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Tim - Mean to me Thanks for another wonderful rendition in this month's Piano Bar that seems to have become a sort of tribute to the Ronstadt/Riddle collaboration.

The Cafe Songbook website is a great reading resource, though at some points still a work in progress. Information about "Mean to me" is still lacking: http://www.cafesongbook.com/pages/songs/m/mean_to_me_m.html

Geez, you guys really got a head start on me this month. Gonna hafta work hard to catch up.

Jazztpt
One Two and Three: Cheerful, tuneful, that descending bass line is very appealing.
New Lifetime: These old recordings may be relatively low-fi, but they bring back another time and place. Great music.
Days of Wine and Roses: Another fav of mine. You sound like Red Garland! Well done!

Pianist685
Maybe: New Age maybe, but crisper and jauntier and with feeling. Good recording too.

IosPlayer
BluebirdBoulevard: Very free-flowing and creative. The part with the voices was very strong

Tim
Lush Life: Love that song! As you say, what changes! And what a dynamite introduction! Didn’t Andrew Lloyd Webber plagiarize something from this?
Skylark: Hey, no fair Tim, you are hogging all the good songs this month. Just kidding. Wonderful playing as usual.
You Took Advantage of Me: Catchy song, great arrangement.
Mean to me: I am so accustomed to hearing the Monk version of this song that at first, I did not recognize the sentimental version!

Beemer
Careless Love: I think I remember this being on the hit parade. Excellent playing.
Trouble in Mind: straightforward, bluesy rendition. Well done.

Handyman
My Funny Valentine: This is one of those songs I’ve loved since hearing my mother sing it while she was hanging out the laundry! Beautiful.

My piece this month is Dolores, by Wayne Shorter, who played sax with one of the Miles Davis groups.

I love the tune, but it is complex, and the Davis group played it at a tempo that is way beyond me. Apparently even Miles found it challenging. In the recording session, he stops playing at one point and says that he can never figure out when he is supposed to come in. At another point, he stops and says: "That's some funny ****, boy". I always get a kick out of finding stuff like that (like when Sinatra gave up trying to sing Lush Life) - if guys like that had trouble, I should not expect it to come easy!

Anyway, I am playing here from a lead sheet, with a backing track.

Ed

Dolores

Riddler,

I'm intrigued by this piece which you played so well. You said that it was written by a sax player so is their a sax recording of it? I'm interested because I have recently bought an alto sax and will soon start lessons.

Ian

New to me and smooth, upbeat and well-played - good listening...

Thanks for your comments on "My Funny Valentine" - I, like probably many, had always assumed that it was a song to be sung by a man about his love for a not overly attractive, but still strangely appealing, woman - however, in the musical "Babes in Arms" it's sung by a woman about the man she loves (whose name was changed in the Book to Valentine, or Val, to make the song work)...other songs to come from that perhaps most successful of the 30 Rogers & Hart's musicals are:

Where or When
Johnny One Note
The Lady is a Tramp
I Wish I Were in Love Again (one of my own personal favorites), which contains in part these cynically witty lyrics:
...
The broken dates, the endless waits
The lovely loving and the hateful hates
The conversation with the flying plates
I wish I were in love again
...
The furtive sigh, the blackened eye
The words, "I'll love you 'til the day I die"
The self-deception that believes the lie
I wish I were in love again

Yes, Wayne Shorter played sax for the V.S.O.P. Quintet:

Dolores

Ed

Ed - Dolores I always appreciate uptempo numbers (and guys who can play them that well) here in the Piano Bar.

In that case you should enjoy the Benny Goodman recording of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2bh1Oc5atk

Yeah.

I think I have a lot of fragments from the Great American Songbook lodged in the dark corners of my brain - because the lyrics are funny or clever, or because the tune is catchy or beautiful - and when I hear or read anything that reminds me of these fragments, there is a kind of resonance that occurs, and the thing takes on a deeper reality for me.

So my worldview is shaped by Cole Porter and George/Ira Gershwin and Richard Rogers / Hart / Hammerstein.

Which may explain the battle that plays out in my mind between the romantic and the cynic.

Ed

John - thanks much for that great recording of his superb sextet!

And here's that Clooney/Riddle version that I mentioned earlier in this thread:

You Took Advantage of Me

Exactly! Very astute observation.

Tim Adrianson - a very nice 'Mean to Me', some great standards this month, keep them coming chaps.

Riddler - Yes I remember this one from the VSOP band , very well played Ed , great to hear these tunes again, more.

I am somewhat in love with Keith Jarrett's piano playing and this just makes me smile it's so good.

You Took Advantage Of Me

As do these:

Honeysuckle Rose

Ain't Misbehavin'