J.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Dennis Claxton" <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2011 12:11:50 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Just wondering...
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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