Nancy LaMott-"Autumn Leaves/When October Goes"

Nancy Lamott (1951-1995) was a New York based cabaret singer. You don't see much crossover between the jazz world and cabaret, with the exception of Maureen McGovern, a cabaret singer with a powerhouse voice and a swinging style. (I heartily recommend McGovern's "Out of This World-McGovern Sings [Harold] Arlen). LaMott was another exception-a sweet-voiced singer with a gift for emotionally charged yet restrained readings of standards, as well as a talent for making even light material sound like, yes, standards. Many jazz players were featured soloists on LaMott's albums, most especially trumpeter Glenn Drewes. This track features ex-Maynard Ferguson soloist Mike Migliore's wife Deborah with lovely cello work.

Here she tackles "Autumn Leaves", originally a French song ("Dead Leaves"), given English lyrics by Johnny Mercer, and "When October Goes, by Barry Manilow (of all people) and Mercer.  Beautiful as always-emotion sans overkill. This is originally from LaMott's all Mercer album, "Come Rain or Come Shine-The Songs of Johnny Mercer".

LaMott's story was a tragic one. She had done little recording till the 90's, when she was suddenly catapulted into the limelight with a series of successful albums, appearances on various TV shows, and a concert at the Clinton White House. But her health, always precarious, failed her, and she died of cancer just hours after her deathbed marriage to actor Peter Zapp. From the wikipedia article on Nancy: "According to conductor and composer David Friedman, who wrote many of the songs which she performed, LaMott's life featured two threads: her illness and her talent, and the 'two things peaked at exactly the same time'".


Nancy's imdb listing.

Fred Astaire, Vera-Ellen-"Mr and Mrs Hoofer at Home"

Ahh-the Hollywood/Broadway musical. Something of a joke now, and for good reason-few good ones have been produced since the mid-60's-but there was a time when they represented the peak of American movie entertainment..

That peak may have been reached in the 50's-just when Hollywood musicals were on their way out, presumably due to their expense in a time when people were becoming accustomed to watching television for free. As much as I love the Astaire/Rogers musicals of the thirties, the technical possibilities available two decades later made lavish productions like Gene Kelly's "An American in Paris" a possibility.

This cut is from what is actually not a great movie-1950's "Three Little Words", starring Fred Astaire, Vera-Ellen, and Red Skelton. The plot's pretty light, and the comedy only so-so, but this dance routine is certainly one of the best ever filmed. Sheer joie de vivre.

Not that you asked for it, but here is an informal ranking of the best 50's musicals. I'm the ultimate Fred Astaire fan, as noted, but Gene comes first.

1. "Singin' in the Rain" (1952)-Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds. Easily the funniest of the era's musicals. O'Connor's dance scenes make you think he lacks bones.
2. "The Band Wagon" (1953)-Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Oscar Levant. Director Vincente Minnelli at his best. Plot: Should we turn a light musical into an updated version of "Faust"? Nah.
3. "An American in Paris" (1951)-Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant. Kelly's climatic ballet might've been enough by itself to make this the best, but the Kelly/Caron romance is a little silly-he's a grown man (pushing 40 in real life) and Caron looks to be about 15 (she was in fact still a teenager).
4. "It's Always Fair Weather" (1955)- Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, Cyd Charisse. Co-directed by Kelly with Stanley Donen, this somewhat cynical story (war buddies meet ten years after the war and soon realize they don't like each other) was a box office flop, but it's a delight. It's a musical comedy with a real plot.
5. "Funny Face" (1957)-Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn, Kay Thompson. Young intellectual (Hepburn) agrees to become a model because it means a free trip to Paris. Again, you have to overlook a big age gap between the romantic leads-Astaire is thirty years older but looks a lot more. And yes, Audrey can dance-I would've included her great solo dance but it's now gone from Youtube.
6. "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1953)-Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Charles Coburn. Marilyn plays dumb but cagey here-she wants a rich guy and makes no bones about it. Russell, who gets a lot of great lines and knows how to deliver them, is her somewhat cynical friend. Again, I would've included my favorite scene from this one (Russell's sexy, funny "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love"), but that's also disappeared from Youtube, though other scenes from the movie are still there.

Vocalchord-"Texas Girl at the Funeral of Her Father"

Vocalchord is, or was, a Dutch group of opera singers who did some very nice close harmony vocals. Here they tackle Randy Newman's lovely "Texas Girl at the Funeral of Her Father". The song is simplicity itself, but very moving, and this treatment certainly does it justice.


Newman is, by any reckoning, one of the finest songwriters of this musical era. So good, in fact, that while Randy was still in his 20's the brilliant Harry Nilsson had already done an album composed solely of Newman material, 1970's "Nilsson Sings Newman".


Which makes me think of the CD's I've listened to recently: 1) Randy Newman-"Little Criminals" (which the above is from); 2) Frank Sinatra-"Sinatra's "Swingin' Session"; 3) Maynard Ferguson-"Maynard '61"/"Straightaway Jazz Themes" (the latter of this double set is from the early 60's ABC series "Straightaway" which Maynard did the music for); 4) Chick Corea-"Concerto" (Chick's sole recorded foray into classical music, as far as I know-he wrote a new orchestration of his "Spain", as well as a new piano concerto for himself); 5) The Beatles-"The White Album" (yes, I actually think that for a few minutes "Revolution 9" works, as a sort of sonic tour of Hell as imagined by John Lennon, that is before John starts into naming dances-"the Watusi, the Twist" and such); and 6) The London Brass-"Modern Times with The London Brass" (hyper-modern set designed to annoy people, though I like a lot of it, actually).

Bernard Herrmann- "Vertigo"-theme

I'm constantly coming across new examples of wonderful music by Hermann. I watched "The Ghost and Mrs Muir" (1947-Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison) recently and marveled at the beauty of the opening theme, heard over shots of the seaside where Tierney's character would end up living. Then I noticed the credits and saw, not surprisingly, Hermann's name. Of course. Another perhaps surprising place you run into Hermann's music is Twilight Zone re-runs, many of which were scored by Hermann.

As, presumably, most people know, many of Hitchcock's movies were scored by Hermann, including this wonderful example. This strikes me as Hermann's best work for Hitchcock, though some will name "North by Northwest" as such. In any case, this is modern, in the right way.

What friendship is worth-the BBC's "Martin Chuzzlewit"

Just finished watching "Martin Chuzzlewit", the 1994 BBC treatment of the Dickens novel, on DVD. Highly recommended. Paul Scofield stars as Old Martin Chuzzlewit. If you've seen other BBC productions you'll recognize Pete Postlethwaite as Mr. Montague/Mr. Tigg. You might also recognize Graham Stark, who played Clouseau's underling in "A Shot in the Dark".

The story centers on Old Martin Chuzzlewit's vast fortune, his disinherited grandson of the same name, and the conniving attempts of others, including the boundlesly hypocritical Mr. Pecksniff, to win that fortune. Since it's Dickens, most of the characters are either pretty much all good or all bad. Two exceptions are Pecksniff's mostly good daughters Mercy and Charity, who are unwitting victims of their father's plot to get the loot.

Also, since it's Dickens, and since it's the 19th Century, friendship is at least as important a theme as romantic love, and this tale's focus on greed. In fact, friendship among the various male characters is more central to the story than who will marry whom. This was an era when men would write letters to each other and mention their love for each other, and nobody looked askance at it. (Actual homosexuals would've been more discreet-remember what happened to Oscar Wilde).


And so the hero of the story is Tom Pinch, who (spoiler alerts) is loyal to a fault (quite literally) to his friends, but who doesn't get the girl (Mary) he loves in the end-she marries young Martin Chuzzlewit. Who gets most of the money.


Major tear-jerker scene at the end, as Tom's sister comforts him, but he says to her that his getting Mary would have been how things work in books-the "justice", as he puts it, of real life is different.

The case against football

I don't mean to sound like a sports prude, if there is such a thing, but if you're an NFL fan, these guys are suffering catastrophic brain injuries so you can be entertained. How can you be okay with that?


On various other blogs I've issued screeds about football-why the teams aren't really trying to win (they make money regardless), with the result that the sport is basically just a hugely successful TV show. Or about how the sixteen game season's small sample size makes it all kind of pointless anyway. Not to mention the degree to which the game's success is linked to all the free publicity it gets in the media, or how the hype to thrills ratio is pretty skewed given that there may be five or six exciting plays (lots of "three yards and a cloud of dust" skirmishes) in a dreary three hour TV show.


But those are simply matters of taste. Much more important is that we now know much more about how risky the game is, which may be why kids' participation in the sport is declining-America's parents have the good sense to protect their kids.


Dr. Bennet Omalu, whose pioneering research into football's dangers was actively resisted by the league, says kids under eighteen shouldn't play football at all. He has the same opinion, it should be added, about other contact sports-they are simply too risky for the developing brain.


For the NFL'ers themselves, Omalu says no equipment can prevent the injuries caused by huge guys moving at great speeds. Far too may become suicidal, or zombies.

Of course there are other arguments against the game-the current kneeling idiocy, the fact that so many of the players are, well, thugs.


But the safety issue is the big one.

The Eternal Soundtrack

God knows how many tracks there-500?.  But they're all, in my biased opinion, worth listening to-the youtube playlist I've been accumulating for several years. It might take several years to listen to all of them. Basically it's jazz, the better rock stuff, sophisticated pop like Sinatra, classical brass pieces, French Impressionists, clips from old TV shows like What's My Line-you know, the usual pretentious crapola.

People like me who have widely diverging tastes in music like to think that shows how smart we are. It actually shows that we have wisely diverging tastes in music.

I still feel weird about youtube, I have to admit. Yes, I own maybe 150 CD's. But I could still try to buy all of these tracks. I doubt I will.