I’m Irresistible You Fool. Give In. Part 3: We LOVE YOU Sarah!

I’m Irresistible You Fool. Give In. Part 3: We LOVE YOU Sarah!

I love fan art. It gives the amateurs amongst us a chance to put our own creative spin on an existing work while paying tribute to an artist that we admire. It’s interactive. It’s a form of homage. It helps Vaughan’s legacy live on. And Vaughan’s cover of “Whatever Lola Wants” has spawned a lot of fan art. Some of it is a lot of fun. Some less so. Some, quite, frankly, a little weird.

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I’m Irresistible You Fool. Give In. Part 2: Buy This!

I’m Irresistible You Fool. Give In. Part 2: Buy This!

Last time I talked about Sarah Vaughan’s still popular cover of “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets” and the power of music to enact real cultural and social change. This post I’d like to discuss another form of cultural work done by music: selling stuff! In particular, how “Whatever Lola Wants” has been used in advertising.

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From Jazz Manhood to Jazz Personhood

From Jazz Manhood to Jazz Personhood

There has been a lot of talk online recently about jazz, gender, and sexuality. Musicologist Guthrie Ramsey, for example, gave us a historian’s take on what he calls “jazz manhood” in bebop and the career of pianist Bud Powell, and how this contributed to his own embarrassment as a boy playing the piano, which he loved, rather than the more masculine saxophone. Drummer Allison Miller wrote a moving essay on the challenges of being not only a woman, but also a lesbian, in the jazz world. Crooner Spencer Day discussed coming out, homophobia, the absence of gay voices in jazz, and how all of this has influenced his career, both creatively and commercially. And singer Michelle Shocked, long believed to be a lesbian herself, lashed out with an unfortunate, if predictable, homophobic rant during her recent appearance at Yoshi’s Jazz Club in San Francisco.

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