If you were given a list of genre to choose, what would be your choice? Being a 21 year old, my music genre may differ compared to other teens as I just love listening to jazz. Jazz is just the kind of song I can listen to all day long without feeling bored, its the kind of song which lifts me up when I’m feeling blue, the kind of song that lifts my spirit up & motivates me to study for my exams…The list however can go on forever but lets just say, jazz and I, we are just a fairytale.
1) Nat “King” Cole
His voice is as tender as a lover’s touch, each time he sings he releases these warm, caressing, silky soft, as smooth as velvet feeling and over a 30-year recording career he became one of the best-loved romantic balladeers of all time. Nathaniel Adams Coles was playing the piano by age 5. Fifteen years later, after “King” had been added to his name as a variation on the fairy tale figure Old King Cole (and the “s” in Coles dropped), Nat still thought of himself as an instrumentalist. However, that all changed when a club patron insisted that he both play and sing a request on that night. To his amazement, it was his voice that swept him to fame in 1942 and kept him on top until his death at the age of 48 from lung cancer. Nat made movies, hosted his own TV show and scored more than 175 pop and rhythm ‘n’ blues (R&B) hits. A quarter century after his death, Nat “King” Cole won a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award. The next year, an electronic “duet” between Nat and his now grown-up daughter, Natalie, became both a Grammy winner and million-selling sensation.
Biggest hits: TOO YOUNG (1951), MONA LISA (1950), FOR SENTIMENTAL REASONS (1946)
2) Tony Bennet
Multiple Grammy winner Tony Bennett was still in high school when he started out crooning in small New York clubs as Joe Bari. Bob Hope liked his sound but not his stage name. Upon learning that Joe had been born Anthony Dominick Bendetto, Hope suggested that the young man merely simplify his own real name. The master comic then strolled onto the Brooklyn Paramount stage and, for the first time, introduced the world to Tony Bennett. More than 50 hits followed between 1951 and 1977. Tony never warmed to the music that pushed him off the charts, insisting that “rock ‘ n’ roll doesn’t have a note of real feeling.” He preferred his kind of “quality songs” — the ‘30s and ‘40s tunes of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and other Tin Pan Alley composers. Ironically, two of Bennett’s sons later formed their own rock band and Tony himself made a major comeback with younger audiences in the ‘90s, still singing his beloved standards. His 1994 “MTV Unplugged” album became one of his all-time best-sellers and won the Grammy for Album of the Year.
Biggest hits: BECAUSE OF YOU (1951), COLD COLD HEART (1951), RAGS TO RICHES (1953)
3) Dean Martin
Twinkle-eyed romantic Dean Martin spent a decade paired with crazy Jerry Lewis as the ‘50s’ most madcap comedy team. After each went solo, “Dino” became the host of his own top-rated TV series and the maker of dozens of sometimes swingin’, sometimes heartwarming hits. In his movies, nightclub and TV appearances, and 60-plus albums, the former Dino Crocetti cultivated a suave, effortless pose. “I don’t work at nothin’;” Martin boasted to Look magazine in 1966. “I’m not a great singer or anything like that. I just croon.” Martin began his show business career at age 17, singing in Ohio nightclubs near his hometown. He was noticed by Cleveland bandleader Sammy Watkins, who hired Martin as his band’s featured vocalist. In1944 Dino was given his own 15-minute radio program, “Songs by Dean Martin,” which was broadcast from New York City. In 1946 he recorded for the very first time: four songs for Diamond Records. During a club engagement that year, Martin met Lewis and they teamed up, with Dean playing the straight man to Jerry’s clown. Their immense club popularity led to radio and TV appearances as well as 16 films between 1949 and 1956. After the duo split up, Martin found solo stardom in movies, on record (for Capitol and Reprise) and in concert. To his many fans, Dino was the epitome of “cool,” with a cigarette in one hand and a bit o’ booze in the other. (In reality, Martin never really was much of a drinker. That “whiskey” in his glass was actually apple juice.) Dino died on Christmas Day, 1995.
Biggest hits: MEMORIES ARE MADE OF THIS (1955), EVERYBODY LOVES SOMEBODY (1964), THAT ’S AMORE (1953)
4) Kenny Rogers
“I’m not a great singer or vocal technician,” said Kenny Rogers. “I’m a stylist. I have a familiar voice with a certain honesty and distinction.” His voice became familiar through nearly 70 pop and/or country hits from the ‘60s through the ‘90s. Born in Texas, Kenny was six in 1944 when he made his singing debut before a nursing home audience. He cut his first single with his high school band, The Scholars, in 1956. Stints in a jazz quartet (The Bobby Doyle Four) and a folk group (The New Christy Minstrels) followed before Kenny finally scored as lead singer of The First Edition in 1968 (“Just Dropped In” and others). After 11 hits and their own TV series, The First Edition broke up in 1976. Rogers then embarked on a solo career as a country star — one of the few channels then open to someone of his “advanced” age (38). The results exceeded his wildest expectations — as Kenny emerged as both a country and pop superstar, leading to film roles in the “Gambler” series of movies and “Coward of the County.” After some fallow years in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, Rogers made a spectacular comeback in 1998 by launching his own label (Dreamcatcher Records) and releasing the #1 country hit “Buy Me A Rose.”
Biggest hits: LADY (1980), COWARD OF THE COUNTY (1979), SHE BELIEVES IN ME (1979)
5) Frank Sinatra
After less than one year in the employ of big band leader Harry James, a skinny singer named Francis Albert Sinatra was given the break of a lifetime: to sing with the third most popular band of 1939 (Artie Shaw’s was #1, Kay Kyser’s was #2). Almost overnight, the combination of the man they’d call “The Voice” with the orchestra of “That Sentimental Gentleman of Swing,” Tommy Dorsey, sent the music world swooning. “No singer had ever sung like that before, recalled Jo Stafford, then a member of the Pied Pipers, the vocal quartet which often backed Sinatra. By the time he left Tommy’s organization in 1942, Frank was a superstar. He would go on to make his mark as an Oscar-winning actor, TV host, record company owner and the creator of some 170 solo (and duet) hits through 1980. Among Sinatra’s Grammys was a somewhat premature 1965 “Lifetime Achievement Award,” as he had yet to chart 30 more albums (13 of which became million-sellers!). By that time billed as “The Chairman of the Board,” “The Voice” continued to enchant millions with new material until just before his death in1998 at the age of 82.
Biggest hits: ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL (1943), FIVE MINUTES MORE (1946), LEARNIN ’ THE BLUES (1955)
6) Andy Williams
If you’d been in the right church in Wall Lake, Iowa in 1937, you’d have heard Bob, Don, Dick and eight-year-old Andy harmonizing as The Williams Brothers. The quartet later sang on radio and records (backing Bing Crosby, for instance, on “Swingin’ On A Star”) and toured nightclubs with comedienne Kay Thompson. After that act broke up in 1953, Bob, Don and Dick retired from show biz, but not Andy. He began a three-year run as a regular on Steve Allen’s television program and started cutting his first of 45 hits through 1976. Williams also hosted his own TV variety series between 1962 and 1971. “I think you have to bear in mind that mine was not just a recording career but a television and recording career,” Andy said. “The two of them together, working hand in hand. Even in making records, our thought was, ’What can we do with this one to expose it well on TV’?” That philosophy certainly paid off, since — in addition to his hit singles — Williams scored 34 hit albums between 1960 and 1995.
Biggest hits: BUTTERFLY (1957), CAN’T GET USED TO LOSING YOU (1963), ARE YOU SINCERE (1958)
7) Vic Damone
“Romance is my life,” said Vic Damone, “and music and love are together.” Born Vito Rocco Farinola in 1928 in Bensonhurst, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, Vic Damone delivered fruit and sang in his church choir before landing the job that turned his life around — working as a theatre usher. One night he worked a Frank Sinatra concert as was mesmerized by “his phrasing, his breathing, his tone, his timbre. Everything.” Having discovered a role model, Damone decided to try making it as a supper club crooner. He won an Arthur Godfrey “Talent Scouts” competition in 1946 and the next year had both a contract with Mercury Records and his own radio program. Fifty hits followed through the end of the ‘60s, as well as movie roles and jobs hosting three different TV series. Vic’s liquid baritone and serene delivery made him one of the most popular of all postwar romanticists. “I’m a ballad singer,” said Damone, “and I guess I always will be.” Frank Sinatra himself credited Vic with having “the best pipes in the business.”
Biggest hits: YOU’RE BREAKING MY HEART (1949), MY TRULY TRULY FAIR (1951), ON THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE (1956)
8) Michael Bublé
And of course, among all these singers, I can’t help but fall in love with the way Michael Bublé writes his music & the way he sings. When he sings, magic happens, lyrics are so meaningful & it’s the kind of music that makes you want to stand up & sway to the music, sipping a glass of wine, indulging yourself to just spend time with your loved one enjoying the beautiful rhythm.
Unlike other kids in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Michael Buble (pronounced BOO-BLAY) spent his childhood listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra. “My grandfather was really my best friend growing up,” said the Vancouver vocalist. “He was the one who opened me up to a whole world of music than seemed to have been passed over by my generation. Although I like rock ‘n’ roll and modern music, the first time my granddad played me the Mills Brothers something magical happened. The lyrics were so romantic, so real — the way a song should be. It was like seeing my future flash before me. I wanted to be a singer and I knew that this was the music that I wanted to sing.” Buble entered a local talent competition and won first place — only to be disqualified for being under age. After turning 17, Michael won the top prize again — this time in the Canadian Youth Talent Search. He recorded a series of independently-released albums before Grammy winner David Foster, the owner of Canada’s 143 label, signed the young man and directed the production of his debut album in 2001. Included was what would become the typical mix of numbers on a Buble album — some all-time standards (“For Once in My Life,” “The Way You Look Tonight”) plus newer titles (like “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine”). The Bee Gees even sang along on Buble’s remake of their 1971 hit “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart.” “Michael hasn’t just learned this music, said Foster. “He’s lived it. He brings youthful energy to it — tough and tender at the same time — like nothing else I’ve ever heard. The great thing is, he’s tapped into a repertoire that can last him 50 years. He’s at the beginning of a very long career.”
Biggest hits: HOW CAN YOU MEND A BROKEN HEART? (2003), HOME (2005), SAVE THE LAST DANCE FOR ME (2006)
By: Syaza WJ
...The way we view things... 