I think the show went really well! If I do say so myself. It was a lot of fun & the work beforehand putting it all together really paid off. Here's the playlist if anyone is interested. Georg said he thought I did a good job of getting in at least one song by everyone important, which was good to hear. The only people I missed who I really wanted to include were Anita O'Day, Woody Herman and Django Reinhardt. I really tried but just couldn't work them in. Oh, and Dick Powell, Billy Eckstine, and Mildred Bailey. And I'm sure I could think of a dozen more if I thought a minute. Four hours were not quite enough for this show! It would have been easier to include everybody, and a few more songs by the really important artists, in five hours.
During the show I was surprised by how clear and distinct were the changes in musical styles. Playing a song a year like this, you could hear it happening. Sometimes triggered by events, like jazz coming on the scene in 1917, or the invention of electric recording technology in 1925, or sometimes just because styles changed with the passage of time. Swing in the early 30s, big band in the late 30s through mid 40s, those Mitch Miller novelty songs in the early 50s, then we hit the mid-50s and suddenly it's all sultry cool jazz. Of course in reality music was never that monolithic. I was trying to play songs that were either very popular or very important in each year, which tends to amplify trends.
The show was instructive for me in another way: before now I've thought of the really popular songs as "overplayed" and avoided them to some degree, in favor of more unusual songs. Well this show was basically a greatest hits program, almost every song was hugely popular, and people seemed to really like it. I got way more calls today than usual. (And most of them called during the big band portion of the show, which suggests that big band is what people like the most.) I liked it too; I spent the whole show singing and dancing along in the MCR.
This was a great way to wrap up the year. I wish I could do a show like this every year, but it would be really hard to do without basically repeating the same show. I think next year on Oscar weekend I'll do a song a year thing for Oscar winners. That would be a similar idea, but with a different spin on it so it didn't sound the same.
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