I present this 1956 LP not because it has some great musical merit (although it isn't bad), but because it contains one of the few songs - if not the only one - ever dedicated to my favorite baseball team.
Yes, baseball season is nearly upon us, and for those of you who are from the lucky lands where this game is not played, let me explain that baseball is the game where the players' scratching, staring and spitting takes at least as much time as their hitting, running and catching. It is a contemplative game.
OK, it's a bore, but I grew up watching it and rooting for the local team, and somehow the fact that they haven't won a World Series since well before this record was issued and before my own birth does not deter me, although it should. The team is the Cleveland Indians, and the musician who immortalized them in a Dixieland riff (called "Indian Uprising") was Henry "Hot Lips" Levine.
If that name sounds familiar, you may be used to digging through piles of old LPs. You would have seen Levine's name on an RCA Camden record from the Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street, a radio show that was mostly notable for its vocalists, Dinah Shore and Lena Horne. Levine was the leader of that ensemble, which appeared on NBC and made records under the unappetizing name of "Dr. Henry Levine's Barefoot Dixieland Philharmonic".
Some of those records featured the great Sidney Bechet - and Levine was a fine musician himself, first achieving notice in 1926 when he replaced Nick LaRocca in the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. After the early 1940s sessions referenced above, he made no commercial records under his own name until this 1956 release on RCA Victor. These items were made during a time when Levine was the music director at the NBC station in Cleveland - thus the tribute to the local baseball team. Levine also honors another local institution by including a song in honor of the Cleveland Press, then the city's leading newspaper, but now long defunct.
If you enjoy this style of music or are a fan of the Cleveland Indians, this is for you.
