Passages

[colinr0380]

Randall and Hopkirk was shown on BBC2 in the 90s, probably in the 6.00-7.30pm slot that often had the Simpsons, the Fresh Prince, and various Star Treks. Kenneth's son, Nick, was in a 90s indie band and now has a lovely music programme on CBeebies.

I wonder if that was down to the comic parody effect of the 1990s, or whether the re-runs fed into it, as I remember post-repeats of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) that Reeves and Mortimer did their own semi-parody version of the show later on. Although the ultimate version of this was when The Time Tunnel showed on BBC2, I think after the "Drunk in Time" sketches with Alexei Sayle and Peter Capaldi(! I wish he'd played his Doctor Who that way!)

[hearthesilence]

JD Souther.

He co-wrote hits for the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and Don Henley like "New Kid in Town," "Best of My Love," "Faithless Love" and "The Heart of the Matter" (as well as quite a few other songs for them). He had a big hit with "You're Only Lonely" and (with James Taylor) "Her Town Too."

He had a later career as an actor in television and film, starting with a role on the prime-time series Thirtysomething in 1989. He subsequently was best known for appearing on the first season of Nashville in 2012, with his other parts including small roles in the films like Mike Nichols's Postcards From the Edge and Steven Spielberg's Always.

[hearthesilence]

Kathryn Grant Crosby, best known for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Anatomy of a Murder.

[hearthesilence]

Nick Gravenites.

A Chicago blues musician who relocated to San Francisco in the 1960s, he co-founded the Electric Flag and wrote or co-wrote songs for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band ("Born in Chicago" and "East-West") and Janis Joplin ("Work Me Lord"). He later produced the 1971 hit “One Toke Over The Line.”

[Fiery Angel]

Kathryn Grant Crosby, best known for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Anatomy of a Murder.

probably best known as Bing Crosby's widow

[mizo]

Culture critic and philosopher Fredric Jameson

[hearthesilence]

Kathryn Grant Crosby, best known for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Anatomy of a Murder.

probably best known as Bing Crosby's widow

Bing who?

In all seriousness, I think it's interesting how Crosby's place in music history seemed to precipitously decline in appreciation right after his death. If you've read up on him, you'll get it, but otherwise compared to someone like Frank Sinatra (who belongs to a generation later to be fair), there's been a lot less written on him and far less in terms of well-curated and well-promoted reissues. If I had to wager a guess, I don't think pop music pre-dating the rock era really resonates that much beyond its original audience (or maybe musical theater listeners). If I do get sent to that stuff, it's usually for whatever value it has with regards to jazz singing.

[hearthesilence]

Jazz tenor saxophonist and composer Benny Golson, per social media. He was 95 - one of the last remaining greats from a bygone era.

Made his name with Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie, especially as a composer, and he formed a marvelous group called the Jazztet with the great jazz trumpeter Art Farmer in 1959. Their first album may be the greatest one Golson ever cut - they split up in 1962 with Golson focusing on studio gigs and television scoring (he worked on a lot of popular shows at the time), but he and Farmer did revive the group in the '80s and Golson was touring regularly even after he hit 90.

Some may recognize him from Spielberg's The Terminal, which had a plot device about Golson's appearance in perhaps the most celebrated photograph in jazz, "A Great Day in Harlem," a group portrait of prominent jazz musicians taken in 1958. Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) travels to the U.S. to get Golson's autograph as Golson was one of seven surviving musicians in that photo. With Golson's passing, only Sonny Rollins is left.

[Feego]

Norman Chui

Norman Chui's wife has also died after his funeral. She was just 43.

[Lemmy Caution]

Marshall Allen of Sun Ra Arkestra fame still performing at 100.
Sonny Rollins 94.
Not sure if any other jazz musicians left who recorded in the 1950's.

As for Bing Crosby, crooning is rather out of date. I thought he was still well-known for holiday songs, White Christmas and Irish songs for St Patrick's Day. Did you know that Otis Redding's Try a Little Tenderness was originally an early 30's tune, with a hit version by Bing in 1933, in his early pre-crooning style. The song was later picked up by Aretha Franklin, inspiring Otis' rendition.

[Lemmy Caution]

Mercury Morris, speedy back who won two Super Bowls with Miami, dies at 77
Morris was a star on the Dolphins’ 1972 squad, still the only team in NFL history to go undefeated.
Had a few stellar seasons on a mini-dynasty. Derailed by injuries (and later cocaine).
That Csonka-Morris backfield one of the best ever. Great nickname too.
Just slightly before my time. I was a tyke and aware of the Dolphin dynasty but not really clued in yet. Morris's career 5.1 yards per carry on par with Jim Brown (5.2) and Barry Sanders!

[hearthesilence]

Marshall Allen of Sun Ra Arkestra fame still performing at 100.
Sonny Rollins 94.
Not sure if any other jazz musicians left who recorded in the 1950's.

Still with us: Lou Donaldson and Roy Haynes, not only recording as leaders in the '50s but as sidemen in the '40s!

As for Bing Crosby, crooning is rather out of date. I thought he was still well-known for holiday songs, White Christmas and Irish songs for St Patrick's Day. Did you know that Otis Redding's Try a Little Tenderness was originally an early 30's tune, with a hit version by Bing in 1933, in his early pre-crooning style. The song was later picked up by Aretha Franklin, inspiring Otis' rendition.

Pre-rock pop vocals (particularly with big bands or orchestras) generally go back to 1920s crooning though. It's definitely from a bygone era but that's part of what I'm trying to say: Sinatra and Bennett were in a later part of that tradition, but they've been well-covered for decades while Crosby seems long, long forgotten outside of a few hits that are played like seasonal novelties rather than revered as great records (which some probably are). Like most (maybe all?) great pop singers in his wake, Crosby could be a genuinely good jazz singer and recorded plenty of good examples of that at the start of his fame, something Gary Giddins writes about in his first Crosby book, crediting it to the massive influence of Louis Armstrong.

EDIT: Re: a "bygone era," to be fair, there have been revivalists like Michael Bublé and before him Harry Connick, Jr. I don't really listen to them.

[jwd5275]

Marshall Allen of Sun Ra Arkestra fame still performing at 100.

And as of last year, still doing cartwheels on stage (we even caught it on camera).

[Matt]

Bing who?

In all seriousness, I think it's interesting how Crosby's place in music history seemed to precipitously decline in appreciation right after his death. If you've read up on him, you'll get it, but otherwise compared to someone like Frank Sinatra (who belongs to a generation later to be fair), there's been a lot less written on him and far less in terms of well-curated and well-promoted reissues.

Gritting my teeth reading this as a Crosby fan but it’s all true! I was going to post something earlier here about his unfortunately swift decline in popularity, but you made me think on some of the reasons for this.

Sinatra got extremely lucky by inventing (or being the first big beneficiary of the invention of) the concept album in the LP era. This, plus his additional good fortune in recording in long stretches for the three recording labels with the deepest pockets and greatest longevity made his music always available via high-profile rereleases and reissues (especially at the height of the CD era—the complete Columbia recordings and complete Sinatra-Dorsey recordings box sets are objects of veneration in my house).

Bing, by contrast, reached his greatest popularity pre-LP, one single at a time. After leaving Decca in 1955, he generally owned his master recordings and released them through a multitude of different labels. He still recorded prolifically, but without a lot of great success, and he was the anathema of cool to the Baby Boomers, the personification of their parents’ staid culture. His biggest selling records in the last decades of his life and career were his own greatest hits anthologies and, of course, his Christmas compilations, whereas Sinatra stayed more up to date and relevant up till just before his death.

Sinatra also had better taste in song selection and in curating his own image. Bing really did not care about all that and just wanted to make enough money to keep golfing. He was, in many ways, an incredibly lazy and promiscuous artist, recording any old song in any old genre, but also pioneering audio and video tape recording because he didn’t feel like straying too far from Palm Springs to do live radio or TV shows.

I think Bing’s reputation has been reclaimed among aficionados of pop/jazz singing—he truly was incredibly gifted—but not among the wider populace. Sinatra (and Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, the other figures on the Mount Rushmore of singing) have almost legendary life stories. The only thing people seem to know about Crosby’s life these days, if they know anything, is that he was mean to his kids. Gary Giddins’ outstanding biographies have done a good job of rehabilitating his image, but again only to that already receptive niche audience.

Crosby’s estate (including Kathryn) has been good in the last 20 years in reissuing some of his post-1955 catalog and doing themed compilations for streaming, and there’s a great Mosaic box set of his mid-50s CBS radio recordings, but no, the kids are not exactly making Tik Tok dances to Der Bingle. Universal has half-assed his Decca recordings (a 4-disc 1993 box set and maybe 2 greatest hits collections since), and I think the best release of his 1930s Columbia recordings is still a 3-CD set from 1988 before they were bought by Sony!

I think he’s one of the greatest and most innovative singers of the 20th century. People today can’t even fathom how popular he was in his day, but I think he’s destined to be just about forgotten and soon. It’s crazy to me how much music changed between, say, 1928 to 1968 and how little it’s changed since then. Teenagers listening to the Beatles today would have been like me listening to 78s of Al Jolson or Paul Whiteman in high school in the ‘80s. Even at that point, Bing Crosby was, to my generation, just that old guy in the David Bowie “Little Drummer Boy” video.

As for crooning being out of date, might I submit Billie Eilish and FKA Twigs as counter-examples?

[Orlac]

Bing and Kathryn were the parents of Harry Crosby, who gets pinned to a door (and nearly blinded for real!) in the first Friday the 13th movie.

[hearthesilence]

FWIW, I was told The Chronological Crosby is supposed to be the best-sounding reissues of vintage Crosby out there. It's made up of 51 (!) factory-pressed CD's issued on the UK boutique label "Jonzo" and they're available through the International Crosby Circle. Every existing take of every song Bing Crosby ever recorded, including alternate and unissued takes, in strict chronological order as to when they were recorded, from 1926 through early 1951. Far more Crosby than I'd need, but in terms of sound, there's likely no better alternative.

Roughly the first half of the series were done by John. R.T. Davies, and then the second half was done by Ted Kendall.

From there, Sepia Records (also in the UK) started their own series called Through the Years which picks up where Vol. 51 of The Chronological Crosby left off.

[diamonds]

Pierre-William Glenn, cinematographer for many luminaries of French cinema, including Rivette, Truffaut, Pialat, and Tavernier. He also shot George Roy Hill's A Little Romance, a lovely little picture that looks quite nice to boot.

[hearthesilence]

Cat Glover, a choreographer, dancer, singer and even rapper for Prince during what was arguably his prime. She's essentially the only lead performer aside from Prince in the concert film Sign O' the Times. (Originally filmed at a show in the Netherlands, technical problems convinced Prince to reshoot most of the numbers at Paisley Park - still a live performance, but basically done in a large studio.) She's also prominently featured in The Black Album (which Prince notoriously tried to bury, turning it into perhaps the most famous bootleg this side of Bob Dylan) and its twin Lovesexy.

[yoloswegmaster]

Maggie Smith

[Aunt Peg]

A huge loss for the entertainment industry and audiences. What an amazing collection of works she leaves behind for future generations to enjoy: Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Travels with My Aunt, Death on the Nile, Evil Under the Sun, California Suite, Gosford Park, Quartet, A Room with a View, Downton Abbey, A Private Function, The Missionary, Tea with Mussolini, The First Wives Club, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, The Lady in the Van all come immediately to mind.

[colinr0380]

Don't forget the Mother Superior in the Sister Act films! And very moving as a woman getting a late in life opportunity to be desired in the "Bed Amongst The Lentils" monologue of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads series.

[domino harvey]

And yet every obit leads with the film series neither of you mentioned

[hearthesilence]

This is exactly why Richard Harris refused to do those movies until his 11-year-old granddaughter threatened never to speak to him again. Personally, I would've called her bluff and told her "I don't dictate life choices to other people, and they don't do the same for me."

[beamish14]

This is exactly why Richard Harris refused to do those movies until his 11-year-old granddaughter threatened never to speak to him again. Personally, I would've called her bluff and told her "I don't dictate life choices to other people, and they don't do the same for me."

Raul Julia and Bob Hoskins also took video game adaptation roles as a result of intense pressure from their children. The latter lived to deeply regret it.

Going back to Maggie Smith, the compendium of her BBC performances is excellent. She’s better in Suddenly, Last Summer than Elizabeth Taylor

[Matt]

Jared Harris recently turned down a role in the Harry Potter TV series saying he didn’t see the point of it, which is funny considering the reason his father took the Dumbledore role and that Jared took a role in Morbius with the explanation “I have a mortgage to pay.”

There is a funny scene in the documentary Tea With the Dames, an extended conversation between Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Eileen Atkins, and Judi Dench where Dench is told by the others that they only get called when she has turned down a role.