Word: binges
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...bands sounded like him, their featured improvisers took direction from him, and every school of jazz since has had to address how he interpreted the basics of the idiom--swing, blues, ballads and Afro-Hispanic rhythms. While every jazz instrumentalist owes him an enormous debt, singers as different as Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Marvin Gaye have Armstrong in common as well. His freedom, his wit, his discipline, his bawdiness, his majesty and his irrepressible willingness to do battle with deep sorrow and the wages of death give his music a perpetual...
Sinatra--this is both his gift and, on occasion, his downfall--is always Sinatra. Beyond his technical prowess as a jazz-influenced pop singer, building on the innovations of Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and Billie Holiday, there is the sheer force of conviction, feeling, the weight of personal history in his voice. In this, only Holiday is his rival--perhaps even his better. Both exemplify what people in my generation like to flatter ourselves is unique to rock 'n' roll and its offshoots: the immediacy, the idiosyncrasy, the genuineness of expression. Sinatra is the century's musical equipoise, the pivot...
...yeah, other movies. Well, just because Bob Hope turned out not to be dead doesn't mean you can't pay the man a rental's worth of appreciation. This week's pick: My Favorite Brunette (1947). Dorothy Lamour, Peter Lorre, a cameo by Bing, and some of Hope's finest and most cowardly comic double takes. Come on. He needs the royalties...
...Kennedy eventually betrayed Sinatra by choosing to stay with the more wholesome Bing Crosby during a visit to California. It was a humiliation that sent Sinatra rightward, into the arms of Nixon, then Reagan, which is where a lot of his audience was going in any case. Years had to pass before he could re-emerge entirely as a lodestar of bipartisan style. "I am," he once said, "a thing of beauty." It was a complicated beauty, but he had a point...
High Society (1956) What the Rat Pack movies should have been: briskly plotted and musically irrepressible. A musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, with Frank joined by Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and Louis Armstrong. Bing/Frank duet "Well Did You Evah" is sheer...