Time: 27:07
Size: 62.1 MB
Styles: EasyListening, Traditional pop
Year: 1965/1998
Art: Front
[3:10] 1. A Way Of Life
[2:28] 2. My Wish
[2:25] 3. As Time Goes By
[1:50] 4. Make Someone Happy
[3:10] 5. I'll Be Seeing You
[2:33] 6. When Day Is Done
[2:56] 7. When I Lost You
[2:43] 8. If I Had You
[2:52] 9. Once To Every Heart
[2:56] 10. I'll See You In My Dreams
If any performer can truly be said to have carved out his own comedic turf, made a huge success out of it lasting over several decades, while completely owning that piece of turf lock, stock, and barrel, then that performer would have to be Jimmy Durante. There never has been -- nor is there likely ever to be -- a stylistic school of Durante; the man and his character are of one piece and ingrained in the national consciousness to the extreme. Anyone foolish enough to start appropriating any part of his act would be immediately branded as a slavish imitator -- someone just merely "doing Durante" -- while always being doomed to comparison with the one and only real-deal "Schnozzola" and again, falling well short of the mark. On the surface, Durante's mega-success defied all commonly understood show business laws. No one with such a gravelly voice should have been able to put over a song as well as he did. No one as ugly as him should have made as much profitable hay as he did about being that ugly, and parlaying those looks into a movie career at that. No one wore rumpled suits and a beat-up fedora (covering what little hair he had left), smoked a cheap cigar, and mangled the English language with more charm and hilarity than he. No one won the hearts of his audience by simply being himself -- a comic Everyman from the poor side of town -- than did one Jimmy Durante. He didn't sing good, he didn't look good, and he had the audacity to keep bringing it up, he dressed like a bum, and couldn't say a complete sentence without screwing up some (or all) of the words. Not much of a show business résumé on the surface of it, but Durante's uncloneable charm gathered its main strength from being just that; an average guy who -- as one critic put it -- "acted like a heckler from an audience who had finally decided he could do a better job himself and, upsetting all conventional show business decorum, had snuck into the spotlight." There was not one subtle thing about Jimmy Durante; whether it was wrecking a piano and throwing the resultant debris at the audience, singing a song like "I Know Darn Well I Can Do Without Broadway (But Can Broadway Do Without Me?)," or doing a complete about face and providing a brief glimpse of the wistful side of his character, he tapped the deepest of emotions every single time and did it at full bore. ~Cub Koda
Jimmy Durante's Way Of Life mc
Jimmy Durante's Way Of Life zippy
The man was a treasure, worthless, but at the same time priceless. You know you're gonna laugh,but a tear or two will fall too. Beloved I'd call him. Thanks for this.
ReplyDeleteFor what has to be the majority of Silky Denim followers who did not grow up in the U.S. in the 1950s (or, as in my case, having known daylight there as far back as the 40s) or, equally likely, didn't grow up in the U.S. at all, this one, if you've troubled to click on it, has to be something of a mystery. Durante, though, was one of those many bizarre creatures, not quite mutants but bizarre creatures all the same, whom we watched on our television screens, in those early days of television, as if they were ... well, if I say like exotic animals in a cage in the zoo, I am overstating my case. But at least I've got the vector right. JD was an old-fashioned song-and-dance man. I just looked on Wikipedia. To my amazement, I discover he was born in 1893! But my wife Barbara and I listened to this album last night. We listened to it 2x in fact. We both smiled. Love the pile-driver weight with which he hits the initial consonant of any word he sings. He practically spits it. Love the way he sings "I'll be lookin' at duh moon." For those of you who aren't native speakers of English, this is an instance of the "dese, dems, dose" talk -- for "these, them, those" -- characteristic in other days of a Brooklyn, not like the Brooklyn now, where immigrants and their children struggled (or didn't bother to struggle) with the English-language "th." But the voice has tremendous warmth and personality -- plus, for people who remember JD from way back when, equally powerful nostalgia value. ("Good night, Mrs. Calabash!" -- wow! There's a whole era of American life encapsulated in that sign off.) The Gordon Jenkins arrangements? GJ did arrangements for everyone from Juldy Garland to Sinatra to Ella and even Billy Holliday. I don't know what to say. The arrangements are ridiculous -- but also completely appropriate. I really enjoyed this ... experience. Thanks.
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