breathless score.

The word about Solal then began to reach America – both Oscar Peterson and Ellington had been entranced by him in Paris, with Ellington pronouncing him a “soul brother”. In 1963, he played at Newport, with the bassist Teddy Kotick and the drummer Paul Motian; despite barely knowing his new partners, Solal boldly added his 11-minute tempo-shuffling Suite Pour Une Frise to the usual programme of standard songs.

Turning down an invitation to move to the US, Solal led world-class groups in the 1960s and 70s, often including the drummer Daniel Humair, the bassist Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, and even an advanced two-bass trio for piano and the double-bassists Gilbert Rovère and Jean-François Jenny-Clark. He also explored fruitful duo partnerships with the American saxophonists Lee Konitz and Phil Woods between the 70s and the 90s, and led innovative big bands, notably on the thrilling Martial Solal Big Band session (for the Gaumont label in 1981) and Plays Hodeir (1984).

An insatiable capacity for self-education helped Solal to develop a characteristically pungent harmonic language. He wrote and performed contemporary classical music and published jazz-piano pieces modelled on the Mikrokosmos educational cycles of Béla Bartók.

In 1989 the Martial Solal jazz piano competition was founded. Its winners have included the Frenchman Baptiste Trotignon and the charismatic Armenian virtuoso Tigran Hamasyan. In the 90s, Solal often worked with the Moutin twins, François and Louis, on bass and drums – both were flexible enough to follow their leader’s tendency to launch a tune without telling them what it was, change key without warning, or turn it into a different song entirely.

As he entered his 70s, Solal seemed to be playing with a revitalised and swashbuckling confidence – as if he was finally sure that he would still sound like himself whether he played within the regular rules, or broke them. In 1999, he won Denmark’s Jazzpar prize, and celebrated by writing parts for the accompanying Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra owing as much to the French impressionist classical composers as to jazz. In that decade, Solal also had an unprecedented 30-concert solo run on French national radio.

In 2000, with his 12-piece Dodecaband, he recorded Martial Solal Dodecaband Plays Ellington. During the following decade, he recorded two live albums at the Village Vanguard in New York; the brilliant unaccompanied session Solitude; the duet Rue de Seine, with the trumpeter Dave Douglas; and the Exposition Sans Tableau session for his woodwind-less, brass-packed Decaband – a typically quirky lineup featuring Solal’s talented daughter Claudia singing the roles of a missing sax section.

His final public performance was a solo concert in 2019, at the Salle Gaveau hall where he had made his Paris debut in 1961. After a masterly exposition later issued on the album Coming Yesterday, Solal’s typically elegant exit was prefaced by the words: “I don’t want to bore you. It’s better that you leave here serene.” Then he played “a nice chord like this” – a single F major – said “Voilà. Merci” and left the stage.

Solal undoubtedly loved improvisation, but he believed it needed the spur of challenging composition to stop improvisers from slipping into habits. Not everyone shared his enthusiasm for musical jokes and maybe Solal was unnecessarily diverted by whether or not jazz could satisfy what he saw as classical listeners’ expectations of “perfection”. But he was a jazz-lover to his nimble fingertips, nonetheless. Speculating that probably no more than 10% of his fellow countryfolk knew anything about jazz, Solal phelgmatically declared that “as long as we can live, and play the music we like, it’s too bad for the 90%. It’s their loss.”

Solal is survived by his wife, Anna, their son, Eric, and daughter, Claudia, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

🔔 Martial Saul Cohen-Solal, musician, born 23 August 1927; died 12 December 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[eptodaytommorowforever]

Elvis Presley In Paris, France June 17th, 1959.

Events In The History And Of The Life Of Elvis Presley Today On The 17th Of June In 1959.

Elvis Presley's visit to Paris was an extraordinary event; he was drafted with the US forces in Germany, but the capital city of France is the only place, outside the United States, that he went to on his own.

And more surprisingly yet, he did so three times! In June and July 1959 then in January 1960. He will later often confide in his friends that these visits to Paris will always remain one of his best memories.he gave a brief press confernce at the Paris de Galles Hotel met a french model actress and met the black american gospel and blues and jazz singer nancy holloway and her manager and her boyfriend rare b/w candid photos taken here of Elvis Presley's three visits to Paris Fance in 1959 and 1960 photograher unknown.

[scotianostra]

On July 17th 2009 the singer/songwriter Gordon Waller and one half of the duo Peter & Gordon passed away.

Waller, the son of a surgeon, was born in Braemar, and went to Westminster school, in London, where he met Peter Asher in 1959. Asher was already something of a jazz and blues fan, but Waller persuaded him to broaden his horizons to include pop and rock'n'roll. Both were keen guitarists and soon they were entertaining their fellow students. By 1963, they were playing (initially as Gordon and Peter) in pubs and small clubs at lunchtimes and evenings for small fees or for a meal, often singing their own compositions in the close harmony style of the Everly Brothers. Early in 1964, they were booked for a two-week engagement at the Pickwick nightclub. One of the diners was Norman Newell, an EMI record producer. Newell was charmed enough by Peter and Gordon's rendition of their song If I Were You to offer them a recording contract.

At this time, McCartney was dating Jane, and Peter and Gordon badgered McCartney to provide them with a song. He obliged with A World Without Love, which he had written six years earlier in Liverpool. McCartney told his biographer Barry Miles: "Gordon was a lot of fun – he was slightly less academic than Peter. It was he who persuaded Peter to jump school to do lunchtime sessions."

By the end of March 1964, A World Without Love had displaced the Beatles' own Can't Buy Me Love at the top of the charts. In May, just before Waller's 19th birthday and Asher's 20th, it was the biggest selling record in the US. The instant stardom created by A World Without Love was the beginning of two years of frantic activity for Peter and Gordon.

For the American media, they combined the cachet of a Beatles connection (McCartney wrote several more of their hits and fans discerned in Waller a slight resemblance to John Lennon) There were numerous television appearances, occasional tours of Japan and Australia as well as North America and dozens of recordings. In the next 12 months, Nobody I Know and I Don't Want to See You Again (both by McCartney) were transatlantic hits, as were I Go To Pieces, written by Del Shannon, and True Love Ways, a Buddy Holly song the duo had performed in their early days in London.

By now, Peter and Gordon were competing in North America with numerous other British imports, including another middle-class duo, Chad and Jeremy. Their star began to wane in 1966, when their only hits were Woman, another McCartney composition credited pseudonymously to "Bernard Webb", and Lady Godiva, a novelty number that was denounced as obscene by the mayor of Coventry, which helped it reach the Top 20 in Britain and the American Top 10. By 1967, Peter and Gordon's British career was over and in America they were reduced to peddling olde English material such as the minor hit The Knight in Rusty Armour and the album Sunday for Tea. They split up the next year, with Asher joining the Beatles' Apple project as an A&R man and Waller launching a career as a solo singer.

Despite the fact that he had been the stronger vocalist of the pair, this career was stillborn. A handful of singles were issued, plus a 1970 album of his own compositions called Gordon. He left showbusiness to run a landscape gardening business in Northamptonshire until, in 1971, he took the part of Pharaoh in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.

In the 1980s and 90s Waller ran a music publishing business in America. In the last few years of his life, he reunited with Asher to play a few shows in Los Angeles, the Philippines and New York

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 12.1

Beer Birthdays

William Krug (1857)

Randy Mosher (1952)

RJ Trent (1968)

Susan Boyle

Five Favorite Birthdays

Morris; Belgian cartoonist (1923)

Mary Martin; actress and singer (1913)

Jeremy Northam; actor (1961)

Jaco Pastorius; jazz bassist (1951)

Richard Pryor; comedian, actor (1940)

Famous Birthdays

Andrew Adamson; New Zealand film director (1966)

Woody Allen; comedian, writer, film director (1935)

Carol Alt; model. actor (1960)

Micheline Bernardini; French dancer and model (1927)

Eric Bloom; rock guitarist (1944)

Jan Brett; author and illustrator (1949)

Candace Bushnell; writer (1958)

Richard Carrier; author (1969)

Billy Childish; English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and painter (1959)

Jonathan Coulton; singer-songwriter and guitarist (1970)

Julee Cruise; singer-songwriter, musician, and actress (1956)

John Densmore; rock drummer (1945)

David Doyle; actor (1929)

Étienne Maurice Falconet; French sculptor (1716)

Matt Fraction; comic book writer (1975)

Steve Gibb; singer-songwriter and guitarist (1973)

Sophie Guillemin; French actress (1977)

Judith Hackitt; English chemist (1954)

Annette Haven; adult actress (1954)

DeSean Jackson; football player (1986)

Tahar Ben Jelloun; Moroccan author and poet (1944)

Jonathan Katz; comedian and actor (1946)

Clark Kent; fictional character, Superman

Richard Keith; actor and drummer (1950)

Martin Klaproth; German chemist (1743)

Zoë Kravitz; actress, singer, and model (1988)

Jerry Lawson; electronic engineer and inventor (1940)

Jimmy Lyons; saxophonist (1931)

Emily McLaughlin; actress (1928)

Bette Midler; actor, singer (1945)

Bart Millard; singer-songwriter (1972)

Julia A. Moore; poet (1847)

Emily Mortimer; actor (1971)

Sandy Nelson; rock drummer (1938)

Jim Nesbitt; singer-songwriter and guitarist (1931)

Eligiusz Niewiadomski; Polish painter (1869)

Gilbert O'Sullivan; pop singer (1946)

Isaiah "Ikey" Owens; keyboard player (1975)

Billy Paul; soul singer (1934)

Chris Poland; guitarist and songwriter (1957)

Chanel Preston; porn actress (1985)

Lou Rawls; singer (1933)

Martin Rodbell; scientist (1925)

John Schlimm; writer (1971)

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff; German painter (1884)

Dick Shawn; comedian, actor (1923)

Sarah Silverman; comedian, actor (1970)

Rex Stout; English writer (1886)

Robert Symonds; actor (1926)

Malachi Throne; actor (1928)

Charlene Tilton; actor (1958)

Lee Trevino; golfer (1939)

Jane Turner; Australian actress (1960)

Marie Tussaud; wax modeler-maker (1761)

Mihály Vörösmarty; Hungarian poet (1800)

Treat Williams; actor (1951)

Vesta Williams; singer-songwriter and actress (1957)

Minoru Yamasaki; architect (1912)

[rockingreads]

Howard Mandel (Editor): Jazz & Blues Encyclopedia (2019)

I bought this Jazz & Blues Encyclopedia at Nashville's National Museum of African American Music, and it's as entertaining and educational as a visit to this incredible museum, should you find yourself in Music City.

Decade by decade, throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st, this comprehensive survey provides detailed descriptions of the music’s evolution in both technical and artistic terms, while putting everything into clear historical and social context.

And it ain't just jazz and blues in the strictest definition, but every possible branch in their family trees, leading into countless other styles of American music, such as R&B, Soul, Funk, Gospel, Doo Wop, and, of course, Rock 'n' Roll and Hip Hop.

Each decade also gets a dedicated description of relevant events, deep dives into a handful of key artists, and capsule biographies of dozens more, both familiar and obscure (depending upon the reader, of course), along with their most important works.

All the while, this incredible trove of invaluable information is presented with a fair, authoritative, scholarly tone, reminiscent of the very best PBS documentaries -- at once dispassionate and oh-so-passionate -- about these timeless artists and their music.

Needless to say, this encyclopedia is highly recommended to find a shelf in every home -- not least as a handy reference book.

Featured Records:

Bessie Smith: The World’s Greatest Blues Singer (1970)

Various Artists: Jazz Abstractions (1960)

Sun Ra & His Solar Arkestra: The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Vol. 2 (1966)

Nina Simone: Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967)

Charles Mingus’ Mingus Ah Um (1959)

Miles Davis: Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet (1958)

Billy Cobham: Spectrum (1973)

Buy from: Amazon

[allthingsfern]

Seeing the above article really made my day and helped me relish the fact that I am 70 and still actively creative, plus I love her music. Have for years, and for about 30 years, not knowing it was Mina who sang a favorite movie theme song.

The article is brief but worth reading and Mina's musical catalogue is a treasure trove. The woman has a voice so lovely that Louis Armstrong had this to say about her:

From the Wikipedia page about Mina:

Voice

Mina is a soprano with great agility and a range of three octaves.[5][7] Swingy and anti-melodic in her early years ("Tintarella di luna", 1959), her singing later acquired high dramatic tones.[5] Louis Armstrong famously declared her to be "the greatest white singer in the world".[74][75][76]

(Yes, I copy and pasted the section with the footnote references as proof that he did say it. I was enthralled by the fact that there are 3 links as evidence. Considering that Armstrong worked with Ella Fitzgerald, one of the greatest voices ever, that is high praise.)

And here is an interesting personal side note to all this. I know I've shared that one of my favorite films of all time is The 10th Victim, with Ursula Andress and Marcello Mastroianni. (Fun fact: Ursula Andress stars in 2 of my all time favorites: The 10th Victim and Casino Royale from 1967. I saw both films that same year, maybe saw 10th Victim in 1968. Both films remain on my top 10 list for over 50 years--I'm old--and I've seen them countless times, at least twice a year.)

Anyway, I discovered about 20 years ago that Mina sings the modern-jazzy "Spiral Waltz" theme song for The 10th Victim. There are 2 versions. One, which is heard in this clip that features a scene referenced in the original Austin Powers film, is scat, and is heard several times during the film.

The other, which is heard at the end credits, in English.

Anyway, I was fascinated by this article about Mina and the news of her new album release. I am a fan and have been for over 2 decades. Highly recommend her music and love this new album.

BTW, the full soundtrack for The 10th Victim gives me goosebumps. Such a cool 60s Italian jazz vibe, especially with the use of organ music (and perhaps even harp?) throughout.

So, back to Mina. Hope some of you venture forth and listen to her and maybe become fans too.

Enjoy.