Word: bing
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...weren't precisely ad-libs, but then this wasn't jazz, it was comedy. The point wasn't to be witty on the spot; it was to suggest an offhand wit that whispered to the audience: Nothing matters, it's only a movie. The blitheness was in keeping with Bing's radio personality, and probably with his real one. Bing enjoyed a genuine or seeming ad-lib; sometimes he'd use it like a mantra. In January 1950 Louis Armstrong, a guest on Bing's radio show, remarked that he had just concluded a tour of Scandinavia. Did you "Skol...
...specialties by Burns and Allen, Bob Burns, Martha Raye and others too grating to mention). Giddins is attentive and generous to Crosby's films, finding saving graces, vagrant epiphanies or sociological sassiness in each. He is also knowledgeable about the movie milieu, offering paragraph-long portraits of dozens of Bing's coworkers. The book ends with "Road to Singapore," and one avidly awaits his consideration of Crosby's later film work: the rest of the "Road" series, the 1944 "Here Come the Waves" (with "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive" sung by Crosby and Sonny Tufts in blackface...
...makes the girls scream, but here he was impersonating not himself but the younger Sinatra, who had become the bobbysoxer's rage. By the 1950s Crosby was part of a parade of aging male stars (Bogart, Cooper, Gable) making love to actresses young enough to be their daughters. For Bing, art was mirroring life: He was costarring with Coleen Gray, Nancy Olson, Debbie Reynolds and (twice) Grace Kelly, even as he courted and married actress Kathryn Grant, 30 years his junior - she was younger than some of Bing's movies...
...Evah." And in the four flavorful minutes of "Now You Has Jazz," with Armstrong and his band, Crosby displays his vocal and verbal acuity in top form. This song, like the one with Sinatra, was considerably revised - ad-libbed, if you like - from Cole Porter's text. Bing's asides are apt and inspired: when Armstrong sings "Frenchmens all/ Prefer what they call/ Lay jazz hot," Bing apostrophizes a très-français "formidable!" Satch, Trummy Young, Billy Kyle and the rest broil their venerable chops in a sweetly swingin' 12-bar blues. And Bing leads them...
...that's Bing...