Billie Holiday was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday made a significant contribution to jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly influenced by jazz instrumentalists, inspired a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills.
This is a list of notable events in music that took place in the year 1944.
The Nutcracker, Op. 71, is an 1892 two-act classical ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, set on Christmas Eve at the foot of a Christmas tree in a child's imagination. The plot is an adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 short story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. The ballet's first choreographer was Marius Petipa, with whom Tchaikovsky had worked three years earlier on The Sleeping Beauty, assisted by Lev Ivanov. Although the complete and staged The Nutcracker ballet was not as successful as had been the 20-minute Nutcracker Suite that Tchaikovsky had premiered nine months earlier, The Nutcracker soon became popular.
On the Town is a musical with music by Leonard Bernstein and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, based on Jerome Robbins' idea for his 1944 ballet Fancy Free, which he had set to Bernstein's music. The musical introduced several popular and classic songs, among them "New York, New York", "Lonely Town", "I Can Cook, Too", and "Some Other Time". The story concerns three American sailors on a 24-hour shore leave in New York City during World War II, 1944. Each of the three sailors meets and quickly connects with a woman.
Jerome Robbins was an American dancer, choreographer, film director, theatre director and producer who worked in classical ballet, on stage, film, and television.
The Little Prince is a 1974 British-American sci-fi fantasy-musical film with screenplay and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, music by Frederick Loewe, arranged and orchestrated by Angela Morley. It was both directed and produced by Stanley Donen and based on the 1943 classic children-adult's novella, The Little Prince, by the writer, poet and aviator Count Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who disappeared near the end of the Second World War some 15 months after his fable was first published.
La source is a ballet in three acts/four scenes with a score composed by Léo Delibes and Ludwig Minkus which was premiered in Paris in 1866 with choreography by Arthur Saint-Léon. In 1878 in Vienna it was called Naïla, die Quellenfee.
"Love Me or Leave Me" is a popular song written in 1928 by Walter Donaldson with lyrics by Gus Kahn. The song was introduced in the Broadway musical comedy Whoopee!, which opened in December 1928. Ruth Etting's performance of the song was so popular that she was also given the song to sing in the play Simple Simon, which opened in February 1930.
Carmen Mercedes McRae was an American jazz singer. She is considered one of the most influential jazz vocalists of the 20th century and is remembered for her behind-the-beat phrasing and ironic interpretation of lyrics.
Bloomer Girl is a 1944 Broadway musical with music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by E.Y. Harburg, and a book by Sig Herzig and Fred Saidy, based on an unpublished play by writer Daniel Lewis James and his wife Lilith. The plot concerns independent Evelina Applegate, a hoop skirt manufacturer's daughter who defies her father by rejecting hoopskirts and embracing comfortable bloomers advocated by her aunt "Dolly" Bloomer, who was inspired by the women's rights advocate Amelia Bloomer. The American Civil War is looming, and abolitionist Evelina refuses to marry suitor Jeff Calhoun until he frees his slave, Pompey.
"The Way You Look To-night" is a song from the film Swing Time that was performed by Fred Astaire and composed by Jerome Kern with lyrics written by Dorothy Fields. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1936. Fields remarked, "The first time Jerry played that melody for me I went out and started to cry. The release absolutely killed me. I couldn't stop, it was so beautiful."
"Pennies from Heaven" is a 1936 American popular song with music by Arthur Johnston and lyrics by Johnny Burke. It was introduced by Bing Crosby with Georgie Stoll and his Orchestra in the 1936 film of the same name.
John Kriza was an American ballet dancer and teacher whose long career as a principal with American Ballet Theatre made him one of the best known and most admired male dancers in the country.
"I Wished on the Moon" is a song composed by Ralph Rainger, with lyrics by Dorothy Parker. Bing Crosby sang the song in The Big Broadcast of 1936.
On the Town is a 1949 American Technicolor musical film with music by Leonard Bernstein and Roger Edens and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. It is an adaptation of the Broadway stage musical of the same name produced in 1944, although many changes in the script and score were made to the original stage version; for instance, most of Bernstein's score was dropped in favor of new songs by Edens, who felt that the majority of Bernstein's music was too complex and too operatic for film audiences. This caused Bernstein to boycott the film.
This is a list of Bing Crosby songs he recorded twice or more during his career, excluding all of the 1954 re-recordings for Bing: A Musical Autobiography.
Blue Skies is a studio album of phonograph records by Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire released in 1946 featuring songs that were presented in the American musical film Blue Skies. Like Song Hits from Holiday Inn, the entire 78 rpm album would be composed of Irving Berlin songs written specifically for the film. This was the first release of one of Astaire's greatest songs, "Puttin' On the Ritz", on shellac disc record.
The Complete Commodore & Decca Masters is a 3CD box set of recordings by Billie Holiday, released by Hip-O Records in 2009, compiling all the master takes released as 78rpm singles by Commodore and Decca Records. It includes an essay by Ashley Kahn.
"Lonely Town" is a song from the 1944 musical On the Town. It was composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Adolph Green and Betty Comden.
