Some Big Band Boogie Woogie Bounce for everyone depressed by the Chancellor's ghastly Butskellite Bollocks Budget

The human dynamo on the drums - and the matchbox - was, of course,  Gene Krupa with his "Drum Boogie" from the great 1941 comedy Ball of Fire. Right, let's get the politics out of the way. Allister Heath expressed my exact feelings in the Telegraph this morning:

The film "Whiplash" has divided the House of Grønmark - but I think it's a masterpiece

"Not quite my tempo - but, hey, it'll do."

On one side there's my son and me - we loved it (he's already seen it three times). On the other, there's my wife, who found it distinctly unsettling. She interpreted it as a young man making a Faustian pact with the devil to renounce his humanity in return for the gift of musical genius, and found it unsettling because, as she put it, the devil wins either way. If the student throws in the sponge (or, in this case, his drumsticks) he will have proved the devil was right to have doubted his talent - and if he becomes a great drummer, the devil's horrendous methods will have been vindicated.

 Is it, I wonder, a bloke's film?

I spent ten minutes watching a jet-black cat slinking around our garden this afternoon - which reminded me of this...

...which in turn reminded of this glorious version :

Louis Armstrong's second wife, Lil, with the delightful "Oriental Swing" (1938)

And here's a modern remix - Parov Stelar's "Booty Swing":

The Fulminators revisit Mel Tormé's "Comin' Home Baby" - the coolest song on the planet

"President's Walk" - and other fabulous instrumental gems from the vaults

Eighteen reasons for not hating jazz

Herbie Hancock

When I used the term “modern jazz” in my previous post, I meant the inaccessible stuff which Be-Bop ushered induring the 1950s and which reached its unlovely zenith at the end of that decade. I didn’t mean to include Trad or Swing, which had their moments, or some of the terrific stuff that followed "modern" jazz, when a regular beat and tunes were reintroduced in the 1960s.

Sixteen reasons for hating modern jazz

            

Hoagy Carmichael, the white songwriter who made pop black - and cool

"Green Onions", "The Locomotion", "The Wanderer" - 1960s pop music was great before The Beatles

We all know that the period between the end of rock and roll’s initial wild-man era – 1956 - 1958 – and the 1964 British Invasion of the US pop charts represented a dreary wasteland of safe, manufactured, talentless teen idols and tepid, gutless singles: the Music Industry, frightened by the wildfire spread of the raucous, lust-drenched yowlings of sexually-deranged young white and black Southerners had regained control by imprisoning Chuck Berry for transporting a minor across state lines, exposing Jerry Lee Lewis’s marriage to his 13-year old cousin, and tucking Elvis safely away in the army for a couple of years. 

Danny Gatton, Rockabilly Guitar God - and maybe the best damned guitar picker of all time