![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
2010 in Twelve Days - January
Dec. 5th, 2010 08:04 pm
Song: Sara Lowes - Night Times (Joni Mitchell meets Frazier Chorus)
TV: Walk On By, The History Of The Popular Song. I've written previously about how (marginalised) gay American song-book writers wrote brilliant lyrics for women to sing, but this programme showed how Jewish immigrants combined their traditional melancholic minor key melodies with African-American rhythms and created orchestral ragtime: the sexy syncopation of Gershwin, the pop sensibilities of Berlin, the poetic rhythms of Hart and his sidekick Rodgers. It was kinda ironic that the songwriters were incorporating black sounds into their music seeing as the songs became jazz standards for black singers such as Billie, Dinah, Ella, Sarah. The programme dug up a black musicologist to say that the songwriters weren't stealing from their black compatriots [like R 'n' B becoming Rock 'n' Roll], indeed much was made of the fact that Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's Showboat was the first piece of musical theatre to have black and white actors on the same stage and that Gershwin wrote the first black musical, Porgy and Bess in 1935 (which led, after protests from the cast, to the first desegregated theatre audience in 1936).
The programme also stated that Louis Armstrong had influenced a pre-White Christmas Bing Crosby to adopt a (black) swing style and Bing persuaded Louis to sing (white) pop music, making Armstrong the first crossover artist; the Smokey Robinson of his day.
The music was avant garde at the time, but when Frank Sinatra recorded (what some people think are) the definitive versions in the '50s, at the dawn of rock 'n' roll, it seems incredibly reactionary, like playing Beatles songs at the birth of punk. But now, the songs are 80 and 90 years old and My Funny Valentine, Lady is a Tramp et al still resonate.
Film: Breaking and Entering
Book: Hypothermia - Arnuldur Indridason. Feck your Mankel and Larsson , I got me an Icelandic thriller, even more dour than Scandi-crime.
Places visited: Epping Forest
