The Queen of vibrato

Iván

 

Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht

I quite like Dee Dee Bridgewater's tribute album to Kurt Weill, called This Is New from 2002. Her versions of The Bilbao Song, My Ship and Speak Low are pretty definitive for me in a jazz context. I was disappointed though in her version of September Song. But Ella Fitzgerald's version on The Intimate Ella and Sarah Vaughan's rendition on the Clifford Brown album simply can't be beat. 

CPicard wrote: Robert Johnson, for its leading role in the history of Blues... And because he sold his soul to the devil, which makes him the Grandfather of all thing Metal.

Faust beat him to it - but I don't think he played the guitar 

 

 

 

Sorry ... your list misses the mark and does not list a whole lot of European folks ... and half of that list, in my book, are minor artists and not deserving to be mentioned.

 

Sorry I have different opinions.

 

(Just noticed Dean's choice. Fully agree! If not the best, certainly one of the most important, and one that affected theater so much, and was copied in France mercilessly ... all the way up to Jacques Brel and then Ange!)

 

The list is missing some outstanding names in music as well, like Maria Callas, Beniamino Gigli and others that helped put opera on the landscape of music ... but you can't expect a rock'n'roller to know what opeara is, can you?

To be fair, one could make an alternative list, which would be interesting as well. These things are always going to subjective, and not exhaustive  I think his list is good, and it at least has us talking about it 

Besides, swing jazz was the most popular music prior to the 1950s, to the point where Adorno and the Frankfurt sociologists were raging against jazz and the popular culture industry as being evidence of the decline of the Enlightenment project. Jazz (and later, rock and roll) was considered to be low brow, when compared to high brow art such as classical music and opera. So his list totally makes sense from that perspective.

This is exactly how I felt upon seeing this list.

 

I would have divided it up between some disciplines.

 

The really hard part is that "popular" music did not "start" it's great integration into society and break apart the handles and controls of "music" by the upper class ... until right after WW2 when the LP was first starting ... you have to see the TOM DOWD DVD for an incredible history of American music in the 40's and 50's ... which will help understand things that came about later!

 

That leaves us with just a handful of popular names ... and the likes of Cab Calloway are better known strictly because of a movie, not necessarily because he was any good. We have no way to compare him to others ... because there are no records or films of any of them!

 

Written accounts, in various novels, even the ever graceful and fun to read Victorian Novels, are the ones that mention -- for example -- London/Paris Society at its most active from a well known actor, to a well known painter to a well known cabaret whatever ... and while some might suggest that some of this is a bit ... romanticized ... in the end, they are almost the best record we have. I mean ... depend on movies on Coco Chanell and Edith Piaf?

 

Both Spain and Portugal have a fairly strong artistic history in the first 50 years. So does Italy and France and Germany, considering that they lost half their history in WW1 and WW2 real quick, but, for example, Marlene Dietrich was not just famous for her legs! And we really do not know many of the names in Russia and Eastern Europe because of the wars and the separatism.

 

I also, on occasion, question the African culture ... there is no way that African musicians and artists and everything else "africa" can take hold later so fast, unless there already was something in there in that continent that thrived ... Brazilian history likes to state that a lot of its artistic history has more to thank the African Continent than it did the Portuguese and Spaniards that invaded it!

 

I kinda look at the "LP" and then later "Cassette" as what the 20th century was about ... "recording" and the "remembering" (my word for it) as FILM is the major record of all these 50 years ... and it is totally sporadic, spastic, incomplete ... and at the mercy of the arts that we have come to know. However, can you honestly say that Guernica was not the best view of the Spanish Civil War you ever saw or heard? Do you have to read Garcia Lorca to know?

 

So, for me, the 20th century is the first one to "record" its whole history ... way better than it had ever been done ... right down to the crumbs and dirt around it all!

Are you sure about that? I don't know the history of the LP, but I'm pretty sure people were pressing records before 1950 (e.g. Robert Johnson recorded his tracks in the mid-1930s), and that jazz swing was the dominant popular music. According to Wikipedia, phonograph cylinders were used from the 1880s till gramophone records replaced them in the 1920s. [1] What became Billboard Magazine was founded in Cincinnati on November 1, 1894, and in 1913 published sheet music best sellers charts & top songs in vaudeville theaters. When the jukebox industry developed in the 1930s, Billboard began publishing music charts of best sellers; initially there were only three genre-specific charts: Pop, Rhythm & Blues, and Country & Western. [2]

1.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record" rel="nofollow - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record

2.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_%28magazine%29" rel="nofollow - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_(magazine)

 

I recognised at the start that I would be missing out many essential names, but I gave it a go and chose some acts over others.  For example I chose Caruso instead of Callas, as he was earlier and had the first ever million-selling hit song.

 

I bet none of us could choose 25 acts covering 1950-1999 and not leave out lots of important names.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Jazz_Singer_1927_Poster.jpg" rel="nofollow">

 

 

Had my words ... incorrectly placed ... but the LP itself goes back to the turn of the century almost ... however, it was not a mass market thing, and they were very expensive.

 

The history of the LP really takes off after WW2 ... again, see the Tom Dowd DVD for the American version of it ... as he was one of the very early engineers of the making of LP's.  Tom has an interesting idea about why before the LP was not as viable as it became ... and the recording levels and the controls and everything else goes into it ... which you would expect from a recording engineer!

 

Film history is very clear that there was no direct/actual sound until the Jazz Singer (not actually true ... more later), because the celluloid at the time had no "sound strip" and most projectors and cameras had no facility to handle these. The "Jazz Singer" was one of the first to actually take a recording and "match" it to the film ... where you can see on occasion that the timing is not correct, but it was very well done and obviously painstakingly detailed to ensure that it did not come off bad! 

 

But in a generalized context, the amount of material you can get and learn from and understand and figure out how to place it in a historical context within those 49 years, it would show that the development was there, but it was still in a transitional and experimental stage. FILM, and specially Hollywood, is often given the credit for helping the LP develop further, to be able to make even more copies ... and they immediately made sure that their "stars" could sing, and immediately had albums available to the public ... and in essence this is the beginning of the history of the LP, because before that the number of copies made was too limited and its distribution was not possible and in some cases, downright difficult and mostly local ... the stuff by Robert Johnson and some of the other black folks, whose music survived, was being made but rarely gor very far beyond its locations and certainly got no help from record companies or other institutions by comparison -- Tom Dowd -- who also states that a lot of black music was killed when the studios brought out their stuff ... everyone started buying the other stuff and the black stuff ... disappeared in the media and in people's collections other than a handful!

 

And most of the stuff that survives, including Robert Johnson recordings, are of such sad and bad quality compared to other stuff at the time, that it has been thought that they were more representative of a period of American History, than they would be considered a part of American Music History ... most of which STILL ignores the relevancy of many of those folks! While we speak of the likes of Robert Johnson, according to Tom Dowd, the live jazz scene was far more important and inventive and was the scene that died badly ... and has the "least" history, only because Mr. Slowhand or Jack White mention Robert, so to speak, otherwise no one would know them or have heard of them!

  1. Cab Calloway! 

  7. Eddie South

  8. Boswell Sisters

  9. Damia

10. Bix (Beiderbecke) 'n Bing (Crosby)

While Sinatra was huge during the 1940s, most agree that the best was yet to come, starting in 1950 and all those great Nelson Riddle albums of the 50s. So, I don't think Sinatra - or others like Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan - are missing since they peaked after 1949. (But then, Duke Ellington made a number of great albums through the 1950s and 1960s, and he's on the list... :-)