The Great American Songbook

I mentioned the other day that Ella Fitzgerald recorded a set of albums featuring selected songs by the most favored songwriters of the so-called Great American Songbook. I have been listening to albums 2-8 this past week to make notes on the works of the songwriters in question. As usual, I didn't like everything on the albums, but within them so far I've found that between them, indeed, they have written the majority of my favorite jazz/blues songs, and here I have added all the new-to-me songs that I thought were great on listening (given my sources, the default here is Ella Fitzgerald, who has recorded more of them):

( Cole Porter: )

( Rodgers & Hart: )

( Irving Berlin: )

( Gershwins: )

( Harold Arlen: )

( Jerome Kern: )

I like Duke Ellington, but his music is mostly long tracks with instrumental solos and isolated lyrical bits, not vocal-first like many catchy songs. I think I'll have to listen to the album quite a bit more to pick out my preferences beyond the two songs I recognized already before I started it, "The A Train" and "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)", both legitimate bangers. After listening to the Johnny Mercer album, I would also grant 'great song' status to two of those as well, "Too Marvelous for Words" and "If You Were Mine", and the latter is a legitimate top-tier jazz standard sung by everybody.

So if having written two songs which I consider great is the standard for inclusion in the above list, then Fats Waller should also make the cut, for "Ain't Misbehavin'", "Honeysuckle Rose", and anecdotally also "I Can't Give You Anything But Love", which Waller and his lyricist partner Andy Razaf both were repeatedly heard to say they had had to sell for money (it was attributed to Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields when it first appeared in a Broadway revue and then a Broadway play in 1928). Plus "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Honeysuckle Rose" are both better than "If You Were Mine" and "Too Marvelous for Words", although I can't say they're better than "It Don't Mean a Thing" (especially as sung by Ella).

I combed through all my female jazz vocalist albums to pick out favorite songs by songwriters or lyricists other than the above, and there were no repeat appearances in the 27 songs aside from Waller & Razaf's.

Billie Holiday wrote multiple much-recorded jazz standards, most notably "Fine and Mellow", which is on my list, and "Don't Explain", which is not on my list even though I think every female vocalist ever recorded it because it's an extremely upsetting song about a person being cheated on who insists they don't mind because they have no bargaining power in their relationship and simply wants the cheater not to leave them. Yuck. I admit that musically it's nice. Maybe Weird Al or someone could save the melody with some new lyrics on a different topic. She also wrote "Tell Me More and More (And Then Some)", which Nina Simone later hit out of the park. Nina Simone also wrote multiple bangers, including "Do I Move You?", the fiery "Mississippi Goddamn" and the much-covered "Four Women", as well as adapting "I Want A Little Sugar in My Bowl".

It seemed a bit parochial to me too, until I thought of Stargåte and now I'm just amused

According to the "Diacritics are Fancy" meme documented here on Language Log - see also this comment to the post:

people make distinctions between movies (low-brow productions), cinema (mid-brow), cinéma (high-brow) and činémâ (sub-200 IQ individuals need not apply)

... that means Stargåte would be high brow and Mötörhead is probably genius only (I can't think of any brands with 3 decorative diacritics, so perhaps two might indicate the 140 'genius' cutoff).

Nero Wolfe: The Black Mountain and Before Midnight

• "I will not say that to him a woman was more important than a sauce—he could not be accused of ever neglecting a sauce—but he had a warm eye for women."


• I found Wolfe standing with his arms folded and his lips compressed, glaring at a vehicle that deserved it.


• We were locked in a cell with two cots which were already occupied by fifty thousand others. Twenty thousand of the others were fleas, and another twenty thousand were bedbugs, but I never found out what the other ten thousand were.


• "Why should he?"
  
  "He shouldn't. But a man with his frontal lobes pushed back like that is unpredictable."


• a German who thought he could speak English but was mistaken

—Rex Stout, The Black Mountain

• He was gruff, but he would be gruff saying his prayers.


• eavesdropping is vulgar if you can't distinguish words, and I soon found that I couldn't


• You might think that after putting up with Wolfe for so long I would be acclimatized, and I am up to a point, but he keeps breaking records.


• It is always best to regard journalists as friends if they are not actually standing on your nose.


• "I don't like the look on your face, but I seldom do."

—Rex Stout, Before Midnight