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Showing posts with the label Billie Holiday

OPEN POST: Manor Music Monday With The Magnificent Sylvia Syms!

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Greetings Manor hors, and welcome to another edition of Manor Music Monday! Did you know? Today is National Bubble Wrap Day, so if you have some, by all means enjoy popping those air-filled plastic nubbins. Pop-pop-pop! Such fun. Also fun, a lively jazz and Broadway songstress who was brought to new heights in 1949 after being spotted performing at Greenwich Village's The Cinderella Club  (where Billie Holiday and Thelonious Monk frequently gigged) by none other than Mae West, who promptly cast her in her Broadway revival of "Diamond Lil." That's quite a gal to give your career a boost. And tonight, at the Manor's exclusive "Canyon Yodeling" club and taco joint, DJ Li'l Scratch will be spinning her irresistible tunes. How irresistible? Let's just say that Frank Sinatra himself called her "the world's greatest saloon singer."  Yes, it's Sylvia Syms (not to be confused with the British actor with a similar name), who was born in ...

OPEN POST: Manor Music Monday With The Magical Mary Stallings!

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Welcome, music sloots to another edition of Manor Music Monday, today by way of a San Francisco gal with incredible talent and understated class, a combo we don't see much in performers these days of any ilk, if at all. Better still, she's still truckin' at age 86. And though it's wintertime, her music will bring back summer. Just listen and you'll feel the heat, the light humidity, a chill band and her freshly reviving voice. Also, San Francisco must have something in the water, because so many terrific jazz vocalists seem to hail from there. It can't be a coincidence. Case in point, Mary Stallings, born in 1939 in the city, the middle child of 11 siblings. Get this: she's also the niece of saxophonist Orlando Stallings, who introduced her to jazz when she was just a wee one after overhearing her scatting to Dizzy Gillespie's "Oop-Bop-Sh'bam." She performed briefly with Uncle Orlando's band and with her church, and while she was still...

OPEN POST: Happy Manor Music Monday (and Indigenous People Day) With The Marvelous Mildred Bailey!

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"Xest sx̣lx̣alt," music hors, or "Good day" in the highly-endangered Salishan Indigenous American language. After all, it's Indigenous People Day in the U.S. (Columbus who? We don't know her). Confused? Curious? If it makes you horny, don't worry, you're a hussy and you're in the right place.  Welcome to another edition of Manor Music Monday, today with a lass who popularized the swooning, bluesy, "Lover Come Back To Me" in 1938, though it was her versions of "Georgia On My Mind" and "Rockin' Chair" that really made her famous. DJ Li'l Scratch and I just love her to bits, and tonight at the Manor's "Pink And Sloppy" bar and taco dinette, he'll be spinning her tunes for all to savor.  So rejoice jazz fans  - and Indigenous Americans, too! Mildred Bailey, a jazz chanteuse extraordinaire who was known as "The Queen Of Swing" in her day, is here at last. Born in northwestern Idaho on...