May 2026 - Flamingo

[M-ster]

Hello, jazz people! Our standard for May 2026 will be Flamingo (Theodor Grouya, Edmund Anderson, 1941).

Background:
Jazz Standards Songs and Instrumentals (Flamingo)

[ragman1]

Ah! A song to do. I'd forgotten all about it. But I've never heard of Flamingo :-)

wait...

[ragman1]

Or alternately -

[ragman1]

More likely -

[ragman1]

I have heard it before, coming out of the radio at some distant time and place long, long ago :-)

[Mick-7]

I have heard it before, coming out of the radio at some distant time and place long, long ago :-)

It was topical to be tropical in 1940.... "Flamingo, with your tropical hue"

Here's a portrait of the song's composer:

[ragman1]

Very good!

Well done, Mick, takes a lot to make me laugh like that :-)

Anyway, done it.

[ragman1]

... still giggling :-!

[Mick-7]

No, no, no, the big pink bird fancies a latin beat, he's tropical, remember? - a Bossa, a Samba, a Rumba, or his favorite.... a Liberace.

[ragman1]

I know. Well, it is sort of tango-lite, but not the heavily accented stuff you strut across the floor with.

Between you and me, tango is the rhythm they use but I wasn't quite sure how to play it. I looked it up on various sites and YouTube but it was all teachery stuff, going through it from the simplest basic pattern to really complex stuff that only serious latin musos would play.

Not what we need for this. The usual basic rhythm is applied to dancing - 1 2 3 4-AND 1 2 3 4-AND 1 etc... But applied to this tune is still a bit too much. So I just did it roughly, if that.

It'll have to do.

[Mick-7]

I saw this rumba backing track on Youtube, not bad, I'd prefer it without the bird pics though.

[ragman1]

I think that's more or less what I was doing, I don't really know. A bolero might be good too. Probably any latin-sounding thing would do.

Anyway, on this forum, being 'jazz', you can just play anything you like. I get rather tired of hearing that, to be honest.