Time Out Ten
Pick Yourself Up
For this item you need to be able to stop for ten minutes.
We are often moving on to the next job, the next meeting, scrolling down social media, taking the next call ......'Time Out Ten' asks you to stop for ten minutes and listen to a particular piece of music; to find a time when you won't be interrupted, when you can put in/on your headphones and chill out. Ten minutes isn't long.
Somehow I hadn't seen Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields' Pick Yourself Up as a 'jazz standard' but it goes to show how a good, uplifting song can be open to a jazz interpretation. It is also a very appropriate interlude for taking ten minutes out.
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In this case, the interpretation is by saxophonist Benny Carter and pianist Oscar Peterson. It comes from the 1953 Verve album cosmopolite and has Barney Kessel (guitar), Ray Brown (bass) and J. C. Heard at the drums. It comes to an abrupt end after two and a half minutes so you might want to dust it off and play it again later - listen to it here.
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The song was written, as many of you will know, for the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers 1936 film Swing Time. In the movie Ginger Rogers plays a dance teacher. To get to meet her, Fred Astaire pretends to go to her for dance lessons.
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Author John Mueller wrote that their dance to the song "Is one of the very greatest of Astaire's playful duets; boundlessly joyous, endlessly re-seeable.
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As we have time in our ten minutes, we can watch the song clip from the movie here, and the dance sequence here.
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Nothing's impossible I have found
For when my chin is on the ground,
I pick myself up,
Dust myself off,
And start all over again.
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Don't lose your confidence if you slip,
Be grateful for a pleasant trip,
And pick yourself up,
Dust yourself off,
And start all over again.
Work like a soul inspired
Till the battle of the day is won.
You may be sick and tired,
But you'll be a man my son!
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Will you remember the famous men
Who had to fall to rise again?
So take a deep breath,
Dust yourself off,
And start all over again
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