David Kraus: The Listening Room
Secret Love
David Kraus ~ electric jazz guitars (overdubbed)Return to Tunes
"Secret Love" is a popular song written in 1953 with music by Sammy Fain and lyrics by Paul Francis Webster. Its first performance was in the film Calamity Jane by Doris Day. It received an Academy Award for Best Original Song. Doris Day also recorded the best-selling record of the song, which reached #1 on both the Billboard and Cash Box charts in 1954. The record was made on August 5, 1953. It is heard here in a jazz guitar duet with both parts overdubbed and played by yours truly. Though the swing and ballad rhythms used for decades by the Tin Pan Alley song writers (Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, etc.) I decided to give the song a Brazilian samba feel for the "A" sections then changing into swing in the "B" sections, but only during the melody statement at both the beginning and end. The solo sections are all swing. Brazilian music, in particular the bossa nova rhythms introduced by João Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Louis Bonfi, had not yet come into the jazz repertoire in 1953 when this song was penned, and would not make its appearance until the later 50's. But during the 1960's musicians began taking all kinds of liberties with standard tunes as new rhythms and harmonic ideas began flowering with a more world artistic vision. So this is just one version I chose to do. As in these other guitar duets in the "Chronicles" page, this twenty year old tape recording is not modern digital, and unfortunately the tape quality has slowly deteriorated over time. But it is still clean enough to hear the music clearly.
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