Word: jolsonlis
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...Babe was released in 1995. By now its effects seem as primitive as a scratchy Al Jolson sound track. "Computer horsepower has gotten better, and there are some really sharp guys writing software," says Dennis Muren, senior visual effects supervisor at ILM. His team has kept dinosaurs steadily evolving since the first Jurassic Park in 1993; research for the first two movies has made more monsters possible for the upcoming Jurassic Park III. Cats & Dogs' animators paid their dues on Babe but honed their craft on a talking bulldog for last year's Little Nicky...
...true. But Crosby's early delivery has even more insistent echoes of Al Jolson's, with its declamatory style and its tendency to end on an orgasmic high note (though Bing tended to moo his glissandi, where Jolson went "mwaaa"). Apparently skeptical of the appeal of his natural baritone, he forced it up into the familiar tenor range. It took a while for him to realize that the bu-bu-bu- boos were original, natural and, to his widening audience, deeply satisfying. It was also wonderfully adaptable to the musical genres he would investigate for the rest of his career...
...Voice The book makes an argument familiar to all proselytizing critics. Crosby, Giddins says, isn't like all those people you don't like (like Al Jolson); he's like those people you like (Armstrong, Sinatra, Elvis). And, oddly, the argument is just about convincing. Crosby did indeed learn from Louis - a debt he would gleefully repay with dozens of recorded duets, frequent invitations to Armstrong to appear on "Kraft Music Hall" and the securing of star billing for Armstrong in Crosby's 1936 film "Pennies from Heaven" (at the time a rare plum for a black performer...
...should be thinking of spring and April: T.S. Eliot, Columbine, Hitler, Shakespeare, Waco, taxes, Oklahoma City, Jesus, Moses, Al Jolson singing April Showers. My mother used to sing that. She was born on April l, no fooling...
...Bing was of every class and none; his trick was to elevate the Joe Average attitude to a kind of masculine chic. It was an attitude, of a man at ease with himself and his success, that would help him dominate entertainment until the '50s. In pop-cultural history - Jolson to Crosby to Elvis - Bing was the calm before the storm...