Various Artists

New York in Words and Music (Digipack)

Blue Moon Jazz

New York is a city of cities, a melting pot of nations, a hodgepodge of creeds, accents, tongues, colors, and customs. It is a city of crazy dimensions. There is the low-slung, ramshackle Swing Alley and Strip Lane jammed against the towering seventy-story sweep of glass and concrete that proudly crowns the Rockefeller Center, to name but a few of the contrasts in New York City. New York is a welter of clashes, both cultural and social. There is the sixteen-mile Broadway, the longest street in the world, a fantastic paradox of elegant shops and blaring honky-tonks, where one hundred-andfifty dollar alligator bags are sold a few blocks from a flea circus, where glittering stars are seen at theatre time at the Hayden Planetarium on Central Park West. This CD is a celebration of all that New York has to offer.



01. FRANKIE RANDALL: My Kind of Town 3:43
02. PEGGY LEE: New York City Blues 3:17
03. FRANK SINATRA: The Brooklyn Bridge 2:35
04. GEORGE WILLIAMS ORCHESTRA: Uptown Blues 3:20
05. BILLIE HOLIDAY: Autumn in New York 3:41
06. LOUIS ARMSTRONG: Theres a Boat Dats Leavin' Soon for New York 4:51
07. NAT KING COLE: Penthouse Serenade 3:05
08. DUKE ELLINGTON: Sidewalks of New York 3:15
09. LEE WILEY: Manhattan 3:23
10. PLAS JOHNSON: Sax Fifth Avenue 2:23
11. ERNIE ANDREWS: Big City 3:11
12. DAVID ALLEN: Penthouse Serenade 2:56
13. MEL TORMÉ: Lullaby of Birdland 4:50
14. NAT PIERCE ORCHESTRA: 7th Avenue Express 3:01
15. MORGANA KING: Take the A Train 2:41
16. ILLINOIS JACQUET: Harlem Nocturne 3:25
17. MAXINE SULLIVAN: Stompin at the Savoy 3:08
18. BOSWELL SISTERS: Forty-Second Street 3:13
19. COUNT BASIE & HIS ORCHESTRA: Broadway 2:56
20. DORIS DAY: Lullaby of Broadway 2:50
21. FRANK SINATRA: Autumn in New York 3:15
22. NEAL HEFTI ORCHESTRA: Rhapsody in Blue 3:32
23. RALPH BURNS ORCHESTRA & CHORUS: I Happen to Like New York 3:00
24. FRANK SINATRA, JULES MUNSHIN & GENE KELLY: New York, New York 3:41

Album details

This compilation produced for CD by Jordi Pujol

Press reviews

"New York City has inspired more good songs than perhaps any other city in the world (what's the competition, Paris? London? Vienna?), and a ton of great recordings of those songs. That's the raison d'être behind this multi-artist compilation, 74 minutes of great music hooked around the city and its various aspects. It comes with a booklet that includes lyrics but no annotation, but none is needed. There are too many highlights to enumerate, and some of them -- like Billie Holiday's "Autumn in New York" or Lee Wiley's version of "Manhattan" -- need no comment or explanation. Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Frankie Randall, Lee Wiley, Mel Tormé, Morgana King, and the Boswell Sisters are among the singers represented, while big bands led by the likes of Duke Ellington, Neal Hefti, Nat Pierce, and Louis Armstrong (whose "There's a Boat Dat's Leavin' Soon for New York" is almost worth the price of admission by itself) and a few renowned soloists such as Illinois Jacquet, Plas Johnson, and Nat King Cole all get to show what they can do in various pop, blues, and jazz tributes to the city.

As a pleasant surprise, the programmers skipped any of Ellington's various renditions of "Take the 'A' Train" in favor of "Sidewalks of New York," while the Billy Strayhorn classic is represented by Morgana King's recording. One does sort of wish there were information on some of the big-band tracks indicating who the specific soloists were, but otherwise this is a totally delightful collection. The sound is state of the art and the overall effect of the collection is spellbinding and hypnotic at various points, and seductive throughout, even as it makes its way to the logical finale, the rendition of "New York, New York" by Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Jules Munshin from the movie On the Town."

Bruce Eder -All Music Guide

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9,95 €  (tax incl.)

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