Bing Sings Whilst Bergman Swings

 

Nice Work If You Can Get It

Bing Sings Whilst Bergman Swings

Verve Records MGV-2020

1956

From the back cover: By now, more than a quarter of a century has passed since the voice and the face of Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby eased themselves snugly into the American consciousness. With this voice and face fitting together so agreeably the years have brought Crosby a curious position. He has become, as one critic phrased it, "a member of American royalty." There's a grain of truth in the observation since in our Republic we maintain no royalty  and as a result the more lasting celebrities must serve as crowned heads. In a harrowers sense, however, Crosby is less royalty than he is a kind of jug-eared, mellow-lunged Everyman set to song.

Of the two theories, Crosby himself yields more readily to the latter. In his autobiography, entitled "Call Me Lucky," Crosby expressed it this way: "I think that every man who sees one of my movies or who listens to my records or who hears me on the radio believes firmly that he sings as well as I do, especially when he sings in the bathroom shower. It's no trick for him to believe this because I have none of the mannerisms of a trained singer and I have very little voice. If I've achieved any success as a warbler it's because I've managed to keep the kind of naturalness in my style, my phrasing and my mannerisms which any Joe Doakes possess..."

For All his self-depreciation, Crosby's commoners is an illusion which punctures easily. Imitators of the Crosby sound can be found everywhere but on one yet sounds exactly like him. Joe Doakes – you and me – we have confidence in our bathroom baritones and we imagine we sound like Bing; actually we all sound like Joe Doakes. There is only one Bing Crosby and – the time has come now to face the issue squarely – he happens to be that unique, awesome creature, an artist. That is to say, an artist with no humbling ol' Frog in the Throat, as Billy Rose called him, as many things – genial troubadour, light comedian, glibly learned conferenciar, man about sports, even, in the last decade or so, an actor who can walk off with one Oscar (for "Goin' My Way") and very nearly cop another (for "Country Girl"). The races has been a slow one. Somewhere between the early 1930s (when Bing was singing "Mississippi Mud" with the Rhythm Boys) and the present we began to take this crooner less and less for granted. He does deserve some gratitude for single-handily making the word "crooner" less calculated to peel the skin. But never before, to my knowledge, has Bing Crosby ever won recognition for what he is, an artist. Perhaps we have waited too long.

Still, the word "artist" and Bing Crosby clasp hands only with a suspicious uneasiness. But then, the popular entertainer has been facing this dilemma since Shakespeare's day – when can the popular entertainer claim the mantle of artist" When do we dare cross the bridge? And yet this bridge for popularity with mere talent to popularity with art has been crossed before with no loss to anyone – no loss at all to the entertainer and for the public a gain of deeper awareness and a more profound appreciation of the entertainer's stature. As a parallel to Crosby, in American literature there is the bridge-crossing example of Ring Lardner, who wrote sardonic fables about ballplayers and was immensely popular. Lardner became an artist when the critics, in a flash of awe, suddenly discovered he actually was one – and everybody said then that they knew it all the time. Ring Lardner, Walt Disney, Cantinflas, Fred Astaire, Babe Ruth, Brando – not ordinary men, not merely popular entertainers, but artist.

It may be a little more than coincidence that while Lardner's major influence was Mark Twain, it was Bing's inevitably good fortune to be influenced by Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke, two of America's more conspicuously vital giants of the trumpet. The coincidence grows more interesting, however, when you remember that the three of them – Mark Twain, Louis, Bix – were all products of the Mississippi River culture, the American heartland. If Larder was, after Twain, the "most American" of our writers the voice of Harry Lillis Crosby is the most American of any singer's. This voice of Bing Crosby reflects America with poignant accuracy to foreigners and Americans alike and one reason might just be the very same Mississippi heartland echoes of Satchmo and Bix (and Mark Twain as well; one imagines Huckleberry Finn on his raft singing and the voice of Bing Crosby floating out over the Mississippi).

Our idolatries, in Whitney Balliett's phase, are often "either presumptuous of too late." There is no presumptuousness in calling Bing Crosby an artist and it is not too late for, after all, haven't we known it all the time?

Now, as for this album, which is Crosby's first on Verve imprint, it is also his first with such a thoroughly modern, swinging orchestra in accompaniment. The songs, moreover, are among those rare few that Bing has never before recorded, Buddy Bregman orchestrated the songs, conducted a hand-picked group of Hollywood's foremost musicians and – most important – conceived the idea in the first place. Although it is quite a musical package – muscular and tender, driving and romantic, pulsating and lyrical. For Bing Crosby, the artist, it is a somewhat different treatment to add to the many already on record and, as you will hear, an ingeniously varied and durable one.

From Billboard - October 20, 1956: This is Bing's first album on Verve, and he draws support from a modern, swinging group of musicians. The package contains a list of great tunes which Bing never recorded before; reason enough to make this attractive to the faithful. Tunes include "Mountain Greenery," "Blue Room," "Have You Met Miss Jones" and other great ones, most dating from the golden age of show music. Bregman orchestrated the songs brightly, and Bing sings them with his casual charm and technical perfection.

The Song Is You

Mountain Greenery

Check To Cheek

'Deed I Do

Heat Wave

The Blue Room

Have You Met Miss Jones?

I've Got Five Dollars

They All Laughed 

Nice Work If You Can Get It

September In The Rain

Jeepers Creepers