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62 nd
ANNUAL
CRITICS POLL
VETERANS COMMITTEE
HALL OF FAME
BING CROSBY
JAZZ LUMINARY
By John McDonough
For all he did for jazz and the cause of modernity
in American music, Bing Crosby’s
presence has become surprisingly neglected
in recent decades. He needs the kind of
restorative cultural epiphany that his friend
Louis Armstrong received from the 1987 film
Good Morning, Vietnam (and its best-selling
soundtrack). Crosby and Armstrong are, after all,
two seminal peas in a revolutionary pod.
The two musicians were fated to join from the
beginning. Their convergence would merge the
crooner and the hipster into a new kind of singer
that would rewrite the laws of American music.
The arc of their lives aligned with an almost cosmic
precision. Born within 21 months of each
other, Crosby began recording within a year of
Armstrong’s first Hot Fives. In the late 1920s,
Crosby found jazz, and Armstrong discovered
the Great American
Songbook, creating a hot
zone of symbiosis.
No white singer listened
more closely to
Armstrong than Crosby,
whose early recordings
betray a two-track tension
between the intuitive
jazz singer who hung out
with Bix Beiderbecke and
Frankie Trumbauer and the
husky romantic balladeer
whom producer Jack Kapp
had tabbed for stardom.
Racial protocols of the time
precluded cross-racial duets.
But Crosby was not shy in
his admiration.
DOWNBEAT ARCHIVES