When You Turn The Lamp Down Low

A serendipitous Intertunnel find. I’m Beginning To See The Light is a jazz standard. It’s older than it seems; it’s World War II vintage. Duke Ellington and three others wrote it. Bobby Darin’s take on it is the quintessential version, if you ask me. It was on the Swingers soundtrack, which is pretty good overall, and many people discovered it thereby. I think of the song as a fifties thing.

Bobby Darin was a very accomplished singer. He never starts on the last note and goes up from there; the song builds from beginning to end, never wanders. The whole style is often aped but rarely performed as ably. The video I embedded gets lost halfway through, and pulls over at a disreputable rest stop where bass solos hang around to ask for directions. Oh well. The guitar player is delightfully loopy in his facial tics, and can really blast away when called on. His comping is very effective, too.

The singer is Cyrille Aimee, just the sort of exotic that New York loves enough to get hired, but if the tepid applause at the end is any indication, plays in half-empty clubs, because no matter how cosmopolitan a city thinks it is, the vast majority of people everywhere are Philistines, and would rather line up around the block to see dreck while accomplished artists play to an audience of chair backs. Such is life.

Me? I go in for afterglow. It’s on YouTube, next to the Psy videos.