concert review: blech
Nov. 10th, 2024 03:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacHaving another free evening in LA, searching the events listings beforehand I found what I thought would be a Rodgers and Hammerstein revue.
It wasn’t. When I arrived, at the PAC at a community college in the Pomona Valley near where I am staying, it was billed as a tribute to the Great American Songbook, but what it actually was, was jazz vocals. You know the kind, where the singers unpleasantly distort the melody, then hand it over to the instrumentalists, who distort it further to the point of unrecognizability. This is why I hate jazz. I stuck out the 90 minutes, more because I was curious as to what songs they’d maul than eagerness to hear them maul them. (There was no set list in the program booklet, which was only available by QR code anyway, and from the age of the audience I doubt I was the only person there who couldn’t access it, though I was apparently the only one who raised enough of a fuss about it that the assistant manager let me look at her phone.)
Anyway, the singers, Benny Benack III and Stella Cole, semi-performed three R&H songs, Some Enchanted Evening, The Sound of Music, and Getting to Know You; a bunch of other Broadway musical theatre songs of that era (I Could Have Danced All Night, Till There Was You, Almost Like Being in Love, Hello Dolly and Food Glorious Food - a bit later date, those two - and a few others, almost all of which I knew), and a few songs from movies (including Moon River and Over the Rainbow, both of which Stella liked so much she sang them almost straight) and a few other miscellanea.
Not a great use of my time.
It wasn’t. When I arrived, at the PAC at a community college in the Pomona Valley near where I am staying, it was billed as a tribute to the Great American Songbook, but what it actually was, was jazz vocals. You know the kind, where the singers unpleasantly distort the melody, then hand it over to the instrumentalists, who distort it further to the point of unrecognizability. This is why I hate jazz. I stuck out the 90 minutes, more because I was curious as to what songs they’d maul than eagerness to hear them maul them. (There was no set list in the program booklet, which was only available by QR code anyway, and from the age of the audience I doubt I was the only person there who couldn’t access it, though I was apparently the only one who raised enough of a fuss about it that the assistant manager let me look at her phone.)
Anyway, the singers, Benny Benack III and Stella Cole, semi-performed three R&H songs, Some Enchanted Evening, The Sound of Music, and Getting to Know You; a bunch of other Broadway musical theatre songs of that era (I Could Have Danced All Night, Till There Was You, Almost Like Being in Love, Hello Dolly and Food Glorious Food - a bit later date, those two - and a few others, almost all of which I knew), and a few songs from movies (including Moon River and Over the Rainbow, both of which Stella liked so much she sang them almost straight) and a few other miscellanea.
Not a great use of my time.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-10 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-10 09:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-10 11:59 pm (UTC)Most of the time it's ... okay.
There's lousy classical music, too; it's just that most of it has been filtered out over the centuries. I imagine there's still some being written though.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-12 10:18 am (UTC)As well tell me that hack-and-slash sword-and-sorcery is “not far off” from The Lord of the Rings. And I have had book recommendations handed to me on that basis.
My denigration of jazz should not be allowed to disguise that this isn’t about whether the thing is done well or badly by its own standards, but that I have no appreciation or feeling for the kind of thing that it is. (Your clip had no emotional effect on me whatever. Do you not think I’ve heard dozens of things of the same kind and caliber before? Usually on used book store sound systems, where jazz of exactly this sort is the music of choice.) Whereas I do have great love for classical variation technique, which should be enough to demonstrate that they’re entirely different things.