La-la means I love you
Written by William Hart and Thom Bell, produced by Thom Bell and Stan Watson, “La-La (Means I Love You)” is a classic of Philly soul, vintage 1968, and a memorable hit for the Delfonics. What a beautiful pop song. I don’t think they make ’em like this anymore. Hart sang the shimmering falsetto lead on the hit single.
Laura Nyro responded deeply to the song. As she did with so many of the “heartbeat songs” (as she called them) that she recorded over the years, she turned it into a personal statement. She teamed up with Manhattan Transfer on the song for the group’s
A New Vintage for Public Domain Classics By Karintha Parker | Feb 12, 2021
It’s the Roaring ’20s all over again. On January 1, thousands of novels originally published in 1925 lost their copyright status and hit the public domain, and this class included several that publishers had long been anticipating. Vintage Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, is one of many publishers to jump at the opportunity, releasing four new, but old, titles in paperback as part of its Vintage Classics line on January 5: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s
In Our Time, John Dos Passos’s
Manhattan Transfer, and Virginia Woolf’s
Photo: www.mazelthealbum.com A Yiddish jazz album featuring the nine time Grammy-award winning singer Janis Siegel from The Manhattan Transfer, a Grammy-nominated pianist, John Di Martino, and Cantor Daniel Kramer from a Port Jefferson Station synagogue in his recording debut? This unlikely trio came together when Di Martino (ironically the only non-Jew from the group) became fascinated with Yiddish songs, which happened, according to a press release, after he heard blues singer Alberta Hunter perform “I Love You Much Too Much” in Yiddish (Ich Hob Dich Tzufil Lieb). An unusual choice for a singer who was born in Memphis in 1895 and came to fame in the early 20th century during the jazz era.
Till Bronner & Bob James –
On Vacation (Masterworks): “Together with jazz legend and Grammy award winner Bob James, trumpeter Till Brönner – Germany’s most successful jazz musician – has transformed holiday moods into a multi-layered sound painting. Close your eyes and dream: “On Vacation is first and foremost a feeling for me and we have transformed this feeling into music,” explains BrönnerVirtuosic, full of creative love for refined details and at the same time of the greatest possible nonchalance, Brönner and James create an imaginative and sonorous music for inspiration, reflection and daydreaming. Confirming the cliché “Unity is Strength”, German trumpetist and singer Till Brönner and the American pianist Bob James have cowritten On Vacation, a work of smooth, hedonistic jazz. Before becoming the king of smooth jazz who has been sampled by every rapper on the planet (his Nautilus has ended up on over 400 tracks by the likes of Public Enemy, A Tribe Call
A.J. Croce has experienced the transformative power of music for much of his life, be it as a vehicle for celebration and contemplation, transcendent love and profound loss, and many points in between.
With his 10th and newest album, the cathartic “By Request,” music provides a life-affirming way for him to grieve losing his wife of 24 years, Marlo, who died suddenly in 2018 from a rare and sudden heart virus.
But Croce does not achieve that catharsis with his own songs. Instead, he turns to funk, rock, blues, soul, pop and country favorites by a dozen distinctly different artists, including Neil Young (“Only Love Can Break Your Heart”); Sam Cooke (“Nothing Can Change This Love”); the Five Stairsteps, (“O-o-h Child”); Randy Newman (“Have You Seen My Baby?”); and the Beach Boys (“Sail On Sailor”).