Burt Bacharach Day

Finally, clips from the Burt Bacharach - Elvis Costello collaboration have made it to youtube. It's a good combination: Burt's melodies and harmonies with pungent, hard-hitting lyrics by Elvis.


Costello's lyrics, for me personally, are right on; I have difficulty relating to the more sentimental (and also at times masochistic) lyrics of Hal David. Anyone who has lived through the experience of this tune, "The House Is Empty Now", can certainly relate.

Reg Kehoe And His Marimba Queens

Watch the bass player in this Soundie - and wonder if these could be transgender marimba queens. . .

It's Trad, Dad a.k.a. Riffin' With Red Allen

Trad, dad, 1920's style, performed in the 50's by an all-star band including Kid Ory (among the first New Orleans innovators to record this music), Henry "Red" Allen, Jack Teagarden, the legendary Lil Hardin-Armstrong, Gene Krupa and more, still sounds . . . wonderful.



Since I just can't get enough with one truncated clip (hey, if you know where the rest of the Teagarden-Allen-Krupa performance is, point me to it - can't find it on YouTube or Daily Motion), here's another one: "Red" Allen's blues-drenched trumpet solo and vocal on St. James Infirmary.



OK, that's not enough. I want more! So here's some ecstatic swing. Red sings Earl Hines' Rosetta, backed by Coleman Hawkins (tenor sax), Pee Wee Russell (clarinet), Vic Dickenson (trombone), Rex Stewart (cornet), Milt Hinton (bass) and Jo Jones (drums).

Happy Birthday, Duke Ellington

Today, we raise our half-filled glasses to Duke's six decades in music. Then we drain them listening to his music.

There are so many great clips of Duke and his orchestra, I couldn't even begin to post all of them. Here's a rare one: the incomparable composer/arranger Billy Strayhorn plays with the band and solos on "Take The A Train".



We follow this with "The Hawk Talks" from 1955. Louis Bellson kicks serious derriere with a cool drum solo, giving Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich a run for their do-re-me.



The showman on the trumpet is the marvelous multi-instrumentalist Ray Nance. . . yes, the same Ray Nance who turns up playing swinging jazz violin alongside Stefane Grappelli and others.

Next up, a slice of living history: Duke and his orchestra in Symphony In Black, one of a series of artfully photographed one-reelers produced by Paramount Pictures in 1935. It features a very young Billie Holiday, singing beautifully in the role of a woman brutally scorned by an ex-lover mean enough to give Pollyanna the mood indigo blues.



A film history note: clearly aiming for "Best Short Subject" Oscars, Paramount created some strong short films in 1935. Manhattan Rhythm, a creatively edited compendium of real-life New York scenes, and the evocative, dreamlike and sensual Spring Night, starring Nana Gollner and David Lichine of the Ballets Russes Of Monte Carlo, are two other memorable Paramount shorts from this period.

And now I'm going to listen to that Ellington Uptown CD. . . Thanks, Duke!

Follow The Bouncing Ball

By all means, forget your tribulations and sing along through this Fleischer Screen Song cartoon, Kitty From Kansas City, co-starring Betty Boop and Rudy Vallee.

One Great Psychotronic Fleischer Cartoon Deserves Another

Betty Boop's Museum (1932)

Ready for a cartoon starring horny statues and skeletons? Well, the skeletons are hornier in a 1934 Krazy Kat cartoon in which a gay skeleton, dancing with Napoleon, cops a feel on Nappy's rear - but this still fills the bill. One of those great inexplicable cartoon moments comes when a skeleton (with a Bluto voice) points at Betty and demands "SING!"

About that Krazy Kat cartoon. . . one of the perpetrators of that classic gag (maybe he animated it) was the great Manny Gould, a few years before contributing fabulous animation to Warner Brothers for. . . guess who, Bob Clampett!

Another Great Psychotronic Cartoon

This truly psychotronic (psychoactive?) cartoon, Betty Boop in Mask-A-Raid, epitomizes everything I love about the Fleischer Studio, circa 1930-1933.



I consider the part (at 2:43) when two "Mickey Rat" characters behind huge weird masks sing sublime gibberish right up there among the greatest moments in the history of world cinema.