Who plays Glenn Miller's 'In The Mood'?

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Cyrano de Maniac
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#106 Post by Cyrano de Maniac » Tue Oct 30, 2007 12:25 pm

I've toyed with the idea of playing In The Mood, Sing Sing Sing, and Stray Cat Strut as the first three songs of an evening after a beginner lesson (i.e. before Lindy Hoppers show up), just so that I can get them out of the way and tell anyone who requests them later "Sorry, you must have missed it earlier."

I haven't yet had the stomach to go through with this idea though.

Brent

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#107 Post by Toon Town Dave » Tue Oct 30, 2007 5:06 pm

Do you actually get requests for any of those three? I wouldn't expect most newbies know the titles of those. Maybe ITM if they took band in school but then they probably wouldn't be requesting it for the same reason.

I'll echo Haydn's comment. As a newbie in 2000 and not really a music person, I didn't have a clue about artists or song titles. In fact, before I started dancing, I'd lump Ellington, Basie, et. al. in with Lawrence Welk on a PBS special. I did know of Glenn Miller (in a Moonlight Serenade, String of Pearls sense) and Louis Armstrong (Wonderful World).

I have recall reallying digging the music in the Swingkids trailer, years before I started dancing. Never saw the actual movie until some time after I started dancing so I missed all the chit chat about Goodman and Django in the movie. At the time, I would have lumped ITM with SSS, It Don't Mean a Thing, A Train, American Patrol, Choo Choo Ch'boogie, etc.

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#108 Post by Haydn » Thu Nov 01, 2007 4:59 am

I've just bought the Bluebird CD of 'The Carnegie Hall Concert' as shown here. As well as being an excellent CD, it has a pumping version of 'In the Mood', check out the sample here. I like this one - I think it's the same arrangement as the recorded one, just a bit faster with ten times more energy.

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remysun
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#109 Post by remysun » Thu Nov 01, 2007 12:33 pm

Eyeball wrote: "Held it back"? Held it back from what? No one in the public ever had a clue that Strayhorn was gay. Most people still don't even know who he is, much less his sexual orientation.
...
"A" Train was and is a huge hit - one of the biggest big band hits of the era.
A Train was a great hit, because it's that good. But from the battle between Benny Goodman and Chick Webb to Pat Boone usurping the Black roots of Rock and Roll, to even Vanilla Ice and Eminem, the pioneering by African American culture has always played second fiddle to what could be crossed over.

I've seen the American Masters episode featuring Billy Strayhorn, how he was instrumental in making the Duke the Duke, and I think the fact he had to hide his homosexuality in some way let the Duke take a lot of the credit that belonged to Billy. Of course, Ellington was getting props he should have gotten in the first place, but what if the system didn't have to work that way?

Looking back, we can appreciate what Strayhorn, Ellington, Chick Webb, etc., what everybody contributed to the art, regardless of color, but in those days, there was chaff being passed off as wheat. Remember those "approved" records in Swing Kids?

So what I meant to say, is that I wonder what other heights could have been reached if Strayhorn could truly express every facet of himself? It gives me something else to look for in the music when I've tired of the other stuff.

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#110 Post by CafeSavoy » Thu Nov 01, 2007 2:22 pm

remysun wrote:
Eyeball wrote: "Held it back"? Held it back from what? No one in the public ever had a clue that Strayhorn was gay. Most people still don't even know who he is, much less his sexual orientation.
...
"A" Train was and is a huge hit - one of the biggest big band hits of the era.
A Train was a great hit, because it's that good. But from the battle between Benny Goodman and Chick Webb to Pat Boone usurping the Black roots of Rock and Roll, to even Vanilla Ice and Eminem, the pioneering by African American culture has always played second fiddle to what could be crossed over.

I've seen the American Masters episode featuring Billy Strayhorn, how he was instrumental in making the Duke the Duke, and I think the fact he had to hide his homosexuality in some way let the Duke take a lot of the credit that belonged to Billy. Of course, Ellington was getting props he should have gotten in the first place, but what if the system didn't have to work that way?

Looking back, we can appreciate what Strayhorn, Ellington, Chick Webb, etc., what everybody contributed to the art, regardless of color, but in those days, there was chaff being passed off as wheat. Remember those "approved" records in Swing Kids?

So what I meant to say, is that I wonder what other heights could have been reached if Strayhorn could truly express every facet of himself? It gives me something else to look for in the music when I've tired of the other stuff.
Aren't you assuming that Strayhorn wanted a different role and would have achieved differently in the limelight? Is there really any evidence for that? But you do raise a good question. Would Strayhorn have achieved without the considerable support of the Ellington organization but with more freedom?

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#111 Post by Lawrence » Thu Nov 01, 2007 2:44 pm

CafeSavoy wrote:But you do raise a good question. Would Strayhorn have achieved without the considerable support of the Ellington organization but with more freedom?
No, not even a little bit.
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remysun
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#112 Post by remysun » Fri Nov 02, 2007 12:53 am

Lawrence wrote:
CafeSavoy wrote:But you do raise a good question. Would Strayhorn have achieved without the considerable support of the Ellington organization but with more freedom?
No, not even a little bit.
Not even that, because everybody needs a start. Take Frank Sinatra or Johnny Mercer. They were able to break away from Tommy Dorsey, and move onto bigger and better things. Could Strayhorn have experienced something similar, moving beyond Ellington, had he every opportunity to do so?

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trev
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#113 Post by trev » Fri Nov 02, 2007 3:27 am

remysun wrote:Take Frank Sinatra or Johnny Mercer. They were able to break away from Tommy Dorsey, and move onto bigger and better things. Could Strayhorn have experienced something similar, moving beyond Ellington, had he every opportunity to do so?
Well he had access to the best jazz orchestra in the land, I doubt he would have been after further fame and glory. Creatively he should have been rather satisfied.

Getting back to the larger issue which I guess is popularity vs critical acclaim - rather than being saddened by good composers not getting the glory they deserved, I think the greater tragedy for music was that financial constraints forced many of the best bands to cater for the popular market so much, rather than reaching their creative potential. But I guess it's the same today.

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remysun
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#114 Post by remysun » Fri Nov 02, 2007 3:55 am

Cyrano de Maniac wrote:I've toyed with the idea of playing In The Mood, Sing Sing Sing, and Stray Cat Strut as the first three songs of an evening after a beginner lesson (i.e. before Lindy Hoppers show up), just so that I can get them out of the way and tell anyone who requests them later "Sorry, you must have missed it earlier."

I haven't yet had the stomach to go through with this idea though.

Brent
Stray Cat Strut, ITM, then SSS might work. Progressively challenge the newbies, then bring it back down.

Then again, I'm averse to clumping songs together like that. A friend was the DJ for my birthday bash, and he wanted to do a three song hip hop block. It was three songs too long. :?

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#115 Post by remysun » Fri Nov 02, 2007 4:22 am

zzzzoom wrote: Anyone else notice that in this clip, Gene Krupa 'disappears'? He is right next to the trumpets as the camera moves back. Then the next shot is a close up of the trumpets and trombones and Krupa's not there. I guess it made for a more artistic shot to remove him.
He wasn't removed. Krupa is offstage left of the second shot.

In order to include Krupa in the next shot, the director would have had to violate Hollywood's long standing 180 rule, which dictates the continuities in shooting and editing.

Basically, there's an invisible line running left to right in the shot. If the camera crosses that line, you flip the orientation, and what's right is now left, and vice versa. Certain angles work better at covering the action, and that meant Krupa, up against the window, was excluded from the other shot.

I hated how my film professors treated that rule like religion, though. Somebody must have said that the confusion would make people's heads explode. So then it was shocking that Yashujiro Ozu did 180 cuts and 90.... Blah! Ozu put me to sleep, but the practicality of the rule is that decisions are made quicker, only half of a set has to be built, and the crew has somewhere to be tucked away. It made Hollywood efficient. After all, it's a business. But don't tell that to someone who got his PhD calling it art.

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#116 Post by Haydn » Sat Nov 03, 2007 9:05 am

trev wrote:Getting back to the larger issue which I guess is popularity vs critical acclaim ... I think the greater tragedy for music was that financial constraints forced many of the best bands to cater for the popular market so much, rather than reaching their creative potential ...
I don't really see it as a 'tragedy for music', more changing tastes in music. Nothing stopped bands being creative, and I'm sure musicians played what ever they wanted when they could, maybe in private or to small crowds. But if they discovered that they could good money from recording and performing hit songs like 'Moonlight Serenade', can you blame them? Just because you record a hit song doesn't mean you can't be creative as well, and it doesn't stop others being creative.

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#117 Post by trev » Sat Nov 03, 2007 9:44 am

I guess you're right, but I was thinking more of the recordings were are left with. Bands like Chick Webb's, who after the commercial success of Ella's A-Tisket A-Tasket commissioned and [studio] recorded a large number of similar pop-novelty songs, and less hot jazz. Their live recordings show that they had a lot more great dance material than what was recorded in the studio. I don't blame them for it, but selfishly I wish they left us with more "pure jazz" (for lack of a better term) recordings.

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#118 Post by Eyeball » Sat Nov 03, 2007 9:59 am

Quick facts - there was no Tommy Dorsey/Johnny Mercer alliance. Mercer never had to breakaway from Dorsey or anyone.

Stylistically, Sinatra did pretty much the same type of stuff on his own that he had done with Dorsey - ballads, pops and swingers. He simply had more space to do them.

Billy Staryhorn did so work outside of the Ellington orchestra on and under his own name....as did numerous other Ellington 'sidemen'. I had a Strayhorn album done in the late 50s or early 60s. Lots of floating type ballads, a vocal group of some sort and the rest I do not recall.
Will big bands ever come back?

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#119 Post by remysun » Sun Nov 04, 2007 6:02 am

Strayhorn also wrote some musicals before Ellington, as I recall. Could he have pursued that any further, to be mentioned with Porter, Rodgers, Hart, Hammerstein, Adler, Ross, Lerner, Loewe, and Wilson? That would have led to movie adaptations, and made him that much more memorable to the American public.

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#120 Post by trev » Sun Nov 04, 2007 7:49 am

Maybe - if he hadn't died from cancer.

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