Jazz, blues and nostalgia, by Sjaak Roodenburg.
Musical time travel. With: ‘Giant Steps’ from the wonderful musical oeuvre of sound wizard André Popp, despair melancholy from ancient South America by the Padilla Sisters (‘Deseperanza’) and from 1920s Cuba by Orquestra Casas with ‘Me voy pa Santiago’. And ‘our man in Havana’ Perez Prado with the rousing, melancholic ‘Patricia’.
Furthermore, Oscar Peterson singing on his tribute album to Nat King Cole, playing with Clark Terry in an unctuous version of ‘Mack the Knife’, the American doo-wop group The Cadets (‘Stranded in the Jungle’), Shirley Bassey.
Plus a woman (Jo Stafford) with the blues staring out the window at night (‘Smoking my sad cigarette’), Ella Fitzgerald, Little Jimmy Dickens (‘Nighttrain to Memphis’), Dizzy Gillespie (‘Nobody knows’).
As for Billie Holiday: ‘Everybody’s laughin’ – well then, we know enough, it’s going to be: harrowing heartbreak.
And finally: a man who did not play an instrument himself (except for the comb with paper) but who played a leading part in the jazz movement in Chicago: Red Mcenzie and his Mound City Blue Blowers, from the prehistory of jazz: Scott Joplin (‘Euphonic Sounds’), Drs P, Ruby Braff.
