[Dixielandjazz] 15 year old Nikki Yanofsky

[Ric Giorgi]

 Hi Pat,

As far as I'm concerned, computers run on magic and most of what has
happened with the internet is way over my head. I would argue that you have
a right to do whatever you want as long as it doesn't trespass against
anyone else's rights, safety or well-being. 

And I'll take Peggy Lee or Connie Boswell or Annette Henshaw or Rosemary
Clooney or indeed Ella over 99% of the so-called singers who are
commercially successful right now. 

But great performers don't develop out of thin air. They develop out of
imitating and absorbing and trying and failing and picking themselves up and
brushing themselves off and starting all over again (man there's a song in
there like they don't write any more!). 

I may have read the tone of your first posting about this kid incorrectly,
but it didn't sound to me like a musician commenting on another musician. It
sounded far less generous or understanding than the great musicians usually
themselves are. So, I wanted to know where you were coming from in the good
old fashioned sense of that phrase.  

By the way, about your trumpet player's break - who said "Repetition is the
death of art"? I'll send you an MP3 of something you're never heard before
if you can guess without looking it up.

Cheers,

Ric

-----Original Message-----
From: pj.ladd [mailto:pj.ladd at btinternet.com] 
Sent: January 6, 2010 7:25 PM
To: Ric Giorgi
Cc: jazz
Subject: Re: [Dixielandjazz] 15 year old Nikki Yanofsky

 Do I have a right to know where you're coming from?>>

Hi Ric,

Not sure I understand what you mean by `coming from`. No doubt as someone to
whom Facebook and Twitter and such are merely words this marks me down as a
technical and computer  illiterate  and probably should not be let out on my
own, and I wouldn`t argue with that.

If you mean ` how do I back up my criticism` I can only say that I am eighty
and I have been listening to music and playing it, at a very amateur level,
ever since I started my first band at the age of eighteen or thereabouts (we
were the Silver Stars and we were awful). Consequently I feel entitled,  if
I don`t like a performer, to say so.

I think the girl is extremely talented and, as I said in my first post, if
she is around in 15 years she will be tremendous. At the moment she is, I
think, too sophisticated for her own good. Her performance is mechanical
with every trick of stage craft in the book at her disposal. I feel that she
does not come over as having learned this stuff from experience but more
that she has been tutored . Hold the mike like this, look left, flounce your
skirt, skip across to stage left etc.,. To me it looks like as rehearsd
routine and no doubt it is, but the point is that it should NOT  look
rehearsed.
A trumpeter may play the same break every night but it must LOOK as if he is
improvising. If it doesn`t it loses the magic.

Sorry if you don`t agree, but there it is. Give  me Peggy Lee any time.

Cheers

Pat