Summertime, part 4: Holiday and others

City Nights-City Lights, Patt Dalbey

Typing day and night's taken it's toll. I've got some nasty tendonitis in my right wrist, so words are limited for the next few days.

Summertime - Billie Holiday

Holiday recorded this in New York in July 1936. So it's the young Billie's voice that I always prefer--sultry and yearning and girlish--and she swings it about like a sparkling beaded handbag. The band's (including Artie Shaw on clarinet) martial rat-ta-tat beat and New Orleans-flavored horns give this "Summertime" a hurried street parade feel or play to a decadent afternoon tea dance of wilted flowers, damp limbs and furtive cocaine sniffing.

From The Essential George Gershwin (US, UK)

Other favorite versions:

Summertime - Sam Cooke

Summertime - Janis Joplin

Summertime - Pete Seeger

Summertime - Miles Davis

From: Portrait of a Legend 1951-1964, Sam Cooke (US, UK); The Essential Janis Joplin (US, UK); American Favorite Ballads, Vol. 5, Pete Seeger (iTunes); The Columbia Years, 1955-1985, Miles Davis (US, UK).

See also Summertime, parts 1, 2, & 3.