Word: moone
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...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...
...Uncharacteristically naked (her voice alone, not double- or triple-tracked) for a few syllables, Ford reprises the first chorus, giving each word double value, again asserting the lyric's wistfulness before revving for the finale. Her voice ascends - "How! High! The! Moon!" - and Les' guitar descends, ending as he began, with the rock riff and adding a puckish triple grace note. He and Ford get in and out of this 21-track mini-masterpiece in a breathless two minutes and four seconds...
...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...
...gizmonics. She coos, "Somewhere there's mu-u-u-sic," coaxing four syllables out of the word by gliding over them rather than hiccuping through them. She wants the listener to know this is an up-tempo love song, not a stuttering novelty. In the bridge - "There is no moon above, and love is far away too" - she lightly swings "above" and "and love," almost 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...