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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 5/27/2025: Summertime [1]
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Date: 2025-05-27
Arthur Wesley Dow: Rain in May (ca. 1907)
Good evening, Kibitzers!
I hope everyone had a pleasant holiday weekend with good weather! It’s quite nice here, except for the pollen. I see the heat is about to crank up in California in a serious way, though, so you all need to prepare your sunhats and your frosty beverages.
I’m writing on Monday, but my plan for this week involves going to New Jersey to get my tooth looked at. I could go here to an entirely unknown dentist, who would probably be fine, but this has the potential to be big and expensive, and I would rather at least get the opinion of someone I trust.
My obstacles for this trip have been dispensed with; my car is back from the shop, and my brother’s arm is apparently not broken and is enough better that I’m not concerned about leaving him here unable to drive his own standard-transmission car. (He could, of course, call a Lyft or something if he needed to go somewhere, but that’s not how I think, yet — too long in a wilderness where you can’t even get a pizza delivered, and if you can’t drive, you’re staying home.)
Anyway, this morning will have been when I can next talk to the NJ dentist’s office. so I am targeting Thursday to be down there. We’ll see if she can fit me into the schedule. [Update: next Tuesday morning!]
I was thinking about the onset of summer, and I got the Gershwin song Summertime stuck in my head. That was a good thing, in my estimation, because I love that song, whereas the earworm it replaced was that leopards-eating-faces song, which was fun but not something you want lodged in there long-term.
Summertime was composed in 1934 by George Gershwin, ultimately as part of his 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. The lyrics are by DuBose Heyward, the author of the novel Porgy on which the opera was based, and Ira Gershwin. It quickly became a jazz standard. Here are my eleven favorites of the numerous versions I had time to listen to on YouTube.
Audra McDonald (Kennedy Center, annual Let Freedom Ring Celebration honoring Martin Luther King Jr, January 21, 2019) [2:41]
Billy Strings (Doc Watson Tribute Set, Newport Folk Festival, Newport, RI, July 2021) [5:44]
Della Reese (Ed Sullivan Show, September 1961) [2:24]
Miles Davis, with Quincy Jones & Orchestra (Montreux Jazz Festival, July 1991) [2:45]
Willie Nelson (official video, 2016) [3:55]
Janis Joplin (Stockholm, 1969) [4:42]
Gil Evans Orchestra (album Svengali, recorded at Trinity Church, NYC, 1973) [4:03]
Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra (Columbia recording, July 1936) [2:54]
Los Angeles funk band Scary Pockets, featuring guest vocalist Olivia Kuper Harris (2018) [2:45]
Prince (sound check, Hanshin Koshien Stadium, Nishinomiya, Japan, September 1990) — this ends rather abruptly and way too soon, because it’s “just” a sound check. As far as I can tell, he never recorded this song in full. Alas. [2:48]
Ella Fitzgerald, with the Tee Carson Trio: Tee Carson, piano; Keter Betts, bass; Joe Harris, drums (Berlin, 1968) [3:39]
Why did I stop at 11? Because it's summertime now and we needed room for a gin & tonic.
For the Wall Street Journal, Kevin Sintumuang gets advice from a bartender on the proper way to make a gin and tonic. [1:42]
Johnnie Johnson: Tanqueray (Montreux Jazz Festival, July 1992) [5:16]
[END]
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