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Adult Standards
Artists
Adult Standards
Dinah Shore
2012
·
1 album
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2
/5
Genres
Classic Soul
Classic soul is the 1960s–early 1970s strain of soul music that fused gospel's emotive vocals and church-derived harmony with the backbeat and instrumentation of rhythm & blues. It emphasizes powerful lead singing, call-and-response with background vocals, tight rhythm sections, and punchy horn arrangements. The sound ranges from uptempo, danceable singles to deeply expressive ballads in 12/8 time. Production is typically warm and analog, with live bands, tambourine and handclaps on the backbeat, and arrangements crafted for immediacy and drama. Lyrical themes center on love, heartbreak, perseverance, community, and, at times, social conscience.
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Adult Standards
Adult standards is a song-based popular style and later radio format centered on the Great American Songbook and pre-rock era pop. It emphasizes sophisticated vocal performances, memorable melodies, and lush arrangements drawn from Broadway, Hollywood musicals, big bands, and jazz-influenced traditional pop. Typical recordings feature rich orchestration (strings, woodwinds, and brass), a polished rhythm section, and crooner-style vocals delivered with close-mic intimacy. Harmonies often include jazz chords, secondary dominants, and modulations, supporting elegant, urbane lyrics that focus on love, longing, and everyday romance. Although it predates rock ’n’ roll in repertoire, adult standards also encompasses later revivals and reinterpretations by contemporary singers who keep the classic songbook alive through modern recordings and live performances.
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Traditional Pop
Traditional pop is the pre–rock and roll mainstream of American popular song, centered on the Great American Songbook and the crooner/orchestral style that dominated radio, records, and film musicals from the 1930s through the 1950s. It favors memorable melodies, elegant lyrics (often about romance), and lush arrangements for strings, woodwinds, and big band rhythm sections. Singers use close‑mic "crooning" to deliver expressive, legato phrasing over jazz‑tinged harmonies and steady, unhurried grooves. Typical forms include the 32‑bar AABA standard, with sophisticated but accessible harmony (secondary dominants, ii–V–I cycles, tasteful modulations) and an emphasis on interpretation—how the vocalist shades timing, dynamics, and diction to make a familiar song feel personal.
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Big Band
Big band is a large-ensemble style of jazz and popular dance music built around brass, reed, and rhythm sections playing arranged parts. Typical instrumentation includes five saxophones (often doubling clarinet/flute), four trombones, four trumpets, and a rhythm section of piano, guitar, upright bass, and drum set. The music emphasizes swing rhythms, call-and-response between sections, riff-based writing, and dramatic shout choruses, while leaving space for improvised solos. Born in American ballrooms and theaters, big band became the sound of the Swing Era, providing both music for dancing and a platform for sophisticated arranging and orchestration that shaped much of 20th‑century jazz and popular music.
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Vocal Jazz
Vocal jazz is a jazz tradition in which the human voice is treated as an instrument—matching the phrasing, articulation, and timbral nuance of horns or piano. Singers often improvise melodically and rhythmically, including using scat singing (nonsense syllables) to emulate instrumental solos. At the same time, many vocal‑jazz performances favor traditional, pop‑leaning song structures and clear lyric delivery, reducing the overall role of extended improvisation compared with small‑group instrumental jazz. Repertoires frequently draw from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway standards (the Great American Songbook), rendered with swing, ballad, or Latin feels.
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Jazz Blues
Jazz blues is a hybrid idiom that merges the expressive, melodic language and 12‑bar song forms of the blues with the harmony, improvisational vocabulary, and rhythmic feel of jazz. Typically, it retains a blues structure (often the 12‑bar form) while enriching it with jazz devices such as ii–V progressions, secondary dominants, turnarounds, tritone substitutions, and extended chords (9ths, 11ths, 13ths). The feel commonly swings, with walking bass lines, comping on piano or guitar, blue notes, call‑and‑response phrasing, and solos that mix blues scales with mixolydian and bebop lines. The result ranges from earthy shuffles to urbane, harmonically sophisticated vehicles for improvisation, sitting comfortably between New Orleans roots, Kansas City riff traditions, and modern bop language.
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Piano Blues
Piano blues is a blues tradition centered on solo piano performance, where the instrument carries both rhythm-section drive and melodic lead. It fuses ragtime’s syncopation, early jazz phrasing, and the 12‑bar blues form into a percussive, highly expressive style. Hallmarks include steady left‑hand patterns (walking tenths, stride figures, broken octaves, and boogie ostinatos) supporting right‑hand riffs built from the blues scale, blue notes, crushed grace notes, tremolos, and call‑and‑response motifs. It flourished in saloons, rent parties, theaters, and recording studios, giving rise to regional approaches like Chicago’s understated, swinging shuffle and New Orleans’ rolling, rhumba‑tinged feel. Closely related to barrelhouse and boogie‑woogie, piano blues underpins much of later American popular music, feeding directly into jump blues, early R&B, rock and roll, and rockabilly.
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Show all 7 genres
Albums
2012
3
/5
Evr’y Time We Say Goodbye - All-Time Romantic Duets
Ray Charles
Piano Blues
Jazz Blues
Classic Soul
Similar artists
4
/5
Frank Sinatra
Big Band
Jazz
Swing
4
/5
Louis Armstrong
Dixieland
Harlem Renaissance
Jazz Trumpet
4
/5
Ella Fitzgerald
Vocal Jazz
Swing
Standards
1
/5
Various Artists
Afro-Funk
Alternative Rock
Ambient
4
/5
Billie Holiday
Harlem Renaissance
Jazz
Swing
4
/5
Ray Charles
Piano Blues
Jazz Blues
Soul
4
/5
Dean Martin
Big Band
Easy Listening
Adult Standards
4
/5
Tony Bennett
Jazz
Adult Standards
Big Band
4
/5
Peggy Lee
Big Band
Vocal Jazz
Jazz
3
/5
Sammy Davis Jr.
Big Band
Adult Standards
Swing
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Melodding was created as a tribute to
Every Noise at Once
, which inspired us to help curious minds keep digging into music's ever-evolving genres.