Who is your favorite crooner

[wayout]

Sitting at home this evening with a bottle of wine (so forgive this nonsensical thread) and just surfing around YouTube checking out various crooners that I have enjoyed from years gone by as well as current . After hours of surfing I have come to the personal conclusion that my favorite is Andy Williams....what are yours? Here is a list of from one source of the best ten (which Andy does not appear on so I have totally discounted the validity of the list myself but am sharing it for reference): http://voices.yahoo.com/the-ten-best-crooners-all-time-5044388.html

If you care to, I'd be interested to know of any of other members favorites (and post a vid of your favorite song they did).

Here is mine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK4pmJQ6zgM

http://youtu.be/flm4xcOyiCo

My runner up is Matt Monro:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx_ktGU3-tQ

(btw, I am fascinated to find out the origin of "crooner" but google searching in my current condition precludes me from gaining any insights so help me out)

[Guest EXPAT]

I'd have to say Barbra Streisand who of course is a woman, but she croons as well if not better than that list of guys. Here she is in a duet with Tony Bennett with "Smile".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l35BZyj7gv4

[wayout]

Interesting that I didn't consider women as crooners but Expat is so right and there are some great lady crooners...Barbara being the best imho of that list. Really enjoyed that version of "Smile" and it indeed did make me smile.

My runner up of female crooners is of course Judy (long intro but song starts around 2:10):

[AdamSmith]

I'll go with Sinatra, although I still like Bing a lot, and how his voice seemed to take maximum advantage of the not-too-great sound reproduction back in his day. Back to Frank, 'The Summer Wind' -- and the earlier the recording, the better; as with a lot of his stuff, the later versions are over-orchestrated and his singing so much less poetic & bewitching than early on.

Repeating myself, I still can't resist this trio either...

[wayout]

Totally agree about Sinatra...the earlier the better. I couldn't find a great YouTube Bing Crosby but he certainly was amazing.

Loved that video of the trio of Allan Sherman, Dean Martin and Vic Damone

[Guest zipperzone]

I'd vote for Michael Buble although I'm a great Sinatra fan as well.

If we are to include females, Ella Fitzgerald- hands sown!

[RA1]

I have not thought about crooners as such in quite a while. It seems an old fashioned term but then I am an old fashioned guy. I have enjoyed many on wayout's provided list and would include others such as Ray Charles, Dean Martin and as zip suggests, the queen of scat, Ella.

Best regards,

RA1

[wayout]

Michael Buble:

Ella:

[Lucky]

And here I was trying to pick my favorite coroner!

[Guest CharliePS]

Margaret Whiting and Peggy Lee.

[Guest EXPAT]

[AdamSmith]

Margaret Whiting and Peggy Lee.

Yes!

And revisiting my own choice, think I am with wayout that Ella proves God is a she.

...'Black Coffee and Cigarettes'...

[MsGuy]

And here I was trying to pick my favorite coroner!

hahahahahahahahahaha...

[AdamSmith]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoroner

http://www.rankopedia.com/Favorite-Television-Coroner-/-Medical-Examiner/Step1/23938/.htm

[RA1]

And here I was trying to pick my favorite coroner!

Mine is Jerry Francisco who managed to say Elvis died of natural causes with a straight face (if you will pardon the expression). Much later he recanted and recognized polypharmacology as the real cause.

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

Verve: the Sound of America by Richard Havers, review

Mick Brown discovers how Verve records helped to bring jazz stars such as Ella Fitzgerald to a white audience

Ella Fitzgerald: jazz star Photo: Library of Congress

By Mick Brown

1:45PM GMT 08 Nov 2013

The Telegraph

Commenting on the accusation that Louis Armstrong had “sold out” by playing an Uncle Tom figure to gain the approval of white audiences, Billie Holiday once remarked that “of course Pops toms, but he toms from the heart”.

Two of the greatest figures in the history of jazz, Armstrong and Holiday both recorded for Verve, one of America’s premier jazz labels, quite late in their respective careers, at a time when jazz had long since left the ghetto of being “black” music to become justly recognised as “America’s music”. As this exhaustive, weighty and beautifully packaged history of the label demonstrates, Verve – and in particular its founder Norman Granz – was to play a significant role in this transformation.

If we think of the Blue Note label as having the monopoly on modernist cool, embodied by such artists as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Lee Morgan, then Verve, by contrast, oozed a more swell-egant sophistication, building its reputation on “heritage” artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson and Count Basie.

If Blue Note was the music of the clubs, Verve was the music of the concert halls – which was precisely Granz’s intention. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Granz began his career in Los Angeles in the early Forties, promoting club dates with musicians such as Nat King Cole and Lester Young, challenging the colour bar by negotiating with the non-integrated white and black unions to have musicians from both sides working together.

Granz’s dream was to take jazz out of the clubs, to a wider – which is to say white – audience, and in 1944 he staged a concert at the Philharmonic Auditorium, the traditional home in Los Angeles of symphony concerts, as a benefit for alleged gang members who had been arrested during the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. It was the starting point for his Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) tours, which would eventually travel all over the world, providing a stage for virtually every major figure in jazz of the time, from Fitzgerald to Dizzy Gillespie.

Granz released recordings of the JATP on his own labels, Clef and Norgran. But in 1956 he founded Verve, initially as a vehicle for Fitzgerald, whom he was also managing. She was already enjoying success singing bebop and scat; but Granz broadened her appeal by focusing her repertoire on work by popular songwriters. She would later describe her first Verve album, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook as “the turning point in my life”.

Fitzgerald would go on to record seven more “songbook” albums, which established her as the pre-eminent interpreter of what became known as the Great American Songbook. Ira Gershwin noted of her readings of his and his brother George’s work that, “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.” The same formula would be applied to the Canadian pianist Peterson, who also recorded eight “songbooks”, including the music of Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern.

Granz’s personal interest in Verve was to be short-lived. In 1960 he sold the label to MGM to concentrate on managing Fitzgerald and Peterson, promoting the JATP tours, and adding to his collection of Picasso paintings at his home in Switzerland.

Under the direction of Creed Taylor, the label enjoyed enormous success with the organist Jimmy Smith, guitarist Wes Montgomery and pianist Bill Evans. In 1963 Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz’s milestone recording Jazz Samba went to the top of the American charts, launching the bossa nova craze, quickly followed by Getz/Gilberto, which launched “The Girl From Ipanema”, Astrud Gilberto.

In more recent years, the label has existed largely through extensive repackagings of recordings from its golden period.

Richard Havers does an excellent job of contextualising the story of Verve within the broader development of jazz, from its birthplace in the bordellos of New Orleans’s Storyville to its place on the world stage.

The assemblage of glorious archive photographs, tour posters, album sleeves and ephemera is eye-poppingly beautiful, incidentally reminding you of two cardinal rules about jazz musicians in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties. Everybody looked ineffably cool, and everybody smoked.

The plume of smoke curling up into the spotlight, as a symbol of the transporting evanescence of the music, is the great motif of the golden age of jazz.

Verve: the Sound of America, by Richard Havers, 399pp, (Thames & Hudson, RRP £45), is available to order from Telegraph Books for £35 plus £1.35 p&p. Call 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10433312/Verve-the-Sound-of-America-by-Richard-Havers-review.html

[MsGuy]

Billie Holliday

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=rVwxCRy2jfI

[Guest zipperzone]

I am a great Billie Holliday fan -

I remember often hearing her when she was singing in some of the bars in Yonge St. in Toronto, way back when.

But I would have difficulty in branding her as a crooner. Her music was much to soulful and dark for that description.

While we're talking about Crooners, may I add a couple more?

Dinah Washington

Lena Horne

Rosemary Clooney

I considered adding Doris Day, but perhaps she was too "perky" for the category.