Adult Pop.
Monday, July 14th, 2008So, now that I’ve got that out of the way . . . .
I’ve been listening to a lot of something that’s hard to define. Frank Sinatra is it, at least until he signed with Reprise and tried to compete with the rock & rollers. Ella Fitzgerald is it, except when she’s doing straight-up jazz. It’s not jazz, it’s pop, but it’s not pop in the teenage hormones-and-attitude sense either — that kind of pop was being invented (by Elvis Presley, to be unforgivably reductive) at the time, and was an unspoken rebuke to this kind of stuff, as this was an unspoken rebuke to it.
I’ve settled on the term “Adult Pop,” because the themes, the emotions, and the clear, sophisticated elegance of the orchestrations and productions all belong very much to a grown-up world, and a vanished grown-up world at that; the baby boomers will never be this grown-up no matter how many grandchildren they have. (This is not necessarily a bad thing.) This, by the way, is album music: the teen-pop of the era was all on 45s. When people try to tell you that the Beatles invented the album or some shit like that, tell them no way. Frank Sinatra and June Christy and Mel Tormé and Ella Fitzgerald did. (Okay, jazz guys like John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman perfected it. But that means the Beatles are third place at best.)
It could also be considered the final decadence of what Wilfrid Sheed calls the jazz song, that form of American popular music invented by Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern and George Gershwin and which is often called, in the crass dialect of marketing and publicity, the Great American Songbook. But the stuff I’m talking about is very much not jazz, though the spirit of jazz runs through it in the complex, shifting rhythms and startling chord changes, and of course in the fact that many of the personnel who made it, both behind the microphone and in the orchestra, also made jazz.
Anyway. So I’ve been listening to it a lot, and figuring out what I wanted to hear over and over again, and I’ve made (as is my nerdly wont) a four-CD collection of what I think is a pretty great mix of songs, with a definite flow to them for once. These aren’t necessarily the best, but they’re the most evocative and tell the story I wanted to tell with the set.
Details: the time period I’m drawing from is roughly from the crystallization of the long-player format in about 1955 to the British Invasion in 1963. Quite literally: after about 1960 there’s a steep decline in the kind of stuff I mean, and after 1963 it’s pretty much nonexistent. (The peak year seems to have been 1957.) It’s the age of high fidelity sound and massive recording budgets and brilliant orchestrators and incredibly proficient studio musicians. There are a couple of outliers at either end of the chronology; that’s fine. Anyway . . . .
I divided the four discs into seasons, and appropriated some vintage advertisments to use as the cover art, then smushed each disc into one streamable mp3. So without further ado, may I present:
The Adult Pop Box
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
1. Mel Tormé “It’s A Blue World”
2. Peggy Lee “Black Coffee”
3. Helen Merrill “Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year”
4. Little Jimmy Scott “They Say It’s Wonderful”
5. Ella Fitzgerald “Day Dream”
6. Anita O’Day “A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square”
7. Dinah Shore “My Funny Valentine”
8. Barbara Lea “Am I In Love?”
9. Billy Eckstine “I Love You”
10. Carmen McRae “All The Things You Are”
11. June Christy “Spring Is Here”
12. Billie Holiday “I Get Along Without You Very Well”
13. Blossom Dearie “They Say It’s Spring”
14. Sarah Vaughan “April In Paris”
15. Rosemary Clooney “Blue Rose”
16. Sue Raney “I Get The Blues When It Rains”
17. Chris Connor “My April Heart”
18. Jeri Southern “Isn’t This A Lovely Day”
19. Nat King Cole “Lost April”
20. Julie London “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most”
21. Johnny Hartman “Long Ago And Far Away”
22. Frank Sinatra “I’ll Remember April”
23. Nina Simone “Lilac Wine”
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
1. Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong “Summertime”
2. Nat King Cole “Day In, Day Out”
3. Peggy Lee “Lover”
4. Teri Thornton “Blue Skies”
5. Frank Sinatra “Summer Wind”
6. Julie London “Memphis In June”
7. Ella Fitzgerald “Too Darn Hot”
8. Joe Williams “Too Close For Comfort”
9. Dick Haymes “The Long, Hot Summer”
10. June Christy “Something Cool”
11. Chet Baker “I’m Old Fashioned”
12. Helen Merrill “It’s A Lazy Afternoon”
13. Etta Jones “Don’t Go To Strangers”
14. Lorez Alexandria “Lush Life”
15. Dinah Washington “Ill Wind”
16. Anita O’Day “Tenderly”
17. Barbara Lea “The Very Thought Of You”
18. Keely Smith “When Day Is Done”
19. Rosemary Clooney “In The Cool, Cool, Cool of The Evening”
20. Mark Murphy “Firefly”
21. Blossom Dearie “Teach Me Tonight”
22. Nina Simone “Don’t Smoke In Bed”
23. Tony Bennett “Darn That Dream”
24. Carmen McRae “The Night We Called It A Day”
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
1. Anita O’Day “Indian Summer”
2. Hoagy Carmichael “Baltimore Oriole”
3. Jackie Paris “A Cottage For Sale”
4. Beverly Kenney “Born To Be Blue”
5. Julie London “Blues In The Night”
6. Nat King Cole “Stardust”
7. Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong “Autumn In New York”
8. Chris Connor “A Foggy Day”
9. Johnny Hartman “Autumn Serenade”
10. Sue Raney “September In The Rain”
11. Lorez Alexandria “But Beautiful”
12. Chet Baker “Let’s Get Lost”
13. Dinah Washington “Invitation”
14. Nancy Wilson “Guess Who I Saw Today”
15. June Christy “Shadow Woman”
16. Billy Eckstine “I Cover The Waterfront”
17. Louis Armstrong “There’s No You”
18. Frank Sinatra “Lonely Town”
19. Ella Fitzgerald “Lost In A Fog”
20. Jeri Southern “Coffee, Cigarettes & Memories”
21. Mel Tormé “Dancing In The Dark”
22. Dick Haymes “The Nearness Of You”
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
1. Helen Merrill “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home”
2. Mel Tormé “Moonlight In Vermont”
3. Carmen McRae “Misery”
4. Abbey Lincoln “Lonely House”
5. Blossom Dearie “I Walk a Little Faster”
6. Ella Fitzgerald “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”
7. Mark Murphy “The Meaning Of The Blues”
8. Chet Baker “Grey December”
9. Dean Martin “Sleep Warm”
10. Ray Charles & Betty Carter “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”
11. Johnny Hartman “Stella By Starlight”
12. Dakota Staton “The Party’s Over”
13. Billie Holiday “The End Of A Love Affair”
14. Frank Sinatra “When Your Lover Has Gone”
15. Julie London “Cry Me A River”
16. Etta Jones “Out In The Cold Again”
17. Sarah Vaughan “Vanity”
18. Tony Bennett “Lost In The Stars”
19. Nat King Cole “For All We Know”
20. Peggy Lee “As Time Goes By”
21. June Christy “This Year’s Kisses”
22. Dick Haymes “The Way You Look Tonight”
Further Theoretical Box Sets may show up here from time to time, depending on my appetite for time-consuming audio crunching and lengthy upload times. Let me know what you think, huh?