Word: swingin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hong Kong isn't known as a city of swingin' hepcats, but it does play host to a small, surprisingly busy jazz scene and a newly launched international jazz festival. It's against this homespun backdrop that the album Raw Jazz emerges, with a kind of indomitable energy that's entirely fitting for the place in which it was born. Introducing Singaporean vocalist Hanjin Tan, a producer and composer of Cantonese pop by day, this low-frills, high-moxie album is a collection of 11 jazz standards, each recorded in a single take along with the help of local jazz...
...discs, and that was the basis for this 12-song LP, which has never gone out of print. Bing does a little globetrotting here, adding songs with Irish and Hawaiian settings, but it's basically that warm Crosby baritone, equally adept at solemnity (a robust "Adeste Fidelis") and swingin' (the vamps of "Jing-jing-jing-jingle bells" that he swaps with the Andrews Sisters). Among holiday LPs, this is the all-time champ...
...buckets of flop-sweat, and Simon Snide's eviscerating bitchiness, is reacquainting the country with its glorious musical past. One week, everyone must sing a Cole Porter tune; the next, '50s rock 'n roll is the genre. All right, the performers don't take their vocalizing cues from the swingin' precision of Ella Fitzgerald, the hiccupping innocence and intensity of Buddy Holly. Instead, they sound indentured to the wildly mannerist melodramatics of Mariah Carey and Michael Bolton. ("Just sing the damned song," my friend George Grizzard has been known to shout at his TV.) But at least the performers...
...Putting together a trunk show of hits from a composer or group is a matter of choosing from among three options: a pastiche of tunes (as in Smokey Joe's Cafe from the Mike Leiber-Jerry Stoller songbook, the Billy Joel Movin' Out or Swingin' On a Star from lyricist Jimmy McHugh); a new book that finds slots for the songs (as in the ABBA Mamma Mia!, the Elvis All Shook Up or the Gershwin's My One and Only and Crazy for You); or a bio-musical of the artist (the Buddy Holly tribute Buddy or Hank Williams...
...shorthand journalism to define each decade by a catchphrase--the Roaring Twenties, the swingin' '60s, the Me decade '70s. Five years into the 21st century, we're in trouble. The current decade doesn't even have a nickname (the zeros? the aughts? the uh-ohs?), let alone a cultural personality. And Hollywood isn't helping. The film industry, especially in the four-month peak-viewing period called summer, rarely tries squarely addressing Zeitgeist anxieties. Instead it ransacks its attic for sequels, spin-offs and, this year, remakes. You don't look forward to many of the new season's blockbuster...