Word: singings
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...with music, With words and music. Please listen and we'll begin Introducing Irving Berlin. That song-writing fellow Wants to say hello, So we will help him along To say it with a beautiful song. - The Revelers sing on the "Good Gulf Program...
...Even on his own machine, Berlin was a lousy salesman of his music; his ragged vocal and instrumental technique could undermine his best work. In 1934, Fred Astaire and the "Top Hat" production team gathered to hear the numbers Berlin had written for the movie. "And then he would sing the song," Hermes Pan, Astaire's choreographer, told Bergreen, "and we were all asking ourselves, Is this any good? I remember 'Cheek to Cheek' especially: the way he sang and played, it sounded so awful...
...dance-and-romance tune composed in an ambitious, 64-bar structure. Berlin pitched it smartly to Astaire's frail but persuasive tenor voice; for example, in the phrase "And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak," the melody zigzags up to a note Astaire can hardly sing. The song's daring swings of rhythm and emotion consecutively express three moods of a lover in pursuit - bliss ("Heaven, I'm in heaven"), jauntiness ("Oh, I love to climb a mountain...") and desperate ardor ("Dance with me!") - which Astaire's dance of seduction with Ginger Rogers sublimely dramatizes...
...Berlin airlift, he adapted the Ralph Rainger-Leo Robin "Thanks for the Memory." The bridge went: "Thanks to the fighting Air Force/ That daily took its toll;/ Now it's a humane Air Force/ With heart and soul,/ Dropping wheat and coal." (If Hope were touring today, he could sing the lyric in Afghanistan...
...GIVE YOUR GIFT Having hot musicians (Sheryl Crow, Macy Gray, Shaggy) sing about giving of yourself--so you'll give your business to the Gap--would be dicey any year, much less after Sept. 11. Yet once again, the retailer's holiday ads were culturally pitch-perfect. On a stark set, the singers, covering Supertramp's plangent Give a Little Bit, gave a little uplift to a Christmas season that needed...