You know my favorite motto “Gotta love YouTube!” The reason for this posting today is numerous: Even though this is actually Barry’s special (and a great one at that, which I encourage to watch in its entirety) I wanted to focus in on his song set with Dionne Warwick. As Barry says in his intro Dionne=Class.

Just listen as the set unfolds and I especially love when Dionne and Barry are working out with just piano and vocals. That’s how a vocalist should work all of it out. Every vocalist should be able to play a little piano at least enough to get you from note to note. If you don’t/can’t then please for the rest of us work out with someone who can and that isn’t everyone… lots of people know how to play piano, but not everyone knows how to accompany. Barry Manilow had mastered this skill from all those years of working with singers before he became a recording artist. (more…)

The history of modern soul music is unfortunately littered with stories of truly magnificent artists who spent much of their adult lives fighting personal demons while creating seminal music. Phyllis Hyman is, sadly, one of those stories. The Philadelphia native was a popular jazz club singer in New York when hot producer Norman Connors witnessed her show and pegged her to perform a cover of the Stylistics’ “Betcha By Golly Wow” on his You Are My Starship album. Her emotive, jazzy stylings melded perfectly with Connors’ production, and her stunning performance resulted in her being signed by Buddah Records for a 1977 self-titled solo debut. (more…)

We’re going way back on this one…I mean way back, all the way to 1839. Yes the inspiration for this hit recording for both Barry Manilow and Donna Summer comes from Frédéric Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 28 specifically No. 20 in C minor. So just to set the record straight Hip-Hop producers are not the only ones who “sample”, quite to the contrary there is a very long history of re-interpolation of Classical and other forms of music. We wear our influences on our sleeves and Barry Manilow being a classically trained pianist well… sometimes the standard repertoire just happens to sneak into pop music.