THE SPLENDID BOHEMIANS PRESENT A NEW SERIES: THE SUNNY SIDE OF MY STREET with THE "MIGHTY MEZ" - SONGS TO MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD - EPISODE #13: BIJOU by LAMBERT, HENDRICKS, AND ROSS (1959, COLUMBIA)

This example of a “sunny song” is a little different from the previous ones because what makes me happy when I hear it is not the message itself. Or, rather, the medium is the message. The message is under the surface, or perhaps on the surface, or threaded throughout it. It’s a message about team work - a premier example of interracial / inter-gendered cooperative, coming together to create a mosaic masterwork of such intricacy that you can’t tell with whom it begins or ends. Jon Hendricks, the master of vocalese, the “James Joyce of Jive”, wrote the lyrics to this1945 Woody Herman instrumental rhumba, and L,H,&R revivify it with breathy delicacy. There is a fractured story about a guy searching Istanbul for a dancing girl, “Bijou” (his jewel) that has captured his imagination. But, it’s really just the repetition of that name, Bijou, bouncing back and forth from voice to voice, that crochets the musical magic into an unforgettable fabric. I first became aware of Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, and the vocalese technique, through the unpredictable medium of Joni Mitchell, who covered Annie Ross’s “Twisted” on one of her albums. And that rendition led me to this cut, whose brilliant shards of musical and lyrical data immediately shot into my brain, implanting an ear worm that still brings a smile as it plays in my head 50 years later. And, when I was creating my list of sunny songs, it was right there, just like the memory of a perfect, perfumed summer evening.