Word: highes
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...wanted to play. But he finally decided that his domestic partner could be his professional one. For a two-star act, she needed a name nearly as short and simple as his; thus Mary Ford. They hit immediately: five Top 10 hits ("Tennessee Waltz," "Mockin' Bird Hill," "How High the Moon," "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise" and "Whispering") in nine months. From August 1952 to March '53, they scored five more Top 10 hits ("My Baby's Coming Home," "Lady of Spain," "Bye Bye Blues," "I'm Sitting on Top of the World" and "Vaya Con Dios...
...High the Moon For all the attention paid to Les Paul the technical innovator, not enough was paid to his skill as an arranger of guitar solos and vocal parts. Similarly, Ford didn't get her due as a singer. She looked the way she sang: smooth, clear, pretty. Her voice, tripled or sextupled in harmony, was the vocal version of his slide-guitar style. Her glissandi were intimate, as if she had been singing inside the microphone. (She was, in fact, the first vocal artist to sing not a foot or so away from the microphone, as most studio...
...High the Moon' had terrific verve," said Bill Wyman, long the Rolling Stones' bassist, "proof at last that pop could provide stylish, instrumental inventiveness." So it's instructive to listen closely to "How High the Moon" - not a chore, since the song provides as much musical exhilaration now as it did when it was released, in March 1951. It encapsulates the lithe popular art of all those Les and Mary singles - the density and clarity, the distinctiveness of his guitar voice and her intimate vocal instrument, the heart and the fun. It's a number that expresses the choral lilt...
...Right from the start, Paul's arrangement has more hooks than a Chicago abattoir. ("We used to start our gigs with the opening riffs from 'How High the Moon,' " said another Paul, the one with the Beatles. "Everybody was trying to be a Les Paul clone in those days.") Do you remember that descending pattern (C, C7, F, F-minor, G) that concluded primal rock-'n'-roll numbers like Billy Haley's "Rock Around the Clock"? Here, Paul begins with that lick; he also anticipates and reverses the fade-out ending of so many early rock-'n'-roll songs...
...gulping each first syllable. You expect her to do the same with "is far," but she smartly refuses to surrender to giddy syncopation. She gives the final words in the phrase their full traditional value. When she reaches the last couplet - "Until you will, how still my heart,/ How high the moon" - she extends the "high" into a sighing "hiiiiigh," then softens "the moon" into almost a whisper of regret. The diminuendo is a subtle reminder that, for all its drive and bounce, this is a song of longing. Until the lover returns, the moon is just a distant prop...