Unpopular music opinions

[jamespowers]

Nearly?? She's awful uke:

The same sentiments I have concerning the Dung Beatles.

I never wanted to marry him. Maybe a roll in the hay at the time, but now.... :eusa_doh: lol

The only thing he is rolling now is a wheelchair. lol
He looks like he has been rolled thousands of times---down a rocky hillside.

 

[Lincsong]

Stinking thread this is. Hate it. This is too much for me


You can ban me now.


Have fun everybody and Happy New Year.

And a happy New Year to you too!

 

[Widebrim]

Wow! Or I should say Yikes... as a person who's made his living making music for the last 30 years I'd like to say something. Personal opinion excluded most of the entertainers being smashed to bits here had a common bond, they defined a decade like it or not. Glenn Miller wasn't horrible, he played the most danceable swing music made in the 40's, and dancing was what people wanted to do. Elvis brought R&B to the white audiences like no one else and gave a voice to the white kids of America. The Beatles were beyond anything we'll ever see in music again, they changed everything (like it or not) about the 60's. All the top bands and writers in the mid sixties used the Beatles as a yardstick to what music was going to do. I have my personal favorites, and some that I really don't care for at all, but do any of them "suck" or deserve to be burned at the stake? I think not...

Well said.

 

[Lincsong]

DJ'ing is NOT a music form.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm an unapologetic fan of Paul Whiteman. The whole "King of Jazz" controversy is a tempest in a teapot -- the word "jazz" in the 1920s was nowhere near as rigidly defined as it is today, and was most commonly used to describe any form of syncopated popular music -- Whiteman was "the King of Jazz" in the same sense that Al Jolson and Sophie Tucker were "jazz singers."

Whiteman was, without question, the dominant figure in the popular music field in the 1920s -- he did more than any other personality to make syncopated dance music acceptable to the mass audience -- and certainly there were members of that audience who went on to buy the records and attend the shows of "real jazz" performers. Without Whiteman, there would have been no Big Band Era, and without that era, there would have been no widespread public platform for many of the "true jazz" musicians of later years.

By 1932, Whiteman had rejected the "King of Jazz" title, and was instead billed in all of his radio broadcasts and personal appearances as "The Dean of Modern American Music," which was meant to emphasize his interest in the intersection between popular and classical styles, and is certainly a more accurate title if one insists on the latter-day, narrow definition of "jazz."

 

[LizzieMaine]

The most danceable Big Band of all time was Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians. If you can remember slow-slow-quick-quick, you can dance to Lombardo's music.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The best band Glenn Miller ever put together was led by Ray Noble.

 

[Blackjack]

. Without Whiteman, there would have been no Big Band Era,

I don't agree Lizzy, Whiteman was King in the 20's but the seeds had been planted for the evolution of swing to happen. Armstrong and many of the Orleans musicians were making their way to Chicago and influencing guys like Goodman, Krupa, and scores of others. Piano men like Freddie Slack were already listening to players like Pinetop Smith and the whole idea of swing was already formulating.

 

[Blackjack]

The best band Glenn Miller ever put together was led by Ray Noble.

My dad played with him a bit in Belgium, that AAF band was pretty darn good.....

 

[LizzieMaine]

Ah -- *but would that music have ever reached a mass audience* without Whiteman making it acceptable to mainstream record buyers and radio listeners in the 1920s? If you go back to the late 1910s, and listen to the most popular orchestras of the time -- Prince's Orchestra, Joseph C. Smith's Orchestra, things like that -- you hear simply chorus after identical chorus. There are no spotlighted soloists, no improvisations, and no creative arrangements. Whiteman, and only Whiteman, changed all that -- he established the pattern that the "modern" dance orchestra would follow for years to come. He brought that style out of the dives, sanitized it, and made it acceptable for hotels and middle-class living rooms. The dozens of mainstream dance orchestras of the twenties -- Art Hickman, Isham Jones, Ben Bernie, Irving Aaronson, Jean Goldkette, etc. etc. etc. -- merely followed in Whiteman's shadow, and carried forward his ideas.

And it was *that* foundation that the swing era was built upon -- the difference was in the arrangements and quality of the instrumentalists, not the general concept. Without Whiteman's innovations, people in 1930 would still have been listening to Prince's Orchestra, the phonograph industry would have collapsed during the Depression, and the Swing Era never would have happened.

 

[Blackjack]

I still stand by if Whiteman hadn't done it some other "white" band would have, it was an evolution that had to happen, Whiteman was in the right place at the right time with the right idea, but that doesn't mean no one else would have picked up that torch if he didn't.

 

[martinsantos]

Noble is just great, wonderful!

And the Dorsey Bros Orch, that Miller helped with arrangements and playing trombone, is one of my favourites.

But Miller had a great civil orchestra. Of course he recorded some things not-so-good - but all bandeleaders did this, didn't they?

And the military one in just marvelous.

The best band Glenn Miller ever put together was led by Ray Noble.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I still stand by if Whiteman hadn't done it some other "white" band would have, it was an evolution that had to happen, Whiteman was in the right place at the right time with the right idea, but that doesn't mean no one else would have picked up that torch if he didn't.

I think Whiteman was also *the right man* at the right time. He was astonishingly open-minded for a classically-trained musician of his era, and he had a unique combination of ability and vision -- he wasn't hidebound by the traditions of the era he'd come out of, and he wasn't blind to the vitality of what was then called "gutter music." He was willing to look for inspiration in areas where "respectable" musicians of his time didn't go. And he had the business sense to know how to market himself and his music to the sort of influential people who could bring it to the attention of the mass audience. For the swing era to ever happen, precisely that combination of traits was required in whoever was to blaze the trail. Art Hickman wasn't that man. Isham Jones wasn't that man. Jean Goldkette wasn't that man. Whiteman was that man.

You could also say that if Edison hadn't invented the light bulb someone else would have -- but that doesn't in any way detract from the fact that *he* did it. I see Whiteman as the Edison of popular music.

 

[LizzieMaine]

What kills the Miller band for me is its particular sort of stylization -- I don't object to stylized bands as such, but that clarinet-lead style that defines "The Miller Style" just pierces right thru my head. And it's as much a gimmick as Lombardo's saxes, Kemp's trumpets, or Kyser's singing song titles.

Ray Noble's 1935-37 American band was hand-picked by Miller, and he was in charge of the overall sound -- and he produced one of the best dance bands of the time *without* the clarinet gimmick, and it's one of my favorites. So I'm not anti-Miller as a matter of policy, I just don't care for the characteristic "Miller Sound." (And I positively hate it when other bands imitate that style -- Ralph Flanagan, blech.)

 

[Harp]

What kills the Miller band for me is its particular sort of stylization -- I don't object to stylized bands as such, but that clarinet-lead style that defines "The Miller Style" just pierces right thru my head. And it's as much a gimmick as Lombardo's saxes, Kemp's trumpets, or Kyser's singing song titles.

Artie Shaw's ok though right, Lizzie?

 

[Blackjack]

Whitemans Rhapsody In Blue did legitimize "jazz" as far as critics went , but just as important was Al Jolson's release of the Jazz Singer. Fortunately, Red Nichols was already hard at work in NY doing the same thing, only in a much more true jazz form. As much as I enjoy Whitemans recordings, and I really do like the band he was as much about real jazz as Jolson was really black. As far as Art Hickman went Whiteman copied from Hickman the idea of adding a saxophone section to the traditional brass section. He also used Hickman's pianist Ferde Grofe to embellish his recordings.
The Miller sound like everything else is a matter of taste, I happen to like it. Always nice debating you Lizzy....

 

[martinsantos]

Artie Shaw had great bands - I like a lot his orch in beggining of 40s. And, of course, he was a great player.

But his interviews are just irritating. The world would be better if he used to talk less and play more... His habit to talk against Miller always made me to play Miller's records again and again.

Artie Shaw's ok though right, Lizzie?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Whitemans Rhapsody In Blue did legitimize "jazz" as far as critics went , but just as important was Al Jolson's release of the Jazz Singer. Fortunately, Red Nichols was already hard at work in NY doing the same thing, only in a much more true jazz form. As much as I enjoy Whitemans recordings, and I really do like the band he was as much about real jazz as Jolson was really black.

Well, as said before, the term "Jazz" in the 1920s didn't have the narrow, rigid meaning that it does today. That meaning didn't really firm up in the mainstream until the rise of the collegiate "Hot Record Society" crowd in the late thirties, and it didn't really become the dominant definition until after WW2. In the twenties, it meant what "pop" means today -- and under that definition it properly applies to both Whiteman and Jolson.

"Swing" went thru a similar evolution. During the "Swing Era" itself, it was common for any popular dance orchestra to be referred to as a "swing band," which explains how leaders as non-jazz-oriented as Vincent Lopez and Sammy Kaye could incorporate the word in their billing. We have to be careful about interpreting the words according to the mainstream definition of the time, not as they're defined today.

Meanwhile, here's the Most Unpopular Opinion Of All. I don't believe in racial essentialism in music, which is so unpopular an idea in these days of rigid intellectual segregation as to be heresy. While the African-American influence was key to the evolution of what we now know as jazz, so also were European and Jewish influences, especially in the use of harmony. Ragtime music, a major precursor of jazz, descended directly from the European march and quickstep. Jazz instrumentation, further, is almost entirely European in origin. Sudhalter's "Lost Chords" goes into this issue in great and exhaustive depth, but I think a strong case can be made that jazz is true "American Melting Pot" music as much as it is "African-American" music.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Artie Shaw had great bands - I like a lot his orch in beggining of 40s. And, of course, he was a great player.

But his interviews are just irritating. The world would be better if he used to talk less and play more...

I agree with this a hundred percent. However talented he was - and he was -- Artie was also a sanctimonious blowhard, and I have always felt very sorry for all of his many wives.

As far as his music goes, I've always thought his band was terribly underrated when it came to ballads. Everybody always talks about their hot stuff, which I can take or leave, but they were really a wonderful band for ballads, especially when Helen Forrest was the vocalist. Their record of "Day In, Day Out," from 1939, is one of my favorites, and their version of "All The Things You Are" is the definitive recording of one of the greatest American songs of the 20th Century.

 

[Amie]

I always thought Elvis Costello was pretty bad and hyped.