San Francisco Fan

Cab Calloway may not be a household name, but you’ve damn sure seen his signature moves or heard one of his songs. Fans have come to Cab Calloway through odd pathways, from the Betty Boop shorts that featured his animated avatar in the 1930’s, to his showstopping cameo in The Blues Brothers in 1980, to covers by unexpected artists like The White Stripes in the aughts. Like a lot of people, I came to this song through Joe Jackson’s cover. In the 80’s Jackson did more than anybody to guide rock fans into the world of swing and jazz music. His jazz covers proved that music that was swingin’ in the 30’s was still swingin’ right in tune with post-punk and new wave. That was a pretty surprising epiphany, given that rock fans tend to view jazz as being as stodgy and musty as their granddad’s old suits. Nobody could ever call Cab Calloway stodgy: he was always in the business of razzle-dazzle and good razzle-dazzle never fades. Calloway has managed to pop up as a cultural reference point in every decade, and being dead hasn’t slowed his roll. He just always comes back around, just as cool as the first day he did the Hi-De-Ho.

 

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Return to Paradise

It’s a great day for jazz. The weather is beautiful and we all survived the weekend. So sit back and drink some tea and unwind for a minute. Let Shirley Horn take you away. I really need to listen to more jazz music, and more Shirley Horn in particular. Her voice is like silk and honey and whatever else delicious sexy things that poets would use to describe a sexy delicious voice. It’s a song to crawl into bed with, whether to sink into a fever sleep or something more productive.

Pantaloons

And now, for something lighthearted. Let Tape Five take you back to the days when people appeared to be having a disproportionate amount of fun, despite the fact that alcohol was illegal. (Obviously, people in places beyond America had other problems besides Prohibition, but they weren’t the ones having all that glamorous fun.) Although, to the rational history buff, it’s clear that the era was actually pretty rough for most people who inhabited it, we’re still helplessly compelled by its images. The art deco design, the music, the movies and movie stars, the gangsters; we can’t get enough reliving those high times. Nostalgia is a little bit of a cottage industry and updating the sounds of swing music for modern ears is one little niche of it. It isn’t a huge fad, but it’s definitely a community with a market for it. And, really, you couldn’t ask for anything more fun.

Our Love (Will See Us Through)

I’ve been listening to a lot more Nina Simone lately. I can’t say that I’ve just discovered her; she is a legend who doesn’t need to be ‘discovered’. But I’ll say that I’m really feeling her music in a way I didn’t before. It’s all part of trying to slowly learn more about jazz. Simone established herself as one of the great jazz vocalists at a time when being a great jazz vocalist was becoming a less and less relevant position. Singing and composing jazz was a tenable way to become a star in the 50’s when Simone began her career. But while the cultural changes of the following decades made most jazz musicians fall out of popular regard, Nina Simone managed to become more important and prominent. This was thanks to her involvement in the civil rights movement, her outspokenness, her socially conscious and politically charged writing, her Afrocentric personal style, and her general reluctance to be made polished and nice (as so many black entertainers had been forced to do in order to enter into the public sphere). Though her more politically charged songs may be what she’s best known for today – and for good reason – they’re the tip of the iceberg. She wrote and sang with unprecedented honesty about the specific burdens of being a black woman, but she could just as easily elevate the most basic love song. There is no message in this particular song that isn’t found nearly verbatim in Sonny & Cher’s I Got You Babe. The difference between ersatz sentiment and genuine soul lies in the delivery.

More Than You Know

When it comes to the standards, it’s hard to know where to start. A standard, by definition, cannot belong to any one singer. If there’s no definitive version of a song that’s been sung by hundreds, how do you even narrow down the field? I find that in these cases, Ella Fitzgerald is the best place to start. Not least because she made a point of recording all the major songs from all the major composers. She sang ALL THE SONGS. Maybe not literally, but not for lack of trying; her ambitious Songbooks project did a pretty thorough job covering most of the popular music of her time. She didn’t just sing them either – she sang them as well as anyone’s ever sung them. From Ella you can go on and find whatever version suits you, in whatever style you prefer, from performers ranging in stature from Holiday and Sinatra to Toni Tennille. But yeah, good rule of thumb, always start with Ella.

Lullaby of Birdland

Here is a rare video of Ella Fitzgerald performing live, in what appears to be a rather large venue full of white people. The sound quality could be better, but overall it’s a very good glimpse of the star. Unfortunately, any such clip is a rarity, concerts not being frequently documented in those days. The shortage of video footage of greats like Ella is painful, especially for young fans raised in the age of minute-by-minute updates, but it does make you appreciate what we do have. I’m sure that seeing Ella Fitzgerald in her nightclub days was something else, but those are moments remembered only by eyewitnesses, and glimpsed only in still photos today.

Love Me or Leave Me

“I’d rather be lonely than happy with somebody else…”

Billie Holiday pretty much exemplifies the figure of the masochistic torch singer. She didn’t invent the trope, but she did it better than anyone. When Billie sang that she’d forgo any and all future worldly pleasures in favor of mooning for some man who don’t treat her right, you damn well believed her. Holiday suffered a lifetime of heartache and went through a series of relationships that could be called tempestuous at best. Although the attitudes prevalent in the torch song genre seem today like a sick symptom of a society that valued women – black women especially – for their capacity to withstand abuse, no one could question that Holiday’s songs were emotionally sincere. And we also have to admit that those are sentiments that at one low point or another, we’ve all found ourselves relating to strongly.