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Crosby made Armstrong his co-star in the
1936 movie Pennies From Heaven, and they met
often after World War II, first on Bing’s radio programs,
then on the charts when their 1951 duet
on “Gone Fishin’” made the top 20. They teamed
up again in the 1956 movie High Society and four
years later on their only album, Bing & Satchmo.
The Aug. 22, 1956, issue of DownBeat featured
Crosby and Armstrong on the cover, and
in one of the accompanying stories, High Society
film producer Sol C. Siegel explained how pleased
he was with the casting: “I was particularly anxious
to have Armstrong [in the film] because of his
close association over the years with Bing Crosby.”
Now the two singers are finally reunited in the
DownBeat Hall of Fame, 37 years after Crosby’s
death and 62 years after Armstrong became resident
number one in 1952.
Why has it taken six decades to honor Crosby’s
place in jazz history? The answer lies in two factors:
the enormity of his shadow as a popular
entertainer, as well as the diversity of his talents,
which made him the only performer of his century
to occupy the heights of all three media platforms
simultaneously: film, broadcasting and
records.
He accomplished this by wrapping his music
around a happy-go-lucky persona that thumbed
its nose at status and materialism. He sang populist
tunes that belittled the values of the one-percenters
of his era (“I’ve Got A Pocketful Of
Dreams”).
In films, he was naturally into characters who
were uncomfortable with responsibility and
who favored the vagabond life. During the Great
Depression, Crosby did more than merely ease the
moral stigma of unemployment. He made laziness
a virtue and invited the poor to look down
on the rich. The persona aged well. He was equally
at home in the prosperous ’50s when he became
a soothing antidote to the rat race of conformity.
Crosby was a beatnik at heart, unimpressed, even
puzzled, by his own legend.
It was his good luck to be part of the Paul
Whiteman band at a formative time. Whiteman
presented a distilled kind of jazz that buffed out
any rough edges. But Crosby, Beiderbecke, guitarist
Eddie Lang and other Whiteman sidemen
sought the music out at its sources, were imprinted
with it, and helped synthesize its possibilities.
If Armstrong was the first important black
singer to use improvisation on popular songs,
Crosby was among the first white singers to see it
as a Magna Carta that could liberate the American
song from the tyranny of the operetta. His rhythm
tunes were full of the freedom Armstrong took—
but with none of its direct language. In Crosby’s
scat singing, especially, it’s clear his rhythmic
thinking was all Beiderbecke, not Armstrong—
never more apparent than on his 1932 “Sweet
Sue,” which Bix had recorded with Whiteman
four years earlier.
Crosby was at home with the Whiteman jazz
contingent, along with the other young, hot,
white players he worked with in the East. After
Whiteman, he settled in California and began his
rise to superstardom. But the jazz singer never disappeared
inside the crooner. The first empowered
the second and formed the matrix for the next
two generations of singers who would dominate
American music: Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett,
Peggy Lee, Jo Stafford, Dean Martin, Billy
Eckstine and, well, everybody.
In later Crosby couplings with Armstrong,
the Mills Brothers, the Boswell Sisters, Jack
Teagarden, Joe Venuti, Johnny Mercer and others,
a smoother Crosby still crackled with the spirit
that ignited the first important generation of
white jazz players. It remained his most natural
environment. But it didn’t stop him from negotiating
a brassy, Basie-ish makeover on Verve in
1956 with conductor Buddy Bregman. Bing Sings
Whilst Bregman Swings would be the best of his
late-career jazz albums.
But a quieter, more intimate jazz sensibility
would settle on an older Crosby in the more
sequestered surroundings of the Buddy Cole
Trio, which backed him on radio into the 1960s.
(Crosby was perhaps the last major star to give
up his loyalty to the medium.) In 2012 Mosaic
Records released 160 of these concise, relaxed performances
in a box set titled CBS Radio Recordings
1954–56. Their casual flow and unforced lyricism
represent the essence of what jazz and
popular music had once given to each other
when Crosby paved the way—and until rock
changed the rules.
DB
AUGUST 2014 DOWNBEAT 37