Since I was a teenager, my favorite music has been from the Great American Songbook - which isn't, as ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
waxjism thought, a physical book, but a term for the canon of American jazz standards, show tunes, and popular songs from the early 20th century.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I didn't always know that's what the name of the genre, or this body of work, was; I discovered it through a compilation of the great ladies of vocal jazz (Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne) and subsequent purchases of more of their albums; I only gradually learned the terms "jazz standard", "vocal jazz", "Great American Songbook", etc. The realization has been slow and gradual, and when I was young the only way to discover more of it was to look for CDs by the names I recognized from the compilations.
More recently, however, I gradually came to conceptualize this music in terms of the composers and lyricists who wrote it and not just the singers (although the singer is an important element, because if you just take my list of composers you could be talking about someone who listened to exclusively Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby or Tony Bennett - and I'm not interested in male vocalists, really, although I'm open to maybe giving them a shot later, once I've found all the important female ones!), and a couple of years ago I went through my collection with the aid of Google and Wikipedia and made a list of the writers of my favorite songs so that I could investigate more of their work. I'm not 100% finished with chasing down their songs, but with the aid of some greatest hits compilations I was able to rank them as follows:
There are more songs I love by all of these people and a whole collection of other songwriters and lyricists responsible for somewhere between one and five songs in my library with a ♥ next to them (which is more a like than a love, you understand). I started trying to make a list and rank them three times in a row before I started thinking I needed a card catalog to cross-reference, because apart from the iconic duos above, most of the songwriters and lyricists collaborated with a variety of different people.
I actually did start making a card catalog yesterday, after a couple of days of trying to just write out lists, only to quickly decide it needed to be a database for searching and sorting. I opened the open source office suite and started to make a spreadsheet, only to realize that there was no good way to include all the titles, all the composers and lyricists, and all the artists in one spreadsheet: if a row is a song title, and one column is composer and one is lyricist and one is original release date etc, but there are a bunch of significant recordings by significant vocalists - I asked my wife, who learned more about Office more recently than me, and she said there definitely is a way to do this in databases, but it's complicated and probably involves having linked spreadsheets for example, and the simpler solution would be to make each row a recording - at least this way they have the same title so when you sort by that column they'll stack up together, she said. I agreed that I didn't want to learn that much about making databases right now just to catalog an important subset of my music collection, but if a row is a recording instead of a song, I might as well just use the metadata tags on my music files.
My desktop music player, Quod Libet, comes with what I think is the most robust metadata-tag-management software in open source, and it's not too hard to do this; you can simultaneously edit the tags of big batches of songs, which is convenient. The albums and artists in my music collection are all tagged correctly pretty much, but the tags for composer, lyricist, and original release year were missing from most of it, so it's still essentially about as much work as if I'd started making a database of them from scratch.
It's fun to do, though, and it's not like I have a deadline to finish quickly. It's also quite interesting to listen to bits of the genre in chronological order of original release year, which happened when I went down the lists of jazz and blues standards on Wikipedia. The 20s and 30s jazz standards are full of songs I love, and the percentage I like goes down and down until it's nearly vanished by the 1950s, and then jazz after that bounced into the experimental stratosphere and left me behind.
Incidentally, I found quite a few shirts referring to this genre on Redbubble last week (it always makes me sad that you can't get band shirts for jazz and classical standards! Wouldn't one from The Planets by Holst be amazing too, by the way?), mostly saying things like "I ♥ VOCAL JAZZ" and "ELLA & BILLIE & NINA & SARAH", but they're just text, which is not nearly as cool as a band shirt should be. At least there should be a nice logo or lettermark. (There are some shirts of the individual artists - the bigger ones anyway. They also don't usually look as cool as band shirts.)
waxjism thought, a physical book, but a term for the canon of American jazz standards, show tunes, and popular songs from the early 20th century. As I mentioned in a previous post, I didn't always know that's what the name of the genre, or this body of work, was; I discovered it through a compilation of the great ladies of vocal jazz (Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne) and subsequent purchases of more of their albums; I only gradually learned the terms "jazz standard", "vocal jazz", "Great American Songbook", etc. The realization has been slow and gradual, and when I was young the only way to discover more of it was to look for CDs by the names I recognized from the compilations.
More recently, however, I gradually came to conceptualize this music in terms of the composers and lyricists who wrote it and not just the singers (although the singer is an important element, because if you just take my list of composers you could be talking about someone who listened to exclusively Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby or Tony Bennett - and I'm not interested in male vocalists, really, although I'm open to maybe giving them a shot later, once I've found all the important female ones!), and a couple of years ago I went through my collection with the aid of Google and Wikipedia and made a list of the writers of my favorite songs so that I could investigate more of their work. I'm not 100% finished with chasing down their songs, but with the aid of some greatest hits compilations I was able to rank them as follows:
- Cole Porter, writing primarily for Broadway from the 1910s-1950s, wrote about 9 of my absolute favorite songs and at least sixteen more that I love, including "You're the Top", "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)", "Anything Goes", and "I Get a Kick Out of You".
- Harold Arlen (anglicized from Hyman or Chaim Arluck, a Jewish immigrant), wrote 8 of my absolute favorite songs for Broadway from 1929 through the early 1960s, including "Come Rain or Come Shine", "It's Only a Paper Moon", and "Stormy Weather" (also "Over the Rainbow", which isn't one of my favorites but has been considered the greatest American song of the 20th century by some songwriters' guild or other).
- George and Ira Gershwin (Jewish, but that's their original name) wrote 6 of my favorites, partly for Broadway and partly for movies, from the 1920s-40s, including "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off", "Summertime" (immortal duet of Ella & Louis Armstrong), and "Nice Work if You Can Get It".
- Irving Berlin (anglicized from Israel Bailin, another Jewish immigrant), wrote 4 of my favorites, partly for Broadway, from the 1910s through the 1950s, including "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" and "This Year's Kisses".
- Rodgers & Hart, the songwriting duo of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, wrote 4 of my favorites for musicals and movies from the 1920s-40s, including "The Lady is a Tramp" and "Ev'rything I've Got".
- Jerome Kern, also Jewish, wrote 3 of my favorites from the 1900s-1930s, including "The Way You Look Tonight".
- Fats Waller & Andy Razaf wrote two, "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Honeysuckle Rose" in the 1920s and 30s.
There are more songs I love by all of these people and a whole collection of other songwriters and lyricists responsible for somewhere between one and five songs in my library with a ♥ next to them (which is more a like than a love, you understand). I started trying to make a list and rank them three times in a row before I started thinking I needed a card catalog to cross-reference, because apart from the iconic duos above, most of the songwriters and lyricists collaborated with a variety of different people.
I actually did start making a card catalog yesterday, after a couple of days of trying to just write out lists, only to quickly decide it needed to be a database for searching and sorting. I opened the open source office suite and started to make a spreadsheet, only to realize that there was no good way to include all the titles, all the composers and lyricists, and all the artists in one spreadsheet: if a row is a song title, and one column is composer and one is lyricist and one is original release date etc, but there are a bunch of significant recordings by significant vocalists - I asked my wife, who learned more about Office more recently than me, and she said there definitely is a way to do this in databases, but it's complicated and probably involves having linked spreadsheets for example, and the simpler solution would be to make each row a recording - at least this way they have the same title so when you sort by that column they'll stack up together, she said. I agreed that I didn't want to learn that much about making databases right now just to catalog an important subset of my music collection, but if a row is a recording instead of a song, I might as well just use the metadata tags on my music files.
My desktop music player, Quod Libet, comes with what I think is the most robust metadata-tag-management software in open source, and it's not too hard to do this; you can simultaneously edit the tags of big batches of songs, which is convenient. The albums and artists in my music collection are all tagged correctly pretty much, but the tags for composer, lyricist, and original release year were missing from most of it, so it's still essentially about as much work as if I'd started making a database of them from scratch.
It's fun to do, though, and it's not like I have a deadline to finish quickly. It's also quite interesting to listen to bits of the genre in chronological order of original release year, which happened when I went down the lists of jazz and blues standards on Wikipedia. The 20s and 30s jazz standards are full of songs I love, and the percentage I like goes down and down until it's nearly vanished by the 1950s, and then jazz after that bounced into the experimental stratosphere and left me behind.
Incidentally, I found quite a few shirts referring to this genre on Redbubble last week (it always makes me sad that you can't get band shirts for jazz and classical standards! Wouldn't one from The Planets by Holst be amazing too, by the way?), mostly saying things like "I ♥ VOCAL JAZZ" and "ELLA & BILLIE & NINA & SARAH", but they're just text, which is not nearly as cool as a band shirt should be. At least there should be a nice logo or lettermark. (There are some shirts of the individual artists - the bigger ones anyway. They also don't usually look as cool as band shirts.)
