SubscribeSometimes I wonder why I spendThe story of 'a song about a song about love' (elaborated within)
The lonely night dreaming of a song
The melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you
When our love was new
And each kiss an inspiration
But that was long ago
And now my consolation
Is in the star dust of a song...
Lucy is holding a saxophone. It turns out, as she informs friend Ethel Mertz, she's an amateur musician. Who knew? Lucy then blows into the mouthpiece and produces a few dyspeptic squawks. "It kind of sounds like 'Star Dust,' " says Ethel, diplomatically. "Yeah," Lucy responds, "everything I play sounds like 'Star Dust.' "
"I sat down on the 'spooning wall,' at the edge of the campus, and all the things that the town and the university and the friends I had had there flooded through my mind. Beautiful Kate, the campus queen and Dorothy Kelly. But not one girl all the girls young and lovely. Was Dorothy the loveliest? Yes. The sweetest? Perhaps. But most of them had gone their ways. Gone as I'd gone mine.Then came to the rush to the Book Nook--now Bloomington's Roly Poly. Just ask mwhybark.
"... I looked up at the sky and whistled 'Stardust.'
Louis was a virtuosic trumpeter who exploited the limits of his instrument; he played loud; he played high; he was a master showman. By contrast, Bix stared at his shoes when he played. Constrained by lack of technique, he rarely left the middle register. But that gave his solos a rare & startling intimacy--they were always within the range of the human voice, as if being sung. He looked to classical music (Debussy, in particular) for his chords, something his peers hadn’t yet considered doing. This gave his music an equally startling originality in the context of 1920s jazz. And he always kept his emotions firmly in check.That's from Satchmo-Inspired Thought #2 at The Beiderbecke Affair
The Bix influence was there. And the improvisations are already written.
Of all the Bix-Tram collaborations, one stands out above all others as their greatest joint performance - and, in fact, is one of the landmarks of the "white" school of jazz. This is the famous record of Singin' The Blues, with Trumbauer playing the first chorus and Beiderbecke the second. So instantaneous a hit with their fellow musicians was this record that within a matter of weeks their colleagues were reproducing the Trumbauer and Bix solos whenever Singin' The Blues was played, and at least three bands have recorded (one as late as 1938) arrangements in which Trumbauer's solo has been transcribed for the saxophone section and Beiderbecke's chorus is played by the brass! Aside from musicians, anyone who had any pretense to collecting jazz records prior to the swing craze of the middle thirties knew the choruses well enough to whistle them through, for this record was one of the "musts" which decided whether you were an earnest collector or just a dallying dilettante.Bix And Tram: Bix Beiderbecke with Frankie Trumbauer's Orchestra
And now the purple dusk of twilight time,and then
Steals across the meadows of my heart.
High up in the sky the little stars climb,
Always reminding me that we're apart...
When the deep purple fallsI dare say that, lyric wise, Parish certainly cornered the market on enpurpled crepuscules.
over sleepy garden walls,
And the stars begin to flicker
in the sky...
The record turned, the living room table was pushed against the wall, the chairs stacked on the table, the only source of light coming from the next room 'How do the lyrics go?' the girl asked, sighing... He answered, 'I only know the start,' and sang softly, "Sometimes I wonder why / I spend the lonely nights / dreaming of a song....' This is just one possible memory associated with the indestructible song by Hoagy Carmichael. I think millions of other men and women around the world could tell their own brief fable based on Stardust...Giulio Nascimbeni
And then it happened--that queer sensation that this melody was bigger than me. Maybe I hadn't written it at all. The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters of the studio. I wanted to shout back at it, 'maybe I didn't write you, but I found you.Hoagy Carmichael upon hearing his first recording of Star Dust. Well, he was not alone:
What’s that great Benny Golson story? Golson [the jazz tenor saxophonist and arranger] has this incredible dream about this amazing, wonderful, celestial music. And in the dream he says to himself, "Right, this time I’m going to wake myself up and write this down." Right then, in the middle of night, he turns the light on and automatically writes this fabulous tune down and goes back to sleep. He wakes up in the morning and looks at the tune, and it’s the middle eight to [Hoagy Carmichael’s] "Stardust." [Laughs.]Richard Thompson
Tops Records (A Division of Precision Radiation Instruments, Inc!) provides us with an artifact from the 50s Mambo Craze (another piece of evidence that the 50s were the true psychedelic era); dig that radioactive pink number on the corn-fed blond on the cover! Roll over Hoagy- here's a version of Stardust unlike any other:
Stardust Mambo
Feb. 4, 1927: "Singin' the Blues" is not a blues. Arranged by 21-year-old Fud Livingston, and accompanied brilliantly by Eddie Lang (the first great jazz guitarist) and Chauncey Morehouse (a remarkably "modern" drummer for the era), both 25 years old, "Singin' the Blues" is credited as the first jazz ballad. (Slow jazz before "Singin' the Blues" was ... blues.) It isn't only that Bix's solo incorporates harmonies new to jazz (which he probably learned from his devotion to Debussy); and it isn't only that Bix's solo is the first fully realized improvisation on the chords rather than the melody of a tune -- creating something utterly new out of its subject matter (Louis Armstrong would inevitably have come up with that on his own, and soon); it's also that this is the first instance of what came to be known as "cool." Bix explores a turf where Armstrong hadn't been and would never go. Armstrong expresses ... well, everything -- his music cascades from his soul into yours. Geniuses like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane would do the same. Beiderbecke's strategy is fundamentally different, even opposite: With the purest of tones he is talking to himself and letting you listen -- the method that Lester Young, Miles Davis, and their followers would favor. In fact, this is one of the few recordings that Lester Young cited as an influence. (Young was the prime influence on Charlie Parker and on what came to be known as "modern" jazz.) As the critic and jazz musician Benny Green would write in 1962, Bix's passage on "Singin' the Blues" is "the most plagiarized and frankly imitated solo in all jazz history."A Little Late, For Bix
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posted by y2karl at 1:31 PM on March 3, 2006