"There's a time in life for Hoagy Carmichael. There's a time in life for Claude Debussy. There's a time in life for Jerry Lee Lewis. There's a time in life for Destiny's Child. All these things have their moment." ~Elvis Costello
The great Hazel Scott (June 11, 1920 – October 2, 1981) Trinidad-born American jazz and classical pianist and singer, She was not only a gifted pianist and singer – a child prodigy who at only eight-years-old was given a scholarship from the Julliard School of Music to be privately tutored – Scott was also an outspoken critic of racial discrimination and segregation, She used her influence to improve the representation of Black Americans in film.
Here, she is performing “Taking a Chance on Love” in 1943.
When you’re a mathematician by trade and you moonlight as one of the cleverest songwriters around, you’re uniquely qualified to perform something like Tom Lehrer’s “New Math” which, by our calculations, is enjoyable and confounding in equal parts.