2. Blossom DearieSings Comden And Green
I adore this record. This speaks to my interest in pop music as it sits closer to jazz. She was a pop singer and jazz singer, and these tunes are part of the repertoire of jazz ballads. You know, people like Chet Baker playing them, or someone like Blossom Dearie singing them. I knew almost all of these tunes before I heard this record, and I couldn’t believe they’re all written by Comden and Green. And she plays them so matter-of-factly – there’s not a lot of artistic embellishment in them. She’s a great piano player, always, but it’s like she just sat down at the piano and just belted out these tunes. She plays them so lightly and with beautiful spirit, and I love it very much. And her voice sounds fucking amazing.
Comden and Green wrote all the lyrics, but among the songwriters here is Leonard Bernstein.
Right right right, that makes sense. I didn’t even know that. I have the sheet music for all these tunes, and I play them all the time, but never made the connection. Every morning I spend a couple of hours playing jazz standards, and in fact one of them I’m getting ready to record is ‘Some Other Time’ from this record [by Bernstein].
I imagine if Leonard Bernstein wrote it then it must have been for a theatre piece [On the Town]. Soundtracks from that era created great pop tunes from films, theatre pieces, Broadway. I’m very interested in Broadway themes from that era, it’s just some of the best music I’ve ever heard, great tunes. And they then get played by people like Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane, people as out as that.
