Boz Scaggs-what's new

boz scaggs performed "what's new"
album:but beautiful

Category:

Music

Tags:

• boz
• scaggs
• jazz
• lowdown
• beautiful
• but
• guitar
• guitarist
• american

[guidomattina57]

Top Line..

[ASSUNTALU]

beautiful and I know he is singing to me. Don't you feel it too?

[jessthehorse]

@DPSTweek - actually he is an "old jazzer" who turned to rock. Boz was a Blues guy before all that commercial crap like the Lido Shuffle which made me wanna puke.

[jessthehorse]

@jessthehorse - I was just about to comment that "this guy nailed it" but then I realized that was my post. LMAO

[jessthehorse]

@hughmackie - well ... you are richly entitled to feel that way. The other versions are so down in tempo I had five o'clock shadow three times during one rendition. I did not find this so bouncy that it came across as frivolous to me, just more of a quasi Latin type of rhythm but as you wish.

[hughmackie]

@jessthehorse The jaunty little rhythm would be fine in an instrumental cover of this song, but in a sung version it completely undermines the lyric. This is a song about someone unexpectedly encountering a lost love, and finding that they still care deeply, while the other has moved on. Helen Merrill -- no belter -- conveys the awkwardness, the wistfulness, and the anguish. Scaggs is unmoved, and unmoving; just an aging hipster finger snapping his way down the boulevard: what's new, babes.

[talibe801]

today i received this record from japan.

amazing cd with great recording.

[jessthehorse]

"Mailing it in"??? Paaalleeeeez ... it's called "Playing the ball where it lies" ... he nailed the dynamic of the song perfectly. This is not a tune to be belted and I prefer this groove and tempo to the Helen Merrill version even though that too was excellent. I don't know how you can do a jazz standard any better than he did them on this recording. I virtually always hate pop artists trying to re-do standards but this recording is a conspicuous exception to that rule. It's stellar.

[hughmackie]

Pleasant enough, especially the quartet behind, but vocally he's mailing it in. No feeling for the lyric here, and no interesting take on the melody. Just a contented duffer chipping down the middle of the fairway, happy to coast to a three over par. What's New? Nothing much here.

For a gripping version of this song, by a 24-year old who could taking Boz Scaggs to school, recorded a life-time ago, in 1954, check out this definitive cover, elsewhere on youtube: watch?v=n2mnND2_ovQ

[DPSTweek]

When old rockers turn to jazz (and eventually most seem to) they hire the big orchestra and overproduce the hell out of it and end up with more of the same old "Standards" schlock... but not Boz. This is what I'd expect to hear in a jazz club, up close and personal. Cool and well played. Thank you Boz.