Boum. Blossom Dearie. 1959. Verve.

 All play is a form of seduction that tends towards congress. It is fearless, an open declaration of the will to power. We play to sharpen our instincts, exercise our strengths and for the briefest taste of invigoration. 20th century American jazz artists were among the eloquent, sublime practitioners of an intensive examination of the rules of creative play as those rules passed through the oppressive system of economic and social segregation. Like today’s hip-hop, ideas and newly minted forms passed through artistic communities like fiery exhalations, refashioned by the bold cast of individual personality. Blossom Dearie worked her way through this inspired process with a distinctly American élan that blurred the lines between sophistication and skylarking. Boum, from My Gentleman Friend, her third record for Verve, released in 1959, is a buoyant recitation, in French, of those natural elements with which our thundering hearts are in resonance when we’re in young love. Dearie’s tone is more felicitous than flirtatious, refining the lingua franca of postwar halcyon mythology and reaffirming beauty as an elemental outgrowth of modern expression as it passed from the art of jazz vocal into a new era of commercial pop romanticism. Blossom Dearie still has the power to beguile listeners in this age of prevailing banalities and sporadic bursts of random violence because, in her commitment to play, we recognize our chance at advancing beyond capitulation to mass imbecility. Boum advocates for the freedom that Joni Mitchell would later radicalize, dramatizing those personalities of the nineteen seventies determined to remake themselves into the image of personalized desire. Popular music is the inexhaustible alien tongue that speaks to the hope of future generations. 

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