A few reuploads for you today, all remastered to taste (my taste, that is), and presented to you via the original posts. The highlight is the spectacular original 1953 recording of Victory at Sea.
Click on the headers below to go to the original post for each item.
Lauritz Melchior in Two Sisters from Boston
| Many blogs feature music from old LPs; usually rips from CD reissues. Very few (like, none) concentrate on the music from the 10-inch LPs that were fairly common from the first several years of the long-playing record, roughly 1948-57. This blog does. We also make room here for other LPs and even 78 and 45 singles from the pre-stereo era. The title of the blog is an homage to an R&B record of the same name by Bullmoose Jackson and His Buffalo Bearcats. (Not sure why a moose would be fronting a band of bearcats, nor why they would be from Buffalo when Jackson was from Cleveland.) The Moose was selling double-entendre blues; we are promoting primarily pop music and classics, although all genres are welcome here! |
4 comments:
Thanks, Buster! Always a hoot to revisit the past. And here's my vote for more oddball stuff in the future, especially from your namesake 10" records. :)
A FAREWELL TO SUMMER: In March, I and most adults I know, began a period of monastic living that has lasted until now—and may last long past year’s end. In time, many participants in this involuntary austerity and suspension of normal life have come to see it as a mandated national retreat. From this vantage point of collective custody, we could watch fire, flood and pestilence ravage the world so savagely that some of us wondered if our dear Mother Earth was self-euthanizing. Who could blame her after centuries of abusive husbandry? Certainly, it could be said that Mother was suffering from Battered Planet Syndrome.
Now our Summer of Seclusion is about to end and an elegiac Autumn begin.
To honor this summer of equal-measure discontent and discovery, I have prepared a 29-song salute and farewell to the season. Due to outdoor inactivity and indoor inaction, this mix is more an archival remembrance of Summers past than a depiction of the present one. The recordings range in date from 1923 to 2009 and move through the times of day from morning and afternoon to night. Although my main intent is to bring good cheer, there are interruptions of gaiety by sadness. We all know the fate of every sand castle ever built. Tide and time wait for no one. Climate change has turned the shorelines of the world into one massive Dover Beach. And even Matthew Arnold has left his life guard stand. The beach is deserted. Don’t call it “closed” because that will flood the beach with climate-change deniers.
This mix was inspired by a chipper Bert Lown record from 1930, “Here Comes the Sun” that bears no relation to the George Harrison song of the same name. It ends in 1923 with a seraphic song, “The Stars of the Summer Night,” as recorded by the Shannon Quartet. In between, my time machine behaves like a bumper car as it lurches through different warps. So you’ll go to Todd Gordon’s 2009 recording of “The Summer Wind,” the only version with Johnny Mercer’s complete lyrics. He’s not a terribly great singer, but the complete lyrics are among Mercer’s greatest. Of special note is Meredith d’Ambrosio’s définitive 1989 recording of “Lazy Afternoon” and Mahalia Jackson’s heart-wrenching 1962 recording of “The Green Leaves of Summer.” I’ve tried to visit every summer locale, including a waterfalls, mountain greenery (which, technically, is a spring song) where summer promises could be made, kept or, alas, broken. Enjoy! Music brings healing to the land—even if increasingly little of it is left.
At WeTransfer for a week.
https://we.tl/t-LpGxDiP725
Thanks, David. I am a great admirer of "The Summer Wind," Meredith d'Ambrosio and Mahalia Jackson.
Thanks, Buster! And thank you, David. I always look forward to your compilations. I think they are brilliant. - Jeff M.
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