Search - Frank Sinatra;Billy Holliday;Nat King Cole;Louis Armstrong;Ella Fitzgerald;and others :: Late Night Jazz

Late Night Jazz Our second jazz collection is deliberately easy listening; relaxing and enjoyable, with strong melodies and a gentle swing. Sinatra, Holliday, Ella, Nat and many more stars in possibly the ultimate fantasy night club programme! Relax into the small wee hours with numbers like Sweet Lorraine, or enjoy April in Paris, and dream a little dream with Armstrong. Even in its rate of development, jazz is truly the music of the 20th century. It is hard to believe that this music, in all its awesome diversity, is only a century old. It has a long and complicated history, full of gods and heroes, saints and martyrs. Diversity, though, can create confusion. The word jazz , once so simple and direct, now describes many sounds, many kinds of musical thought. Browsing through a record shop or looking at the forthcoming attractions in a local club, it is hard to know what kind of music will result when this jazz attraction or that one takes the stand. Jazz is indeed a unique mode of expression. For the first, and arguably the only time, in the history of modern Western music, the performer and the composer are united as one, creator and interpreter fused in a single unit. The result is an expansive musical culture, international, with a virtuoso tradition admired around the world; a degree of artistry truly amazing in its scope and diversity. Its past is constantly uniting with its present to fuse an ever-changing future, with every new artist the sum of everything that s gone before. Ultimately, the jazzman is telling us not about somebody else s feelings and experiences, but his own, and, through our understanding, ours. For a music that was at first seen as reactionary but became accepted on its own terms, it is sobering to realize just how much jazz infiltrated and influenced the mainstream of popular music. Nat King Cole made a smooth transition from jazz pianist to become one of the most outstanding popular singers of the 20th century. Frank Sinatra imbued his singing with an innate jazz feel, an inheritance from his time with the Tommy Dorsey band. Stan Getz could bring his talent to the world of the Bossa Nova in the early 1960s and one did not feel uncomfortable in the process. The music on our collection of Late Night Jazz is relaxing, enjoyable listening; melody plays a prominent role and it gently swings. Angry, rebellious sounds can be heard elsewhere. The recordings featured here date from that late 1930s through the 1940s a period that coincides with what is generally regarded as The Golden Age of Popular Song. From around 1930 to 1950, many of our greatest standards and evergreens were written. These years saw popular music s most celebrated composers producing their finest work. Our program features such illustrious names as Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Vernon Duke, Gus Kahn, Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer, Kurt Weill and Harold Arlen. And consider for a moment the list of artists represented here: it reads like a Who s Who of popular music, from the soulful stylings of Billie Holiday to the soft, gentle sound of George Shearing; from the deep, rich voice of Billy Eckstine to the elegance of Lester Young; from the unique pairing of Ella Fitzgerald with Louis Armstrong to the swinging ease of Frank Sinatra.