Doug Morris Presents: Tom Waits

Tom Waits is one of the most innovative, adventurous, intriguing, distinctive, and unusual singers and composers and actors of the past fifty years. 

His influences range from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill to Jack Kerouac and Jack Nicholson, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burrough, Rodney Dangerfield, Thelonious Monk and Howlin' Wolf to Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Frank Zappa, Billie Holiday and Mose Allison to Frank Sinatra, Cole Porter, Ella Fitzgerald, and George Gershwin, Ray Charles and Leadbelly to James Brown and Miles Davis, from bar room chatter, industrial noise, barnyard revelry to Louis Armstrong. 

In short, the influences range from jazz, blues, folk, rock and roll, cinema, Broadway musicals, industrial noise, animal sounds, soul music, cabaret, to experimental theater, poetry and literature. Tom Waits has written more than 800 songs; we will attempt to get through twenty-five of his more compelling songs - some suitable for just listening and some suitable for singing along. 

Songs, background, stories, images are part of the presentation.