Virgil Fox's First Christmas Album

Virgil Fox was a much applauded and much derided organist who was known both for his technique and his flamboyance. Scorned as the "Liberace of the organ." he also had quite a following and made some great recordings, this among them.

"Christmas Carols on the Organ," one of RCA Victor's 1954 holiday offerings, is the first of Fox's four seasonal LPs, and one of his first of any repertoire.

I am no organ expert - and in general avoid pop organ records - but this is extraordinarily well done, both in performance and recording.

Fox in 1954

In 1954, Fox had been the organist at New York's Riverside Church for eight years, and would remain there until 1965. Here he is performing on the church's Aeolian-Skinner organ, which I believe had been newly installed to his specifications.

Fox had a reputation for being slick, loud and sentimental, but you will find little of that here. His playing always remains well within the bounds of good taste, yet he also injects considerable life into this well worn material through his remarkable control, which he uses to inject a dance-like lift to the contours of these simple tunes.

The sound has an ideal balance of resonance and presence, with just enough church reverberation for my taste.

RCA issued this material both as a 12-inch LP and in abbreviated form as a double EP, with a different and preferable cover (below) by the American regionalist painter Adolf Dehn. I admire Dehn, but why is it that these nostalgic scenes always feature a sleigh and someone waving from the front porch?

Canteloube Settings of Christmas Songs

Let's start off this year's Christmas shares with this gorgeous LP of European Christmas music in settings by Joseph Canteloube.

Canteloube

You may know the composer from his versions of the "Songs from the Auvergne," which have been quite popular since their publication in 1930. If so, you will want to here this record, which has much of the same atmosphere and flavor.

Performing are Le Groupe des Chanteurs Traditionnels de Paris and the Champs-Élysées orchestra (which I believe at that time was a recording name for the French National Radio Orchestra). Conducting is Marc Honegger, a cousin of composer Arthur Honegger. Alto Hélène Brunet, tenor Marcel Giteau and soprano Madeleine Gérault are the soloists.

Honegger

The songs themselves are from France, Bohemia, Spain, Belgium, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Romania, Austria, Italy and England.

Ducretet-Thomson recorded this LP in about 1954, and issued it in France on a 10-inch LP. It then came out in the US on Westminster on a 12-inch pressing. The download includes cover scans from both editions. Westminster's cover is below - it appears to depict an early American fireplace, which could not be less appropriate. My transfer is from the French pressing, and the sound is good.

A happy holiday season to all!

George 'The Fox' Williams in Hi-Fi

It's about time for Christmas music shares, but before I start down that path, I thought I might feature one of the most repulsive covers of the 1950s, or any other decade.

Someone at Decca Records (and it my have been Alex Steinweiss) decided it was a great idea to honor bandleader George "The Fox" Williams by dressing up someone in a ratty fox costume, giving him a baton, putting the results on the cover, and expecting it to sell records.

You have to spend a few moments examining the magnificence of this misguided art direction - the evil eyes, the leering mouth and the mangy fur, accented by a scarf and matching gloves, all topped off by a pair of earphones.

Fortunately, the music is good! Like Buddy Morrow, Williams decided the way to the charts might lie in adopting the R&B style. Unlike Morrow, he wrote his own material, although it is mostly simple riff tunes. Performing the results are several groups of superb New York studio musicians, with one constant being the authentic R&B tenor sax of Sam "The Man" Taylor. I particularly like the way the arranger uses bass sax in the textures.

There is one vocal among the instrumentals, delivered by Belfast-born Cathy Ryan in a convincingly bluesy style. Ryan had made records with Art Mooney and Lucky Millinder, and went on to make several sides as a single for M-G-M, Cardinal and King.

The 12 items here were originally issued as Coral singles from early 1954 through 1955. The sound is excellent. For more on Williams, see the earlier posts here.

The Big Beat with Buddy Morrow

A new one for our long series of postwar big bands; this time the "big beat" of Buddy Morrow and his crew.

Morrow later led a Dorsey ghost band for many years, I suppose predicated by his playing the trombone and having spent a few months with Tommy. And he was quite a gifted instrumentalist, immediately displayed on "Some of These Days," the first cut on this 1953 LP.

Buddy Morrow

The title is The Big Beat, a contemporary euphemism for rhythm & blues; the style that Morrow affected, at least during this period. He had made his name with a cover of Jimmy Forrest's 1951 R&B hit, "Night Train" (which in itself was appropriated from Duke Ellington's 1946 "Happy-Go-Lucky Local"). Morrow spent a fair amount of time trying to make lightning strike twice by recording a variety of crossover material. This led to some strange results. Here we have Sinatra-style vocalist Frankie Lester launching into material from Bessie Smith ("Beale Street Mama"), Jay McShann/Walter Brown ("Confessin' the Blues), and Bo Carter ("Corrine, Corina", although they probably sourced that one from Bob Wills' 1940 Western swing hit).

Frankie Lester

The wonder is that Lester - a singer I admire - does it all so well. Indeed, this is a very well done record by all involved, including the recording crew.

The Big Beat was a 10-inch record, but this transfer comes from an unusual 12-inch promo copy. Morrow's cuts are on one side of the record; the other is devoted to Dates with Ralph Flanagan at Frank Dailey's Meadowbrook and the Hollywood Palladium. Morrow and Flanagan shared management and a record company; this promo record was sent to disk jockeys in advance of some joint appearances. The two bands later combined forces for an RCA album.

Menotti's Sebastian Ballet Suite

Here's the second in a short series of early recordings of Gian Carlo Menotti's music, in this case the first recording of music from his 1944 ballet Sebastian.

These selections are just as attractive as the Menotti violin concerto presented on this blog not long ago. The performances led by Dimitri Mitropoulos are excellent. The "Robin Hood Dell Orchestra" was by and large (if not entirely) composed of Philadelphia Orchestra musicians.

Columbia issued this recording in 1947, a big year for Menotti, whose short operas The Medium and The Telephone had been presented on Broadway to some acclaim.

The cover is by Alex Steinweiss. Columbia's sound and surfaces were very good. My copy of the original 78 set has some dish warp, but it does not affect the sonics to any great degree.

Dimitiri Mitropoulos conducted the music of both Menotti and Samuel Barber. Here, at the 1958 European premiere of Vanessa: Front - Mitropoulos, Rosalind Elias, Eleanor Steber, Barber. Rear - Giorgio Tozzi, Ira Malaniuk, Menotti, unidentified, Alois Pernerstorfer, Nicolai Gedda, Rudolf Bing.

George Williams Remembers Jimmie Lunceford

A few weeks ago the blog presented a Ray Anthony record that was almost certainly arranged by George Williams. At that time, I said I would upload this LP that RCA Victor issued under the arranger's own name in 1957.

I wish I had chosen Williams's Brunswick LP instead, because it has a spectacularly repulsive cover showing a gentlemen in a ratty fox costume conducting the band - in honor of Williams' nickname, "The Fox".

Then again, this cover isn't bad, what with the gentleman grasping his impressively large instrument between the lady's legs.

George Williams

But what of the music? Williams (or RCA) decided to do a tribute to band leader Jimmie Lunceford, on the tenuous premise that Williams was a Lunceford arranger for a few months back in the late 1930s. Homages of this kind were popular in the late 50s, as people looked back fondly on the vanished swing era.

The results are what you might expect - streamlined versions of Lunceford standards played by a talented group of studio musicians who appeared on hundreds of other records of the time. The cover details the performers. Two of them are given pseudonyms - trombonist Jimmy O'Heigho is presumably Jimmy Cleveland and trumpeter Swede Enlovely is Harry "Sweets" Edison. This peculiar custom of fanciful renamings, common at the time, was probably done for contractual reasons.

The music is enjoyable, if not characteristic of the records that had been issued under Williams' name in earlier years. Those recordings, mainly in a quasi-R&B mode, are collected on the Brunswick album I mentioned above. Maybe I'll present that one as well, if people are interested.

A Wagner Concert from Pittsburgh and Reiner

My recent post of a Brahms concerto with Rudolf Serkin, the Pittsburgh Symphony and Fritz Reiner sent me looking through my files for other early Reiner recordings. The first one that came to hand was this "Wagner concert" from the first years of the conductor's tenure in the then-Steel City.

As sometimes happens, my friend Bryan of The Shellackophile blog had the simultaneous idea of posting the same set, and did so yesterday. I would urge you to go there to take advantage of Bryan's efforts, for several reasons: he does a great job on his transfers; he worked from the 78 set while I worked from the LP; he includes the very good graphics from the 78 album, which appear to be by Alex Steinweiss; and his download includes the Venusberg music, not included here.

Reiner caricature by
Olga Koussevitzky

Here are the LP contents and dates (all recordings were made in the Syria Mosque):

Die Meistersinger - Prelude (January 9, 1941)
Siegfried - Forest Murmurs (January 9, 1941)
Lohengrin - Prelude from Act 1 (November 15, 1941)
Lohengrin - Prelude from Act 3 (January 9, 1941)
Die Walküre - Ride of the Valkyries (February 25, 1940)

Similar to the Brahms, these excerpts display fine control, balance and orchestral discipline, if little glamour, delivered in boxy sound.

Reiner's later work in Chicago has been much discussed; I'll be posting a few more examples of what he was able to accomplish in Pittsburgh. If you want to learn more about the conductor, here's a good article with some familiar anecdotes and a few I hadn't heard before.