Ruth Olay with Jerry Fielding

Last summer I posted an Jerry Fielding LP from 1953, with a bonus single featuring the young vocalist Ruth Olay. At that time I had a request for more Olay, so here she is, appropriately accompanied by Fielding in this 1958 date for Mercury.

By that time, Olay had become more established in the West Coast clubs, and had even become a familiar face on television. The cover above pitches her as the "singing discovery of the Jack Paar Show" - Paar at that time was the host of the late night Tonight Show on U.S. television, with Olay as a frequent guest.

Ruth Olay

The term "discovery" may suggest that the singer was a newcomer to the studio, which was not the case. I believe this was her fourth LP recording, with previous entries for the Zenith label, Mercury and Mercury's EmArcy mark (although the latter may have been released later than Easy Living).

Her singing on the Trend single was assured, if seemingly under the spell of Mildred Bailey. On this session she retains her characteristic rapid vibrato, but has adopted a more individual manner, with overtones of Lena Horne and Kay Starr. In a revealing interview with Bill Reed, Olay herself insists her greatest influences were blues singers. In any case, she was a highly accomplished artist whose current neglect is curious - especially considering she is still with us.

Easy Living embodies the peculiarities of early stereo, made during the period when engineers were still experimenting with the new format. On most tracks, Ruth comes at us from the left speaker, with the Mercury folks occasionally moving her to the right channel mid-song, seemingly just for the heck of it. On "Undecided" (of course), she keeps switching back and forth. These artificial shenanigans were common when stereo was young, the better for buyers to show off their new two-channel set-ups. (I distinctly remember the first time I heard a stereo record. It was at the house of friends of my parents, and seemed like quite a big deal to nine-year-old Buster.)

As a bonus, I have added a non-LP single that Olay made with Fielding early in 1958. Apparently the only title issued from that January date, it is a lively version of the Mercer-Donaldson song "On Behalf of the Visiting Firemen." (The other side of the single was "I Wanna Be a Friend of Yours" from the Easy Living album.)

By the way, the mention of Jack Paar on the LP cover inspired me to dig out one of the comic's few singles - a surprisingly good one (no thanks to Paar). The curious can find it on my singles blog.

More Reups and Remasters

A pile of reups tonight - mostly relatively recent items with links that went missing - plus a few remastered items of interest. These are all by request.

Below are links to the original posts, which have more information on each record and new links in the comments. There are links to all these files in the comments to this post.

First, the remasters:

Barbara Cook - Songs of Perfect Propriety. First LP by the Broadway star, I believe still unreissued. Consists of unusual settings of Dorothy Parker poems by Seymour Barab.

Foss - Piano Concerto No. 2, Waxman - Sinfonietta. Famed film composer Franz Waxman conducts his own Sinfonietta, along with Lukas Foss's second piano concerto (alternately Hindemithian and rumbustious), with the composer as soloist.

The reups:

Mitropoulos in Minnesota: Milhaud, Ravel, and Rachmaninoff. Dimitri Mitropoulos was always a compelling conductor in 20th century music. Here we have two LPs, one of Milhaud and Ravel, and another of Rachmaninoff's second symphony. What Mitropoulos's Minneapolis Symphony lacked in polish, it almost made up in commitment.

Claude Thornhill - Piano and Rhythm. A nearly complete collection of the pianist-bandleader's piano recordings.

New York Jazz Quartet. This LP with the vaguely distasteful title "Goes Native" features accordionist Mat Mathews (a favorite of mine) and flutist Herbie Mann (not such a favorite of mine).

The New Christmas Songs for 1952. I guess I am a little late with this one (several weeks or several decades, depending on how you look at it). Compiles Coral Records' holiday fare from the Ames Brothers, Don Cornell, Eileen Barton and Johnny Desmond.

Grieg and Mendelssohn from Ania Dorfmann

Here is the second installment in a series of recordings from the underappreciated pianist Ania Dorfmann, following on the Chopin waltzes and Beethoven concerto featured here a while back.

Concert flyer

Both this disc of Grieg and Mendelssohn concertos and the Chopin disc were issued on RCA Victor's Bluebird label. Dorfmann was one of the first artists presented on Bluebird when RCA revived the mark as a budget line in 1952. The big record company was responding to inroads by independents who were issuing all types of European sourced classical recordings and undercutting the price of the majors' high-end lines.

Billboard magazine, in covering the phenomenon, observed delicately that the products of those companies - and the artists themselves - were "of rather uncertain quality." RCA aimed to provide a higher standard of excellence by concentrating on "concert artists who have achieved wide and enthusiastic critical acclaim" but are not yet "by popular standards, the top names in their field." So Bluebird would concentrate on instrumentalists Ania Dorfmann, Ida Haendel and Byron Janis and conductors Erich Leinsdorf, Karl Böhm and John Barbirolli - most of whom have been featured on this blog.

On this concerto disc, Dorfmann is in her usual glistening form, with sturdy backing by Leinsdorf and the "Robin Hood Dell Orchestra" - that is, the Philadelphia Orchestra in its summer configuration. The session in the Academy of Music was in July 1953, with what I assume to be a patching session in RCA's New York studio a month later. The sound is quite good (much better than the current standard), well capturing the glint of Dorfmann's tone. If the Grieg is more enjoyable than the Mendelssohn, it is probably because the former is a more inspired piece. The pianist does well by both works.

Dorfmann did appear on RCA's full-price line at other times - and this present disc was elevated to Red Seal status later on. 

More Dinah Shore on Columbia

I enjoyed my last Dinah Shore post so much that I pulled a few of her Harmony LPs out of storage and transferred them for you today.

1948 ad

Once again, we have 20 songs that Dinah recorded for Columbia from 1946-50, primarily issued on singles during that time. Note that there are a few duplicates from the previous post - in each case the 78 transfer has superior sound.

Not that the sound here is bad - it's just that in making the transfers, the Columbia engineers probably first dubbed the originals onto tape, and then mastered the LP. Interposing this step does take away some of the immediacy of the first generation. The technicians also typically added some reverb to the remastering in an attempt to make the result more spacious. This is noticeable on the "Buttons and Bows" LP, but not too distracting, I hope.

The title song of said LP was one of the big hits of 1948, when Shore was at her peak as a recording artist. As with the first collection, the repertoire consists of pop songs of the day and show tunes. This also is true with the other album, "Sings Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers," where she takes on the big numbers from such shows as South Pacific and Kiss Me, Kate along with other familiar melodies from the two composers.

Throughout the collection, Dinah is winningly warm and personable, although she doesn't quite convey the type of emotion required for such fare as "The Gentleman Is a Dope."

All that said, this is a most agreeable collection in good sound.

Rosina Lhévinne in Chopin and Debussy

Josef and Rosina Lhévinne

In my first post devoted to the little recorded pianist Rosina Lhévinne, I promised a second entry devoted to her Chopin first concerto and one of the few discs she made with her husband Josef before his early death in 1944. I am making good on that promise today, perhaps the only New Year's resolution I will keep all year.

Josef and Rosina's recording of Debussy's "Fêtes," in Ravel's two-piano version, comes from June 1935, and is one of two works they performed for commercial issue. (I do not possess the other, a Mozart sonata.) The rendition is spirited, emphasizing the festive rather than the nocturnal. My transfer comes from an early RCA Camden LP with excellent sound.

The main work is Rosina's second late-in-life concerto recording. Following the Mozart recording that marked her 80th birthday, she was invited into the Vanguard studios to tape Chopin's Concerto No. 1. Accompanying her was the clumsily named Members of the Alumni of the National Orchestral Association, under John Barnett. A word of explanation: the National Orchestral Association provided a training platform for orchestral players who were newly graduated from conservatory. The "Members of the Alumni" included musicians who had gone on to New York orchestras such as the Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera. John Barnett was the director of the National Orchestral Association at the time, in succession to Léon Barzin, who had founded the organization in 1930.

The Members of the Alumni are very good, but in Chopin concertos almost all of the interest is in the solo part, and Lhévinne does not disappoint. Her playing displays the same grace and control that made the Mozart concerto such a success. It's a shame she was not asked to record more often.

Vanguard's sonics were dull, but I have done my best to bring out the elegant sound of Rosina Lhévinne's piano, with some success, I hope. The LP also included a performance of Schumann's Overture, Scherzo and Finale, which I have not transferred.