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On the web since 1999
Jerrice J. Baptiste’s 12-month 2025 calendar of jazz poetry winds through the upcoming year with her poetic grace while inviting us to wander through music by the likes of Hoagy Carmichael, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Sarah Vaughan, Melody Gardot and Charlie Parker.
...December 31st, 2024
Take tonight, for instance.
I can’t ask you for the moon
the way Sinatra commands it
with his first-class confidence.
Let alone Jupiter or Mars.
January 21st, 2024
The poet writes about the origins of our personal blues, and how they can affect us…
...March 12th, 2023
Although he was not considered to be a true jazz singer, along with Bing Crosby, this “Romeo of Radio”’s short-lived, early 1930’s career influenced Italian crooners like Perry Como (pictured), as well as Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Herb Jeffries and Billy Eckstine. Who is he?
...December 27th, 2022
Chuck Sweetman and Patricia Carragon write two very different poems, both inspired by Frank Sinatra
...December 9th, 2022
In an exclusive interview, Will Friedwald, author of Straighten Up and Fly Right: The Life and Music of Nat King Cole, discusses Cole and his book.
...October 23rd, 2020
Frank Sinatra floated through the air in my boyhood home and Philadelphia neighborhood. My mother and two of her older sisters, Henrietta and Marge, had seen young Frankie in person at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier in the late 1930s, the thrill that wed these young Italian-Americans to Frank for life. “It’s Always You” reached them. He was part of our Staffieri family — their fantasy husband.
...October 3rd, 2020
For those with the time (and a strong nostalgic gene), you may enjoy viewing the 90-minute performance of a 1965 benefit entitled The Rat Pack Captured. This benefit – billed originally as a “Frank Sinatra Spectacular” benefiting “Father Dismas Clark’s Halfway House for Excons” – took place in St. Louis and was broadcast via closed circuit television in theaters all over the country. (Father Charles Dismas Clark was known around the country as “The Hoodlum Priest,” and his ministry included the successful rehabilitation of felons).
A youthful Johnny Carson hosts (in place of an ailing Joey Bishop who, Carson jokes, “slipped a disc backing out of Frank’s presence”), Dean Martin is at his
...February 20th, 2018
So many great songs to choose from for marking Valentine’s Day…The standard that most immediately comes to mind is an obvious choice, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s “My Funny Valentine.” Written for their 1937 Broadway musical Babes in Arms, the piece was overshadowed on Broadway (and in the film version starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland) by “Where or When,” “I Wish I Were in Love Again,” and “The Lady is a Tramp,” and was not made relevant until Frank Sinatra’s recording of it in 1953. It was eventually recorded by more than 600 artists on countless albums, and became synonymous with Chet Baker, who recorded it over 100 times. Will Friedwald, author of Stardust Melodies: The Biography of Twelve of America’s Most Popular Songs — an entertaining and essential work of popular music history — wrote that “the tune could be said to follow Baker from the grave, since it’s usually included in memorial tributes to him.”
Friedwald writes, “What makes the whole [song] so remarkable is the happy/sad nature of the lyric, brilliantly mirroring the major/minor nature of the music. It’s a love song, but far from those ‘I love you and everything’s rosy’ tunes so popular in the twenties (vis-a-vis Iriving Berlin’s ‘Blue Skies’). It’s vaguely optimistic, but it couldn’t
...February 14th, 2014
Excerpted from Tommy Dorsey: Livin’ in a Great Big Way, by Peter Levinson.
With young men being drafted in profusion and some even volunteering for military service, big bands found new venues to work: Army and Air Force bases and Naval stations. With the pre-war and war period having nothing but a favorable effect on the band business, by 1940, dance bands were still big business. Altogether, big bands of every stripe earned one hundred ten million dollars that year.
...September 29th, 2005
Nelson Riddle will forever be linked with the music and recordings of such unforgettable vocalists as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Rosemary Clooney, Linda Ronstadt, and dozens of others. Riddle not only helped to establish Nat “King” Cole’s career in the 1950s, but was also a major participant in reviving Sinatra’s career. He served as arranger of many classic Sinatra albums, including Only the Lonely and In the Wee Small Hours.
September in the Rain is the first biography of the most highly-respected arranger in the history of American popular music.
...April 19th, 2002
“Jazz clouds under the undulating sky of Riga while digging the Epistrophy of Thelonious Monk” by Namaya
The Sunday Poem is published weekly, and strives to include the poet reading their work....
Namaya reads his poem at its conclusion
Click here to read previous editions of The Sunday Poem
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