“At Last” was written to be used in a Hollywood musical called “Sun Valley Serenade” starring Olympic figure skater turned actress Sonja Henie and featuring big band leader Glenn Miller and his orchestra. Miller’s band recorded the song, only to have it cut out of the final film. It was recycled in 1942 for another film called “Orchestra Wives”, this time starring Ann Rutherford and George Montgomery. Here is the song as it appeared in that movie, played again by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, and sung by Ray Eberle and Pat Friday:

The dreamy, romantic quality of the song is very different than the triumphant wail of Etta James, especially as it is sung by a duet. But the tune also really flows well with the big band arrangement of sax and trombones, leading up to a trumpet solo. In fact, the vocal doesn’t even begin until about 2 minutes into the number and takes a back seat to the trumpet.

I think I still like the iconic version as performed by Etta on the 1960 version better, but knowing the provenance of the tune is worthwhile. Here’s the one we’ve all heard a lot of lately. It’s still a great tune, and it’s good that Etta James got the recognition she genuinely deserved, even if it came late.

I have a bone to pick with my friend Mig. How is it that we have gone all these years, mein freund, and you’ve never told me about the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra? It’s not like they’re exactly something new, they’ve been around since 1998, making music with fresh vegetables, and then feeding their audiences with soup made from the instruments! FOR REAL!

First the Arschbar, now this. What other strange things are you hiding there in Mitteleuropa, eh? Start talking!

The singer Cesária Évora passed away a couple of weeks ago. She came to popularity globally in the early 1990s and had one big hit album in the U.S. self-titled “Cesária” in the mid-90s. She came from Cape Verde and sang a particular style of music from her homeland called “morna”, which is sung in a local dialect that is part Portuguese and part West African. The music is sad and soulful. I used to listen to that album on my very first MP3 player years ago along with the Buena Vista Social Club album.

Boston has a large Cape Verdean immigrant community, and this Paris Review piece by Harvard grad student and native Cape Verdean Janine de Novais is an interesting remembrance of Evora, her music, and the culture of Cape Verde as seen from a insider. There’s also a YouTube clip at that link of Évora singing “Sodade”, probably the song she was best known for in the U.S.

Chicago Tribune music critic Howard Reich writes about the recent passing of blues guitar legend Hubert Sumlin as just the latest in a string of passings of legendary Chicago bluesmen. The tradition of Chicago blues is dying out along with those old men, Reich says, and there aren’t a lot of younger musicians taking up where they are leaving off.

Being a sheltered white boy from Maine, I didn’t know anything about the blues when I actually LIVED in Chicago, so I can’t even share a story of the time I saw Pinetop Perkins or something. Well, actually, I did *almost* see Pinetop Perkins years later, but not in Chicago; it was in Portland, Maine, as a matter of fact, and he was supposed to play at one of the venues for Portland’s New Years Eve celebration, but he missed the gig because of the weather. So there you go. A few years after that, once we had moved to Massachusetts, I began listening to “Blues After Hours” on WGBH radio on Saturday nights, which always opened with a special tune created just for the show by Pinetop Perkins, so he and I eventually caught up with one another. I spent many Saturday nights playing Civ until the wee hours and listening to the great artists of blues music, not just from Chicago but St. Louis and Kansas City and the Mississippi Delta and everywhere else. That phase ended not long after Charlotte was born, when the host of the radio show, Mai Cramer, passed away. The show lingered on for a few more years with another host. WGBH pulled the plug on it in ’07, but I had moved on anyway. These days I don’t need to listen to the blues, because I got ‘em myself.

Here’s a video clip of Howlin’ Wolf, Hubert Sumlin, and Willie Dixon playing “Smokestack Lightning” back in 1964, just so you know what you’ve been missing:

Even though I loved their music 20-odd years ago and still love it now, I actually probably have not listened to them in a number of years. As usual, I blame the Internet. The Internet has introduced me to so much more music than I ever would have expected, and as I started discovering all sorts of other artists, I guess the ones I was already deeply familiar with kind of got left behind like a child’s old toys.

I was reminded of all this today by this post by Erich Vieth at Dangerous Intersection. He’s got links to a bunch of YouTube videos of some of their best-known songs, and the featured one is an actual concert video. Here’s one he did not include but is one of my favorite Nightnoise songs, “Shadow of Time”:

According to Wikipedia, the group officially disbanded in 2003, even though they had stopped recording before then, and Mícheál Ó’Dómhnaill died of a fall in 2006.

Here’s Paul McCartney and Paul McCartney singing “Yesterday” together, 45 years apart. If you have headphones, you’ll hear the sound split up so you can compare the difference:

Ladies and gentlemen, the incomparable Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin from a live television performance of “South Pacific”.