(Roughly) Daily

If Ellington was the Beethoven of the jazz band era, its avatar of majesty, then surely Cab Calloway was its Mozart– its imp of pure joy:

…Cab Calloway and his orchestra performing “Jumpin Jive,” in the 1943 film Stormy Weather.  Special Monday Morning Bonus:  they are joined by the incomparable Nicholas Brothers.

(A tip o’ the hat and a tap of the toe to Jesse Dylan!)

As we give ourselves over to smiles, we might recover the serious tone appropriate to the start of the work week by recalling that it was on this date in 1927 that Isadora Duncan exclaimed “Goodbye my friends, I go to glory!”– then hopped into a sports car for a brisk drive near Nice… on which she died, strangled when her scarf became tangled in one of the car’s wheels…  662 years to the day after Dante Alighieri died.

(It’s been suggested– in the diary of an eyewitness to Isadora’s departure– that her actual last words were “Goodbye my friends, I’m off to love”– an allusion, its suggested to her likely “destination” with the handsome young Italian mechanic driving the car…  In any event, as Gertrude Stein observed of Duncan’s death, “affectations can be dangerous.”)

Isadora Duncan