1. Artie Shaw Orchestra – Stardust. THIS IS AWESOME. There’s a kind of disjunct between the performance and the composition which makes the song seem simultaneously very laid-back and very intense. The trumpeter is blasting away when he has his solo, and the full-band passages are really loud and aggressive, but it doesn’t feel like a big number: it’s just a nice little song that somehow happens to be loud and aggressive at the moment. Maybe it’s because the rhythm section stays calm the whole time — I’m not sure if that’s why, but at any rate, the effect is fascinating. The band also has a string section, and when they start playing the same harmonies that sound jazzy on brass instruments, they suddenly sound like Debussy.

2. Wayne King – You Are My Sunshine. I never did manage to track this one down.

3. Billie Holiday – God Bless the Child. I love Holiday’s voice, but I have to say, this song doesn’t interest me. I don’t know why, because it’s not that different from the other slow jazz ballads I’ve been enjoying during this project. Maybe I’m just getting tired of slow jazz ballads. There is a great angular cornet solo towards the end, though.

4. The Andrews Sisters – Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. A cute song about a musician who gets drafted and is sad that he can’t “jam” when playing reveille — until the army drafts an entire band and they all play a boogie-woogie version of reveille to entertain the troops. (WTF?) Strange thing: there are a couple of phrases in the lyrics that also appear in “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar” (#5 in 1940), including the phrase “eight to the bar” itself and a reference to being accompanied by a “bass and guitar.” I’m not sure if it’s a deliberate reference or if it’s just that all boogie-woogie is actually about boogie-woogie, just like all funk is actually about funk. Also of note: one of the Sisters seems to be imitating Louis Armstrong at one point.

5. The Ink Spots – We Three (My Echo, My Shadow And Me). CREEEEEEPY! At first it sounded a lot like the other Ink Spots song I wrote about, except that the background “ooo”s were being done by someone who was singing too low for his range, so that they almost sounded like groaning. But there’s a startling moment halfway through the song when the low-voiced background vocalist starts speaking, still with a very low voice: “We three. We’re all… alone. And it seems like we’re… livin’ in a memory.” He speaks slowly and deliberately, sounding a little like a hardboiled detective in a noir film. And he speaks THE ENTIRE LYRICS OF THE SONG. On top of him, the high-voiced main vocalist sings “ooo”, and with that out front, I can suddenly hear why the Ink Spots are called forerunners of doo-wop. But it’s a really alarming version of doo-wop, like something one of Frank’s friends would sing in Blue Velvet. And when the song’s opening material returns, it now sounds creepy as well, as if it’s been poisoned by the middle section.