Autumn Leaves

This is the platonic ideal of this song, in my opinion at least.

Michael Bublé - Beyond The Sea

I love this song, and this is a particularly good rendition.

John Barry - Theme to Body Heat

Body Heat was a 1981 remake of the classic 1944 film Double Indemnity.  Known mostly for the skin showed by Kathleen Turner, about the only thing really superior about the remake is John Barry's spectacular Film Noir score.

Django Reinhardt - Stardust

This is the kind of music that would be playing when I got home from High School.  You wonder what else Reinhardt would have recorded had he not died so tragically young.

Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga - I've Got You Under My Skin

You have to listen for a while to appreciate Lady Gaga - well, I did, but came around to her as a credible singer of one of the all time great Big Band songs.

Stan Getz - Walk On By

Stan Getz recorded a whole album of Burt Bacharach's songs.  Rest in peace, Burt.  Thanks for all the great music.

 

Amy Grant and Marc Martel - The Christmas Waltz

I heard a jazz version of this by Jeff Goldblum.  Who knew he could sing?   Spoiler Alert: he really can't.

But this is a fine song, well done by Amy Grant (Mrs. Vince Gill) and Marc Martel.

Vince Guaraldi - Linus and Lucy

This is, of course, from the A Charlie Brown Christmas special.  The Studio Execs were nervous about the show: the explicit Christian themes, the use of child actors, the lack of a laugh track.  Of course, the show was a sensation: almost half of everyone who had the TV on that evening had it tuned to that show.  This year is the show's 55th anniversary (!).

And yes, the music is as iconic as everything else from the show.

Nina Simone - I put a spell on you

Get ready for an enchanting Halloween with Nina Simone.

Louis Armstrong - A Kiss to Build a Dream On

It's autumn, the leaves are turning and temperature is falling.  Curl up in front of a fireplace with your sweetheart this weekend.



They sure don't write them like this anymore.

Chet Atkins - Nuages

Atkins said that Django Reinhardt (composer of this song) was one of the ten greatest guitarists of the 20th Century.  Jeff Beck called Reinhardt "superhuman", which is pretty funny since the Nazis who occupied Paris during Reinhardt's career had a very different idea of that word.  Willie Nelson has played this song for a long time.  I can see why.

The first steam locomotive - 215 years ago

On this day in 1804, Richard Trevithick debuted the world's first self propelled steam locomotive at the Welsh iron mill at Pen-y-Darren.  It pulled five cars loaded with ten tons of iron and around 70 iron workers nine miles, at a speed of five miles per hour.  It was so heavy that after three trips its weight broke the rails and it ended its life as a stationary steam engine.

It was followed with other - and better - locomotives: The Rocket, The Flying Scotsman, The Mallard, the Shinkansen and the TGV.  But it was the first, which is what we remember.  This is a reproduction.



There is a magic to all of this.  Castle Borepatch lies near (but not too near) a trunk line and it's possible in the dead of night to listen to the horn of the Night Train.  It's the sound of nostalgia.  Sure, airliners get you there faster but I'm not sure that anyone ever wrote a song like this for a Boeing.

Ike Quebec - Blue and Sentimental

Born on this day in 1918.

Duke Ellington - Autumn Leaves

The leaves are turning color near Castle Borepatch.  This has for years been one of my favorite songs about the autumn.



It has perhaps the greatest jazz violin of all time, by (sometimes trumpeter) Ray Nance.  Ozzie Bailey does a spectacular job on vocals in both French (written by poet Jacques Prévert) and English (by Johnny Mercer).  The music was composed by Joseph Kosma.

Fun fact: this was Yves Montand's signature song.  Just about everyone recorded this (Sinatra, Doris Day, Andy Williams, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, and Nat King Cole who recorded it in Japanese), but I love this version.

And just to show how the absurd can rise to the sublime, here is Nat singing this in Japanese.  I'm not sure that anyone other than him could have pulled it off, but he did pull it off.

Wild Bill Davison - That's A Plenty

Dixieland jazz, baby!

Django Reinhardt and Duke Ellington - Honeysuckle Rose

Django on the electric guitar.  Wow.



From 1946.  He survived occupied France despite being a Gypsy because of Luftwaffe officer "Doktor Jazz".

Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli - J'attendrai

I just ran across a Jazz musician who I'd never encountered before: "Django" Reinhardt, perhaps the first significant European Jazz artist.  There's a lot about him at Infogalactic, but in addition to his musical creds, he was a Gipsy jazz musician in occupied France during the war.  The Nazis hated both gipsys (and killed boxcar loads of them) but hated jazz as well.  He survived because there were a number of Nazi officers who actually liked the music, including Luftwaffe officer Dietrich Schulz-Köhn who was known as "Doctor Jazz" (!):

However, it's Kubrick's interest in jazz-loving Nazis that represents his most fascinating unrealized war film. The book that Kubrick was handed, and one he considered adapting soon after wrapping Full Metal Jacket, was Swing Under the Nazis, published in 1985 and written by Mike Zwerin, a trombonist from Queens who had performed with Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy before turning to journalism. The officer in that Strangelovian snapshot was Dietrich Schulz-Koehn, a fanatic for "hot swing" and other variations of jazz outlawed as "jungle music" by his superiors. Schulz-Koehn published an illegal underground newsletter, euphemistically referred to as "travel letters," which flaunted his unique ability to jaunt across Western Europe and report back on the jazz scenes in cities conquered by the Fatherland. Kubrick's title for the project was derived from the pen name Schulz-Koehn published under: Dr. Jazz.

The Intarwebz are a wonderful place.

UPDATE 16 August 2017 17:28: Here's a short documentary on how Reinhardt survived the War.

Train station Boogie Woogie

Someone donated an old piano to St. Pancras train station in London.  The station management put it out in the concourse.  People walk up and play it.  One day a random guy joined in, for a boogie boogie duet.



A couple years later, Elton John donated a new Yamaha piano to the station.  One wonders if Sir Elton say that video and decided to get them a nicer piano.  It works, too.

Brian Setzer Orchestra - Dig that crazy santa claus

A swingin' remake of the 1954 Oscar McLollie song.

Oscar Peterson - The Christmas Waltz

A Christmas classic from the Maharaja of the keyboard.