A Jazz Etude

A slice of Thirties elegance to welcome the New Year, with piano, three double basses, and tap dancer Billy Burt (courtesy of Weirdo Videos):

Comments

[George Szirtes]

That's gorgeous, Mick. I'll steal it with full acknowledgments. There's something rather haunting about tap dancing in the dark.

[Dom]

I think the pianist is the same guy over here, at 5:10. The mean look on his face was part of his comedy act.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4jiceYtzHo

[Mick H]

Nice find! Yes, it's the same guy. There's a lengthy comment at Weirdo Video - http://weirdovideo.com/wv68/comment/reply/1518#comment-form - which goes into some detail about the life of the pianist, Lothar Perl, "perhaps the best German composer of novelty piano music of all time", who fled the Nazis and ended up, as we see here, on the Ernie Kovacs TV show in the Fifties. Not his finest hour, I'd say, that Minute Waltz business.

Yma Sumac is a whole other story, as I'm sure you know. Maybe the founder of kitsch exotica, she claimed to be descended from the last Incan emperor, but according to legend was in fact a Brooklyn housewife called Amy Camus. Her Wiki entry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yma_Sumac - takes the Peruvian connection seriously, but I have to say I prefer the Brooklyn story.