LizzieMaine
Bartender
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- Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
A woman I worked with a couple of years ago said that her grandmother had a huge crush on Liberace. She thought that he was just so elegant and classy. This amused her because, even as a kid, she could tell, 'Gramma, I'm pretty sure he would not be interested.'
Generation gap aside, the whole idiom of popular music pre- vs. post-rock and roll is so radically different in its approach, conception and performance, they might as well be two different media. As someone who's interested in both, I have to practically engage different parts of my brain to appreciate them. And learning to like older music, I never had an epiphany or a love-at-first-sound experience (well, maybe Ruth Etting). It was a slow, growing appreciation because I was interested in older stuff in general. I still don't "get" a lot of jazz music, even the stuff I like. Note to the jazz-curious who are wading into the listening experience: Don't read the liner notes. Seriously, they'll just make you feel as though you like all the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Hugh Panasie.
The first record I remember hearing was a novelty tune called "Does Your Spearmint Lose its Flavor On The Bedpost Overnight," which I played over and over again on a little kiddie phonograph until one day it disappeared. Most of what we had around the house was of the Billy Vaughn/Ray Conniff style of early-sixties 'easy listening' music, but I developed a taste for jazzier stuff farily early on. I had a little bedside radio and would tune in stuff like Joe Franklin's show on WOR, the Make Believe Ballroom on WNEW, and a show out of Baltimore hosted by this gravel-voiced character who played a lot of loud swing. And then in my early teens I started listening to "Jazz Revisited" on public radio, and I started to think analytically about what I was hearing.
I have never liked bop, or "progressive jazz" of the fifties/sixties style all that much. I don't *dislike* it, but much of it strikes me as music you listen to "for your own good" rather than music you listen to because you get a kick out of it. I settled pretty early on on dance bands of the '30s and prewar swing as "my music," and have pretty much stuck with it since I was a teen.
Ruth Etting is great stuff. So is Annette Hanshaw and Marion Harris.