Martinis On The Patio Music

David Byrne's collection of standards is exactly what Mr. Nag and I lounge lizard it up to most evenings (without irony). Nat King Cole, Chet Baker, Julie London, a warm breeze, a cool intoxicant - ain't nothin' like it.

Though they are often referred to as standards, these songs are only viewed that way by a relatively small group others would view Hank Williams as the 'standard', or Robert Johnson, or The Doors, or Professor Longhair or Aretha or Grandmaster Flash. And they are right- this music has little to do with the majority of existing musical genres but it has influenced all of them. To my mind, here is what happened to classical music between the wars here is where that road led. The rest of orchestral classical music burrowed deep into academia or morphed into Hollywood soundtracks but, for sophisticated music that was as popular as the Italian operas once were, and that's how I'm defining classical music not by instrumentation this is it. And this was where musical genius of a certain stripe gravitated.