Gentle Forest Jazz Band -- Misty (Dedicated to Tomasz Sacha.)/Yuka Deguchi -- Knock Me A Kiss

 

It's been almost four years since I last put up a song by Gentle Forest Jazz Band with the sweet vocal trio, the Gentle Forest Sisters, a group of folks happy to bring back some of that swing jazz into our ears.

Their most recent album is "Gentlemen's Bag" which came out on compact disc in March 2020, and I did see a familiar track there. "Misty" is a jazz standard that was first composed as an instrumental in 1954 by Erroll Garner, and then later given lyrics by Johnny Burke. I've heard it by many singers over the decades but as the Wikipedia article mentions, I think that the most famous rendition is by Johnny Mathis.

Well, the Gentle Forest Jazz Band with the Gentle Forest Sisters gave their own scintillating cover of "Misty" with the Sisters: Miho Kimura（木村美保）, Yuka Deguchi（出口優日）and Yuzu Ikami（伊神柚子）, making their own sound of muted horns through a kazoo and a cup for most of the song. That rather ties in with my question: who was Tomasz Sacha? The search engine led me to the Polish-language version of Wikipedia where I found through applying the translator that Sacha (1953-2006) was a jazz kazoo musician who came up with the mouthphone: a combination of a kazoo and a glass. The whole effect makes me wonder whether visits to the Grand Ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan around a century ago were on this level.

I had never heard of "Knock Me A Kiss" which was first recorded in November 1941 by Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five (the version below is from 1956). Composed by Mike Jackson and written by Andy Razaf, this was also covered by the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald for her 1958 album "Ella Swings Lightly". And over here, it was covered by one of the Gentle Forest Sisters, Yuka Deguchi, via her May 2020 solo album "Jive At Five" (love the cover, by the way). Listening to both Deguchi's and Jordan's versions, "Knock Me A Kiss" has that in-built teasing sultriness which would make the song especially great listening in one of those smoky brick-lined basement jazz establishments.