Word: songbooks
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...sung Porter, of course, performing Too Darn Hot in Jewel Unplugged on MTV. She also polished her singing style while listening to what she calls her Bible, the classic album Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook. But only last month did she learn that Porter was white. "Whew!" she said. "I'm learning minutiae. It's killing me." And it's only been a couple of years since she discovered it was the Beatles who sang I Want to Hold Your Hand--which she liked. When another rider at the stable tells her she was born on the same...
...started singing with Chick Webb's Big Band in the mid-'30s, when she was still a teenager, and later did a lot of swinging and scatting with Dizzy Gillespie. But it was her collaboration in the '50s with producer/manager Norman Granz on a benchmark series of "songbook" albums that gave Fitzgerald the musical regentship that never passed from her. "Norman felt that I should do other things," she remembered, "so he produced the Cole Porter Songbook with me. It was a turning point in my life...
...hipper, so has its songbook. Television is taking a cue from the movies, releasing sound tracks for hit shows as a way of cross-promoting both the show and the musicians whose work is featured on it. Typically, these CDs include a version or two of the show's theme song along with a selection of pop numbers heard at some point on the series. CDs for the hit Fox shows Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place feature such musicians as Vanessa Williams, Annie Lennox and the alternative-rock favorite Urge Overkill. A 1994 CD spun off from the sitcom...
Halfway through song from his new tribute album, The Billie Holiday Songbook, trumpeter Terence Blanchard abruptly shifts the mood from brokenhearted to defiant. Reflecting the emotions of a jilted lover, he blows swirling, gathering clouds of sound. Then, suddenly piercing them with a barrage of sharp notes, he dashes off a few steeply ascending riffs, bending his notes until they cry and yowl. Throughout the album, on solo after solo (Strange Fruit, In My Solitude), Blanchard's compact, mournful-sounding melodies evoke the desperation and broken dreams that tortured Holiday, who died at 44 in 1959 of drugs and drink...
...year it certainly isn't is 1993. In this season of multitudinous musical revivals, even the upcoming "new" musicals derive from the dear dead past. A Grand Night for Singing is a cabaret collage of the 1943-to-1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein songbook. The Red Shoes is so closely based on the 1948 ballet film that it uses footage from it as the basis of TV ads. Cyrano the Musical, an import from Amsterdam, retells a much told romance, written in the 19th century and set in the 17th. Disney's Beauty and the Beast will transpose to the stage...