Virgil Thomson and Otto Luening

Here is one of the early LPs issued by the American Recording Society, which started as a non-profit with a grant from the Ditson Fund to record works by American composers.

The first side of this album is devoted to what I believe is the initial recording of Virgil Thomson's The River. Thomson has appeared here previously with one of his lesser-known works, the ballet Filling Station. The River, one of the composer's best known works, is a suite derived from the music from Pare Lorentz's 1938 documentary on the Mississippi. Thomson was perfectly suited for the documentary approach and its subject, with his use of simple forms and popular songs, and his tendency to remain just a bit removed from his source material, commenting on it with gentle irony. (One of the key motifs in the first piece is The Bear Went Over the Mountain; I imagine Thomson found this droll.) The combination of his music, Lorentz's Whitmanesque narration and the images became one of the definitive statements of late Depression Americana. The music itself was a major influence on Aaron Copland, heard most directly in Copland's score for the documentary The City.

While Thomson's music for The River is well known, the Otto Luening works herein are not. These days Luening is remembered as a pioneer of electronic music, but these orchestral pieces have little to do with those works. The Prelude on a Hymn Tune makes use of source material from William Billings, an early American composer. It was common for composers in the first half of the 20th century to base a work on a theme by composer of an earlier day. Luening pointedly made use of a theme by an American composer. The other works on the record, Two Symphonic Interludes, are from 1935. (I believe the Prelude is from the same period.) All this music is accessible and accomplished, but not memorable in the way that Thomson's work is.

These performances were recorded in 1953. The "American Recording Society Orchestra" was a Viennese group, probably the Vienna Symphony, and they play the music convincingly. The Thomson is conducted by Walter Hendl, mostly known among record collectors as an accompanist, and the Luening works are led by Dean Dixon, the interesting American conductor who mostly worked in Europe. My friend Fred of the blog Random Classics has been on a one-man crusade to get more notice and recognition for Dixon, so this post goes out to him. Also in the download is a 1952 article on Dixon from The Critic, an NAACP publication.

As mentioned above, the American Recording Society was a non-profit. It was established in 1951, with the works to be chosen by an advisory board that included Luening. The ARS was a record club of sorts; after you signed up, each month you would be offered a new recording. The Society advertised heavily in magazines; the ad below (click to enlarge) is from the January 7, 1952 issue of Life. I think I have that Piston second symphony recording around here somewhere.

Brigadoon on Ice

When I acquired this record, I thought it was a promotional item that the Ice Capades (an American skating show) sold at its events in 1953. Turns out that it actually was a regular Columbia issue of that year, as an ad in the download shows.

Commercial issue or not, no doubt this 78 was intended to promote the ice show, which featured an ice skating version of the Broadway hit (this predates the film, which didn't come out until 1954).

Interestingly to me, the record was issued in the same series as the Columbia children's records of the time, using the same type of laminated picture sleeve and a similar yellow label. The sleeves in this particular series tended toward the hideous. This one is more accomplished than some I have seen, if hardly subtle.

The 78 contains a potted version of the Brigadoon score, compressing it to seven minutes. The excellent vocal soloists are Lee Sullivan (heard here previously in Rodgers and Hart songs) and Sally Sweetland, a studio vocalist.

This probably was not the actual performance heard at the Ice Capades show, which likely would have been much longer. The download includes a Popular Science article that claims the music at the show consisted of taped vocals and live musicians, which seems very unlikely.

The set of the frozen version of Brigadoon is below, courtesy of the same article.

LINK

Tonight We Sing

The latest in our series of mainly obscure musicals on 10" LPs is Tonight We Sing from 1953.

The film is a biopic on impresario Sol Hurok. Why anyone would want to watch a movie about a concert promoter is beyond me - I guess it was just a way to string together musical sequences featuring Hurok's attractions such as Ezio Pinza and Roberta Peters. That's them acknowledging the unseen audience on the cover above as Jan Peece looks on from the prompter's box. (Poor Peerce didn't actually get into the film, although his voice did. Pinza and Peters were more lucky, if you can call it that.)

Tonight We Sing is available on Hulu so I sampled some of it, and was amazed to find that Fox had cast David Wayne as the Ukrainian immigrant Hurok. Pinza played Chaliapin. (Wayne couldn't have been more miscast if they had cast him as Chaliapin.) The segment I saw showed Chaliapin (depicted as a blustering buffoon) only agreeing to leave Russia for an American tour when the Bolsheviks set off a bomb outside his window. Then he shows up in New York unexpectedly and Hurok goes to fetch him for what appeared to be an instant tour, leaving his wife (Anne Bancroft!) miffed because it means once again postponing their long-delayed honeymoon. This rift apparently supplied whatever tension the movie had.

Ezio Pinza and Roberta Peters

So the film isn't that great (what I saw of it) but the music is surprisingly good. The LP starts off with Peerce and Peters in a love duet from Madama Butterfly, presented in a extroverted, crowd pleasing manner. The rest of the program - Pinza in Boris Godunov scenes and a Russian folk song, various combinations in Gounod and more Puccini - is on a similar high level. Leading the Fox orchestra is Alfred Newman, who keeps things moving along. The band plays well, as far as I can tell - the voices are well to the fore. Balance aside, the sound is good.

Below is a 1953 Billboard ad that touts not only this flick but The Jazz Singer and The Desert Song - both of which are available here, for those interested.

Note (June 2024): This soundtrack has now been remastered in ambient stereo, and has much better sound.

LINK

Jackie Paris Singles

One of this blog's first posts was devoted to The Song Is Paris, the first LP by the great vocalist Jackie Paris. Today we have 12 selections, including some of his first singles, most of which did not appear on his LPs.

We start with his first record, a 1947 78 released by M-G-M and coupling Your Red Wagon and Skylark (which he later remade for Coral).

After a few more sides for M-G-M, Paris moved on in 1949 to National, which announced his arrival with the ad below for his debut single, coupling The Old Master Painter and a "surprise rendition" of Goodbye Sue. I hope I am not spoiling things by telling you that the surprise is a spoken interlude in hipster lingo in which Paris tells Sue "I dig you the most!" among other entreaties for her to come back. Billboard dug this not, however, calling the spoken section "silly hip talking."

Paris cut a few more numbers for National, then turned up on Debut and, in 1953, on Brunswick. His Brunswick efforts are represented here by live versions with Terry Gibbs of If Love Is Good to Me and Cool Blues. In the latter, Paris indulges in scat singing, the worst vocal idea since singing in falsetto. (Makes me wonder - has anyone ever tried falsetto scat singing? If so, please don't send me the results.) Although these two tracks did appear on a single, I have transferred them from a various artists LP called Jazztime USA, Vol. 3.

In 1954, Paris did a one-off single for RCA Victor with a mannered singer named Tamara Hayes, who made some other records for RCA at the time. They did the old R&B hit I Miss You So, along with Chance of a Lifetime.

Also in 1954, Paris began making records for Coral. Here we have When I Lost You and Idle Gossip, his first Coral single, along with 1955's Love Is a King and I Need Your Love. (Idle Gossip actually appears on the Skylark LP, but I have included it for the sake of completeness, even though I had to fade it up shortly after the opening because of an edge chip on the 78.)

I hope this collection sheds some new light on Paris. He is a favorite of many people who have made his acquaintance already - if only there were more of us!

NEW LINK

More on Matt Dennis

There was quite a bit of interest in the Matt Dennis Capitol 78s that I posted below, so I did a bit more research on them in Billboard magazine.

Dennis was with Capitol for a year - from mid-1946 to mid-1947, leaving that company in a dispute over contract terms. I was not able to turn up any mention of Capitol recordings other than the ones in the post below, so they may be the extent of his Capitol output.

I enjoy preparing posts of 78s, but they pose a couple of challenges. They are time consuming to transfer, which prevents me from working on other projects. And my 78 (and 45) collection is almost completely unorganized, meaning that assembling what I need for a particular post can turn into a search and (sometimes, considering the fragility of the source material) destroy mission.

It took me quite some time, for example, to put together a group of Jackie Paris singles for my next collection. Every time I came across one, I put it aside until I had gathered enough for a respectable post. Even now, I wouldn't swear that I have found them all. Those singles should be making an appearance here in the next day or so.

Matt Dennis on Capitol 78s

These days, Matt Dennis is mostly known for his compositions - Angel Eyes, Violets for Your Furs, The Night We Called It a Day, Everything Happens to Me, all available in superb Sinatra renditions - but he also was one of the finest singers of the post-war era.

Dennis displayed his vocal talent throughout several LPs released in the 50s, all or almost all of which have been re-released. But before then he made a number of records with Paul Weston for Capitol, beginning in 1946. This post captures nine of those sides, as found in my collection of 78s.

None of these records contain Dennis' own compositions, although you will find contemporaries such as Hoagy Carmichael (above) and Johnny Mercer (below). Mercer, I believe, wrote the lyrics to (Love's Got Me in a) Lazy Mood, with the music by tenor saxophonist Eddie Miller, who plays on the record.

Dennis did not have the voice of many if not most pop singers - although anyone who once was a vocal coach for Jo Stafford and her sisters must have known something about singing - yet his style and sensitivity are very winning. He could handle songs of all types, including the A Trout, No Doubt, a nonsense song like Swinging on a Star, without the moral. The Trout is part of today's catch, and just to make sure you get its full effect, I have corrected its speed, which apparently was increased to get the song under three minutes.

Update: I've repitched and remastered all these sides.

Mid-Century Music from Colombia

This unusual record from Colombia presents contrasting works from that country's leading composers circa 1958 - Luis Antonio Escobar and Guillermo Uribe Holguín.

Uribe Holguín, born in 1880, was the senior composer by some 45 years, and was trained in the Schola Cantorum. While his music retained French influences over the years, he also became interested in folk forms. The Three Criollo Dances presented here are his interpretation of dance music from the Criollos - the social caste of native-born people of primarily Spanish ancestry. The composition dates from 1945.

Escobar's work, from just six years later, is in a much different idiom. He wrote it as a 26-year-old newly arrived in Germany to study with Boris Blacher. The soloist in this concertino for flute is Oscar Alvarez. In both works Olav Roots conducts the Sinfonica of Colombia.

In truth, neither the orchestral performances nor the recordings are especially refined, but the music is most attractive and very much worth your listening. This was the first in what may have been designed to be a series on Colombian composers.

LINK

Buddy Clark in 1939-40

About a year ago, I presented several posts devoted to the recordings of the short-lived popular singer Buddy Clark, who died in 1949. Those entries concentrated on Clark's late-40s recordings for Columbia, the period of his greatest success.

Today we examine records that Clark made in 1939 and 1940 for Varsity. Most of these sides were reissued in the mid-1950s on the Regent LP above.

The cover with its snappy pink 1955 Cadillac could not have less to do with the contents. Half of the items are songs written for the 1940 Disney movie, Pinocchio. These were actually recorded before the film was released, and include one song (The Old Music Box) cut from the movie. Beware, though: the songs from Pinocchio are accompanied by organ. I haven't been able to discover who is responsible for the accompaniments for these or any of the other songs on the LP.

I've added as a bonus a Varsity 78 not on the LP. Here, Clark is accompanied by an all-star Chicago-style jazz group, whose names are on the label below. Both of the songs are from the Rodgers and Hart show Higher and Higher.

As I've said before, I am a great admirer of this singer, so it's good to provide this glimpse of his work earlier in his brief career, when he already was a fully mature artist.

Music from Movieland

Despite what the title may suggest, Music from Movieland is not music from movies. It is easy listening music as played by a studio orchestra - in this case the Columbia Pictures Studio Orchestra conducted by the studio's music director, Morris Stoloff, one of the great promoters in a town built on promotion.

Stoloff was honored with three Academy Awards although his list of actual scores written over at Soundtrackcollector is very few - quite a trick! He also made many records, and on a few soundtrack LPs that have been featured here, his name is so prominent that it gives the mistaken impression that he wrote the music.

Be that as it may, this is a good record with excellent arrangements put across by a superb band. But to me its key distinguishing characteristic is the spectacular cover. A showgirl en deshabille inexplicably transported to a street corner set and accompanied by symphony orchestra? Is this really the way they filmed and recorded things in Hollywood circa 1951? Well, it's a nice fantasy anyway and fun to look at - and hear.

Leo Sowerby Orchestral Works

These days American composer Leo Sowerby is remembered best for his church music, but he also composed in other genres.

The works on this American Recording Society disk from the early 1950s were from relatively early in his career. Their titles - Prairie and From the Northland - may suggest that they come from the heyday of Copland-style populism in the 1940s, but they actually were written in the 1920s and stylistically are of that time. Burnet Tuthill (whose own music was featured in this blog's first post) says in the liner notes that Sowerby's style looks back to Brahms, but there is surely as much impressionism in these works. You also may hear similarities to the music of Howard Hanson, who conducted the professional premieres of both compositions.

The performances here - by an anonymous orchestra under Dean Dixon - are enthusiastic and as refined as you might expect considering the circumstances. The recording is vivid.

I'll probably offer more of Sowerby's music down the road apiece.