And All That Jazz

Everyone makes a huge fuss about jazz. For some reason, the name 'Mulgrew Miller' kept popping into my head today so I thought I'd check him out. It doesn't matter how hard I try, I'm sorry, I just don't like Jazz. I know it was born out of the big black movement in America in the 20s and is hugely influential in the way modern music is put together today, but I really just don't like it. I'm sorry Roger, if you're reading this, but I really can't stand saxophones either. There's maybe ONE piece of saxophone music that I vaguely like, which Megan turned into a Judy Garland tribute, but the rest of it... it's just very dated 1980s cop show music to me.

Here's the video from Megan that I'm referring to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=610MLuR7OPU

I like the cheerful tune the sax is doing, but the rest of it is what I've grown up knowing as 'elevator' music (no offence Meg - for me to conceed to liking ANYTHING like this is high praise from me! LOL - it's just so bloody catchy!)

There's a store my mum used to shop in when I was a kid called 'Tudor Williams'
and, this was in the early to mid 1990s you understand, they were STILL selling those massive gold clip on earings, big chunky fake pearl necklaces and bracelets and little Bronnley minature toiletries in powder blue boxes and jumpers with big geometric prints.

When you walked in, it had that sort of stale talcum powdery smell from those horrifically strong floral old fashioned perfumes being squirted, on a daily basis by blue-rinsed tightly-permed pensioners, while white, highly rouged, mannequins with cheekbones like razors looked out over the customers from their pedestals,staring vacantly from beneath thick blue eyeshadow painted up to their eyebrows, and heavy lashes which battled to keep the peroxide blonde Howard Stern-esqye wigs from falling into their eyes...

basically a total throwback to the 80s, and that's the sort of music they'd have pumping through the store.

I think probably half my dislike for this music stems from whenever mum dragged me in there, I'd be stuck there for HOURS while she pottered around looking at fabrics and jumpers and then spent an hour trying to decide between which one of the two white duvet covers she'd picked up should get - while I sat at the base of the mannequin stand sulking, and bored out of my skull, while over-rouged sales assistants smiled at me and cooed and made babytalk. I smiled back because I was a polite little girl, but on the inside I was screaming 'I'm FIVE YEARS OLD! I can spell my own name, I'm not dumb you know - talk to me like a normal person!"

For HOURS

And ALL I wanted to do was go into the shop across the road where they sold millions of different kinds of colouring pencils and felt tips that were invisible until you went over them with the white pen and erasers in the shape of koala bears and things like that.

The shop is still there. I think there was a fire or something there a couple of years ago, but honestly - from my memories of that place, you couldn't persuade me to set foot in it ever again. I'm sure they've revamped it and put in laminate flooring and minamal fixtures and modernised the mannequins; but whenever I go past it on the bus on the way to Kingston, I imagine it to be like some kind of time portal: that the inside is unaltered and they're still selling those little bottles of bronnley toiletries in powder blue boxes, and the jazz is still filtered through the store... and my mother is still trying to decide which of the two white duvet covers she'd picked up she should get, while a little girl sits at the base of a mannequin stand, wishing she was somewhere else.

Give me some good old fashioned big band swing ANY day of the week!
I did start surfing youtube looking for a good example of the sort of swing that I like to post up here, but instead ended up getting extremely sidetracked by Fred Astaire, then Ann Miller and now I've found someone who's stuck videos of plays and also someone who's stuck Stage Door, starring the AMAZING Kate Hepburn up, in its entirety.

I have a love-hate relationship with youtube. I love to watch stuff on there, but if I've made plans for the day, and get on youtube, it's all over. It's all down hill from there. Oh well. I'm having a blast anyway. Who cares. I think I might do a Hepburn Colourisation now - not done a colourisation for AGES!
did a Liza Minnelli design today - My friend, Phil has been whispering the words 'cafe press' into my ear for the past couple of days - I think it could be something worth looking into.