Donna Summer, last dance

[PRR]

Not a guitarist, but:

Disco legend Donna Summer died Thursday at age 63.
...numerous hits in both the 1970s and 1980s, including "Last Dance," "She Works Hard for the Money" and "Bad Girls."
Summer was the first female artist to chart with back-to-back multi-platinum double albums.
http://todayentertainment.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/17/11745326-donna-summer-dead-at-63

[Willabe]

Ya Know, FWIW I gotta say I LOVED her voice!!!!

IMO, she could sing the birds out of the trees!

IMO, HER voice was as _SMOOTH as SILK_, yet _FULL_ in tone and not _THIN_ .

Her vocal timing, phrasing, and total feel for the song was and still is wonderful to me!

Look I grew up in Chgo., played guitar in the blues bars and I have heard/played with a good number of great players/singers/band leaders and have a great love for _ALL ROOTS_ musics, which she was not known for as a disco "Queen" but still IMO _That woman could sang_!!!!  

IMO, THAT WOMANS VOICE WAS AS GOOD AS IT GETS!


                        

[Ritchie200]

Amen, what a voice.  Wow, another one silenced too soon.   

Jim

[Willabe]

YES, that woman had such a wonderful voice!    

Can you imagine _IF_ she was cutting tracks with/in MOTOWN?    

                      
                            

[Willabe]

Here's a few tunes of here's;

http://youtu.be/qG07rYStCjw

Here's Donna on a Family Maters,

http://youtu.be/g_QvhTm_-B8

[EL34]

I don't really think of Donna stuff as disco ,she just had hits during that era
They didn't really seem like manufactured disco songs to me.

Just like ABBA gets labelled as a disco band, but their music is not disco
Sure they had a disco hit with Dancing Queen, but that's about it for thier so called disco stuff
They were more just a super talented pop group that crafted very well written pop tunes.

[PRR]

> Her vocal timing, phrasing

Right. Beauty in all her work.

> I don't really think of Donna stuff as disco

Right. She was a young star in church, training ground for a lot of singing and playing. Backing Three Dog Night. 8 years in Germany including musical theater. She did a lot of other things later. Disco just happened to be "in" at the time she got wide attention.

"MacArthur Park" certainly isn't Disco (of course for that era it was produced disco-like).

> They didn't really seem like manufactured disco songs to me.

"Love to Love You" is certainly "manufactured" in the sense that it must be assembled from hundreds of scraps of tape laid-down by musicians who were never in the same town together. Giorgio must have spent weeks bulking-up the 3:40 version to 17 minutes. But his inspiration was Donna's demo track.

Like MacArthur Park, L2L is a strange hit. Too long, too raunchy, and too many musical themes.

I know what you mean. There's only 6 or 8 good chart songs a year, any year. The rest of the time has to be filled with by-rote songs. In those days, you put the drum machine on D-7, the bass sequencer on D-3, dash off some dumb words, and riff guitar/synth over it. As creative as Burger King. Hit? Yes? No? After 3 drinks and 7 lines of coke, the audience didn't complain.

BTW: the #1 Billboard Hot Dance the week before L2L was 1940's "How High the Moon" discofied. When new-music has to recycle 35 year old music.....

[EL34]

Oh man, How high the Moon is the best
Well the Les Paul and Mary Ford version anyway.
I have listened to that tune back to back 20+ times in a row several times

Not to hi-jack, but the youngsters need to check this out
Les Paul & Mary Ford How High the Moon