Word: silken
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...come down a little bit," Billie Holiday says during a rehearsal interlude on this landmark set. "It's not legit. I do not got a legitimate voice." True enough. But Billie Holiday changed every notion of legit -- twisted it right around into such a newfangled shape that her silken, serpentine style became the touchstone for all jazz singing. She was, by herself, the new tradition. Others followed, and some were great. But no one has ever touched...
...Bruant's head above the bogus worker's costume he wore to perform his argot songs. It is written all over the seamed face and pouched eyes of the English tourist who has just accosted a pair of girls in the Moulin Rouge and is making a none-too-silken proposition to one of them, who recoils slightly...
...chestnuts roasting on an open fire," but this collection pulls together a graceful, occasionally goofy group of 13 Cole Yuletide greetings. He wrings some swing out of All I Want for Christmas, goes mitten-to-mitten with a chorus of brats on Frosty the Snowman and does a silken Brahms' Lullaby. And, yes, The Christmas Song is here too -- talk about pulling chestnuts out of the fire...
...first major black entertainer to have a regular network program -- but didn't do a whole lot for him in the jazz community, which had been buffeted by bop and the restless experimentation of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. Cole began to look like a silken technician who'd sold his soul. One of the best things about this Mosaic set is that it helps to correct that impression and shows Cole for the artist he was. He wasn't corrupted by the mainstream. He used jazz to enrich and renew it, and left behind a lasting legacy...
...pariah dogs. If people are poor and live in the desert, language may be their richest possession: Why not? It opens miraculously onto other worlds. The Koran, with its bursts of sonority and light, describes a paradise that has everything the desert does not: the sweetest water, cool shade, silken couches, wines that one can endlessly drink without getting drunk...