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Results for "JazzWax by Marc Myers"

News: Video / DVD

Patti Page and Nat Cole

January 22, 2015

On October 29, 1958, singer Patti Page hosted Nat King Cole and Gene Krupa as well as Illinois Jacquet, her musical director Rocky Cole and other musicians on ABC's The Patti Page Oldsmobile Show, which featured the swinging Vic Schoen Orchestra. Shows like this take me back to when I was a very little kid, being ...

News: Music Industry

Larry Sonn's All-Star Band

January 21, 2015

The big band era continued long after many historians say it ended. While big bands no longer gained much traction with teens by the late 1940s, many great orchestras continued to tour throughout the 1950s and beyond while others recorded for dancers on the new 12-inch album format. One such studio band in 1955 and '56 ...

News: TV / Film

Robert Herridge: Jazz on TV

January 15, 2015

Up until 1955, modern jazz was largely a punchline. The music wasn't easy to understand by those who grew up listening to big bands and other forms of pop and dance music, and many post-war jazz musicians seemed silly in their cool extreme—people with names like Dizzy, Monk, Chubby, Hawk, Shorty and Bird who recorded for ...

News: Interview

Interview: Peggy King (Part 2)

January 14, 2015

If you were a TV producer in the 1950s, Peggy King was dream talent. She could sing, act and play off comedians—all while seemingly relaxed and sincere. She wasn't a singing stylist like Peggy Lee or Patti Page, but when it came to doing the industrial work of a weekly live television show—with scripts, rehearsals, impeccable ...

News: Interview

Interview: Peggy King (Part 1)

January 13, 2015

The name Peggy King may not be familiar to you, but in the early days of television, she was a singing personality. Back in the early 1950s, in televison's infancy, most TV shows were hosted by name singers and comedians. The TV and movie industries were rivals competing for America's spare time, and film actors were ...

News: Video / DVD

'A Gal in Calico': 1946-2011

January 12, 2015

In December 1946, Warner Bros. released a mess of a film called The Time, the Place and the Girl—a post-war feel-good feature with a dopey storyline on which it hung as many musical numbers as possible. Everything about the film was forgettable—except for A Gal in Calico, a song by Leo Robin and Arthur Schwartz. In ...

News: Interview

Interview: Helen Merrill on Billie

January 9, 2015

Following my post yesterday about a private audio recording at YouTube of Helen Merrill and Billie Holiday singing a duet at a New York party in November 1956, I had to know what was going on at the time of the recording. Why were they together. Why was Holiday so intent on singing the ending twice ...

News: Video / DVD

Billie Holiday and Helen Merrill

January 8, 2015

Tessa Souter, whose singing voice I love (go here), sent along a lovely email the other day. Tessa knows I've interviewed Helen Merrill at length (start here) and wanted me to hear something. It was a link to a tape of Helen and Billie Holiday singing You Go to My Head at producer-writer Leonard Feather's apartment ...

News: Video / DVD

Documentary: Bix Beiderbecke

January 7, 2015

In 1981, director Brigitte Berman released Bix: 'Ain't None of Them Play Like Him,' a documentary on cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. The short-sentence narration and interviews with Beiderbecke's bandmates are remarkable. You may know Berman best as the winner of an Oscar for Artie Shaw: Time Is All You've Got, which she shared in 1987 with Down ...

News: Recording

Jerry Fielding: 'Fielding's Formula'

January 6, 2015

When the 12-inch LP was relatively new in the mid-1950s, jazz labels needed as much content as they could get their hands on to fill production quotas. So they were willing to take chances with artists who had bright ideas and proven track records. After all, even though magnetic tape had dramatically reduced recording overhead, time ...