Tag: Something For Thursday

The classic movie The Philadelphia Story — the tale of a man still in love with his divorced wife, with said wife still being in love with him although she doesn’t realize it even as she prepares to remarry — was remade in the 1950s as a musical, called High Society. In truth, that’s the version of the story I know best, as High Society is one of my parents’ favorite movies. In the original, the leads are played by Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and Jimmy Stewart; in the musical, we have Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and Frank Sinatra. Now, Bing Crosby’s merits as a romantic lead may be open to some debate, but High Society works pretty well, even if some of the nuance of the original Philadelphia Story script was lost in order to accommodate the new film’s musical numbers. Some of these are very, very fine songs indeed. Here are a few.

In a flashback to the honeymoon of Tracy Samantha Lord (Kelly) and C.K. Dexter Haven (Crosby), we hear “True Love” (which I believe is also the only time Grace Kelly ever sang on screen):

The film explains the musical content partly by positing Dexter Haven as a songwriter who is organizing a local jazz festival in Newport, Rhode Island. Thus the presence of Louis Armstrong and his band in the film, sometimes acting as a Greek chorus of sorts and goosing things along. Here, Louis prompts Dexter to sing the song he once wrote for Samantha:

The jazz festival all yields a song where Crosby and Armstrong explain what jazz is all about, in “Now You Has Jazz”:

I mention above that the film includes Frank Sinatra, so of course, he has to get into the act with the film’s music. He plays one of the two gossip reporters sent by SPY Magazine to cover the Tracy Samantha Lord wedding, and he’s generally disgusted by the antics of the rich and wealthy — until, in the course of getting to know some of them, he learns that they have their own real problems. Anyway, here’s an early comedic number with Sinatra and Celeste Holm wondering “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”:

Sinatra also gets, of course, his own soulful love song, “You’re Sensational”, which he sings to Grace Kelly:

The film’s best number brings Crosby and Sinatra together for the only time in the film. They’re at a party and neither is particularly enthusiastic about the proceedings, so both duck into the bar for some frank talk about the rich and the gossip that surrounds them. Here’s “Well Did You Evah”:

This is the movie’s only real show-stopper. I love the moment when Sinatra stops Crosby with the line “Don’t dig that kind of croonin’, chum,” to which Crosby responds, “You must be one of the newer fellas.”

The Philadelphia Story is probably the better film, but High Society is not at all without its charms.

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Who doesn’t like a good rock ballad? People who are dumb, that’s who. But people who are smart and cool like a good rock ballad. That’s how it works.

Here’s ZZTop, with “Rough Boy”.

“Ain’t got no rap, ain’t got no line, but if you’ll give me just a minute I’ll be feelin’ fine….”

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Jim Croce’s birthday was the other day — or, it would have been, had he not died in a plane crash just six days before my second birthday. I discovered Croce about fifteen years ago, and I’ve loved him ever since. This is my favorite of Croce’s many wonderful songs. Here’s “Operator”.

“You can keep the dime….”

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And another prodigal regular feature round these parts returns. I may have used this before, but it’s utterly gorgeous and I can reuse stuff whenever I want. Here is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performing “Shenandoah”.

This recording was fascinatingly used by Oliver Stone during the closing cast credits for his film Nixon…but I first heard it in the hands of my own college choir during my freshman year.

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Dougie Maclean….

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Yes, I’ll still be doing my Thursday offerings, even as I do the Daily Dose of Christmas. Here is Herbert von Karajan conducting the last movement of Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 in D.

This is one of the most spirited movements of symphonic music I know, with a wonderful second subject (starting at the 1:25 mark) that comes back later in full flower. I love the mysterious-sounding section in the middle of the movement (roughly around the 4:30 mark) and the way that section just quietly and logically leads right back into a recapitulation of the spirited manner in which the movement started. (Pay attention to 4:51 to 5:12.) And finally, that wonderful, wonderful coda, with the final build starting at 7:52, those descending scales in the brass starting at 8:17, and the way it all ends up in the trumpets at 8:33 — how I wished, in my trumpet playing days, to get to do this symphony!

Oh well. I can still listen to it, at least.

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I’ve been trying to come up with a rationale for this being apropos of Thanksgiving, but…well, I can see it, and if you can’t, then thbbbbpppt! Here is “The Egg Travels”, from the Disney film Dinosaur. Music by James Newton Howard.

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

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Here’s a bit of film music from quite recently. It’s from the film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and it scores a scene where Harry Potter and a number of the kids at Hogwarts decide that their professors aren’t doing enough to train them against the Dark Arts, and that therefore they should undertake such training themselves, with Harry himself teaching them. Much of the music in the Potter films tends to be the kind of thing you’d expect from movies about wizards and magic and whatnot, especially when most of the themes in the series sprang from the pen of John Williams, who scored the first three films. But this one, the fifth, was scored by Nicholas Hopper, who took a decidedly different approach, as we can hear in this cue. It’s not heavy or portentous at all; in fact, it’s some of the most optimistic music written in the whole series. Here’s “Dumbledore’s Army”.

(This is actually a recreation of the cue by a person using a synthesizer, but it’s really pretty amazingly close in sound to the original composition for orchestra, and the music’s forward-looking nature really comes through.)

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Nettl used this the other day, and it’s sufficiently good for me to pass on to you all. Here’s the first movement of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto:

This has been one of my favorite concerted works — in fact, one of my favorite works, period — ever since I first heard it many years ago. Some of the things in this movement that always strike me are its lack of an introduction (the soloist comes in, playing the main melody of the movement, in the second bar), the placement of the cadenza in the middle of the movement instead of toward the end, and one of my very favorite passages in all of classical music, which comes at about the 2:50 moment, when the soloist climbs to a very high note, holds it a bit, and then arpeggiates back down to a very low note, which he then sustains while the clarinets play a lovely countermelody. It’s not only a gorgeous moment, but an ingenious one as well.

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Several early-morning starts at The Store this week, and a very full “To Do” list, have me feeling a bit irritable, so maybe a mood-lightener is called for. So here’s Kermit the Frog singing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”.

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