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Jim Shaw's list, part 2

Zoot Sims/Jimmy Rowles. These guys had so much fun together, Zoot on tenor, Jimmy on piano. A lot of feeling in their ballads, humor in the up-tempo things.

Zoot was maybe the most lyrical of all the great tenor players. You could hear the words of the song when he played. Jimmy Rowles was the consummate accompanist. He'd worked with most of the great soloists of the late 20th century, from Billie Holiday on.

Ben Webster. Did I say that "Zoot was the most lyrical of all the great tenor players"?

No, I said, maybe he was. Ben Webster was a contender.

Peggy Lee. Peggy was the last -- or maybe the first -- of the great "torch singers." She could put more hurt in a lyric than anybody outside Nashville. But she recorded a lot of popcrap, too, and you're more likely to hear that on golden oldies radio than her better stuff.

Benny Goodman's trio, quartet, quintet, sextet.

Small group swing at its very best.

MUSIC I WISH I'D NEVER HAVE TO HEAR AGAIN

"Hello Dolly" - by Louis Armstrong or anybody

"Mack the Knife" - by Bobby Darin or anybody

"My Way" and anything else by Paul Anka

The Rodrigo Guitar Concerto -- it's been beat to death

SQUARES I LIKE (HONEST!)

CLASSICAL MUSIC

I get a lot of pleasure from listening to classical music. I actually heard Paul Whiteman's orchestra perform Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" when I was in grammar school, but my earliest memory of classical music that moved me was hearing Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto on the car radio when I was about 13 or 14 years old.

But it was when I was about 19 or 20 that I decided to make an effort to learn something about classical music. Columbia had just introduced the first 33-rpm LP records and was offering a player for about $15 to anyone who bought three or four LPs. I was a sales clerk in Pizitz Department Store in Birmingham, Alabama, at that time, and I went to the lady -- yes, she was a "lady," a Southern spinster of a certain age, very cultured and genteel, who was in charge of the classical music records department -- and asked her if she could recommend some music for me. This is what she suggested:

So I bought those four LPs and the little plastic LP player and took it home. I played those LPs over and over and over -- and just loved them! And still do. The music is burned into my memory. How many times I've wished I could have thanked her for introducing me to great music.

My other great epiphany came much later, when I was about sixty (that's 6-0) when I was reading something by somebody and I came across this statement: "All the music of the world is contained in the Beethoven string quartets." Wow! Think of the money you would save if you only had to buy those 16 or 17 pieces. Well, I did, and I gotta tell you, the guy was almost right: They're filled with wonderful, soothing, sublime, angry music that pretty much covers the human range of emotions. I never tire of them.

And kids, could you ever imagine that those ancient, musty, serious composers knew something about SEX, too? Well, give a listen to the Love-Death Theme from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde." If ever there was "pornographic" music -- you can hear them DOING IT! Or Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade." Very erotic, if you're familiar with the story. And of course everybody knows that Ravel's "Bolero" is a can't-miss aphrodisiac.