[lbo-talk] Just wondering...

Mark Bennett bennett.mab at gmail.com
Tue Mar 29 00:29:11 PDT 2011


Oh, sure, the influences went both ways. You can really hear a lot of Billie in Lester Young and Miles, or even in Art Farmer's ballads. I hadn't thought about Sinatra in this context, but I'm sure he's there. His phrasing and timing were his greatest talents. Seeing Frank and Miles chatting in club at 3 in the morning must have been interesting. Those were the days.

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 12:11 AM, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>wrote:


> At 11:53 PM 3/28/2011, Mark Bennett wrote:
>
> Billie said many times that she tried to sing like a horn, and her
>> phrasing
>> clearly reveals that intention.
>>
>
>
> That went both ways. Sinatra's singing influenced the way Miles Davis and
> Lester Young played. Here's Holiday and Young
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtgUbJN8oPE
>
> And here's some jazz players on Sinatra:
>
> http://www.jazzsingers.com/FrankSinatra/
>
>
> From night to night, (Sinatra) did the tunes differently. You really had to
> be on your toes because he was changing lyrics...if we were in a certain
> town, he'd slip a word in there that related to that town. He'd change up
> his phrasing, sometimes he'd go ahead, sometimes, he'd pull way back. He'd
> want tempos to be different.
>
> It was a great learning experience as an instrumentalist to listen to him
> especially on the ballads. He had a tendency to pull way back on the time,
> and then just before you think, oh oh, it's going to fold, he'd be right on
> it. That push-pull thing. Miles was like that too. He was influenced heavily
> by Frank's ballad singing.
>
> .....In the '60s, I played at Jilly's, a club in New York owned by Frank's
> friend, Jilly Rizzo. Miles used to come in there because Miles liked to go
> where the hip stuff was happening. He would come in there with a couple of
> people and sit at the bar.
>
> I remember one time when Miles came into Jilly's and hung out with Frank.
> That's right Miles and Sinatra! It was kind of curious to see these two men
> at two or three in the morning having a few drinks, sitting at the piano bar
> right next to me engaged in some deep conversation.
>
> ....With his ballad stylings, he really told a story when he sang a tune.
> When you listen to different records, you can hear the same tune done
> sometimes with a similar orchestration but his interpretation would always
> be really free. I think that's what Miles and a lot of cats dug about him.
> You could hear a lot of that in the tunes that Lester Young was recording at
> the same time. There's a lot of similarities in the presence, the purity,
> the way they deliver a tune, with so much meaning.
>
>
>
>
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