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| The New Friends of Rhythm, 1938: Sylvan Shulman, Harry Patent, Zelly Smirnoff, Laura Newell, Tony Colucci, Alan Shulman, Louis Kievman |
The New Friends specialized in a sort of genteel swing, usually involving riffs on classical pieces. At its base it consisted of the Stuyvesant String Quartet (originally Sylvan Shulman and Zelly Smirnoff, violins, Louis Kievman, viola, and Alan Shulman, cello) and harpist Laura Newell. The Shulmans, Kievman and Newell were members of the NBC Symphony. The NBC studio orchestra supplied Smirnoff, guitarist Tony Colucci and bassist Harry Patent. In 1940, Harry Glickman succeeded Smirnoff in the second violin chair.
Alan Shulman was the guiding force behind the group. His arrangements were to become highly influential; he taught Nelson Riddle, perhaps the most famous pop arranger of the 20th century. Riddle's biographer Peter Levinson acknowledges the influence in his book September in the Rain, while noting that Shulman himself acknowledged being shaped by the work of Robert Russell Bennett.
These Shulman arrangements emphasize lightly swinging textures, but Shulman also had a romantic bent, which can be heard in a 1946 Risë Stevens collection of love songs, which I uploaded a few years ago. Sylvan Shulman conducted that set. Alan was also a fine composer whose work was often heard on concert programs of the day.
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| Sylvan Shulman, Laura Newell and Alan Shulman |
The group both literally (see photo above) and figuratively revolved around harpist Laura Newell. The download includes an article on her and the group by Alan's son Jay from the American Harp Journal. It provides a detailed background on the New Friends, starting with the story that the Shulmans gifted Toscanini with their records as a Christmas present. (This, too, sounds like a publicist's confection.)
Laura Newell has appeared on the blog in Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp with Julius Baker and Lilian Fuchs.
My friend Bryan featured the Stuyvesant Quartet several times on his blog, The Shellackophile, now regrettably dormant. His posts include music of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Bloch, reflecting the group's commitment to contemporary music. Also there are another recording of the Debussy sonata with Laura Newell, and her recording of the Ravel Introduction and Allegro with the Stuyvesants and others. Bryan even has a disc by the Kreiner String Quartet, which the Shulmans played in while enrolled at Juilliard. The links remain active.
The Complete Victor Recordings
The New Friends owed their Victor recording contract to NBC's Frank Black, who had heard them play and put them on NBC's "Magic Key" program, sponsored by RCA. Enzo Archetti of the American Music Lover praised the performance. He inaccurately claimed that the group was "a combination of Raymond Scott, the Hot Club of Paris and a jam session, and yet original enough to be quite fascinating." Actually, the Friends had nothing to do with Django and certainly their written-out parts were hardly the makings of a jam session. The only connection with Scott's music was its tightly arranged numbers and its offbeat titles, which usually gave a clue to the music's origins (which in any case were decoded on the labels of the crew's Victor 78s).
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| Hubert shoots the Schubert |
The group's first session was in late March 1939, and encompassed Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Paganini and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." They were back in the studio in late June for Back, Raff, more Tchaikovsky and the "Londonderry Air."
In November, they took on Brahms, Stephen Foster, Shulman's "High Voltage," and Schubert. The latter bore the title, "Shoot the Schubert to Me Hubert." This was undoubtedly related to Tommy Dorsey's record of "Shoot the Sherbet to Me Herbert" of a few months earlier.
The Friends' final Victor session was in May 1940, and devoted to Dinicu, Paganini, "Sweet Sue" and Shulman's "Mood in Question."
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| Buster Bailey |
The final session, which apparently wasn't released until 1943, featured the welcome addition of Buster Bailey, one of the most gifted and fluent of all jazz clarinetists. In its review, the jazz magazine Downbeat opined. "This disc is a direct slap at all those who claim strings impede swing. Here the strings themselves sensibly don't try for any solos. They aren't jazz men and they don't claim to be able to do that sort of thing - but their background is rich and colorful, and gives Bailey a terrific basis on which to swing."
The 1947 Session with Maxine Sullivan
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| Maxine Sullivan in 1947 |
The New Friends of Rhythm returned to recording after the war with two 1947 sessions for the small International label: one on their own, the other with the superb singer Maxine Sullivan. I don't have the former set, but the latter makes up the second part of our program.
Sullivan had come to prominence with her 1937 recording of the Scottish tune "Loch Lomond," made with a small group led by Claude Thornhill. It was a huge hit, and led to her featuring such traditional fare throughout her career.
The six-song International album is split between three of these swinging-the-old-tunes numbers and three standards. A remake of "Loch Lomond" leads off the proceedings, which also include "If I Had a Ribbon Bow" and "Jackie Boy," both of which she had recorded before. The pop songs were Noel Coward's "Mad About the Boy," the Vernon Duke -Ira Gershwin "I Can't Get Started" and the Dorothy Fields-Jimmy McHugh "I Must Have That Man."
It's always a pleasure to hear a singer as accurate and clear as Sullivan. Her ability to swing most any kind of material is welcome, as well. Swinging was really not the forte of the New Friends, although harpist Laura Newell and guitarist Tony Colucci were helpful in that regard. They are augmented on this date by Hank D'Amico, a good jazz clarinetist who nevertheless was not the equal of Buster Bailey, who appeared on some of the Victors. For the 1947 sessions, the string quartet had a new second violinist, Bernard Robbins, and a new violist, Ralph Hersh.
International called the set Sullivan's "Anniversary Album," explaining in the notes that it marked her 10 years in show business. Actually she had been singing since 1934, but only started making records in 1937. The selections were supposedly chosen by six well-known DJs and writers, whose mugs appeared on the cover. This transparent publicity ploy was common back then. Among the collaborators are Metronome magazine editor George Simon and deejay Dave Garroway. The latter was an important figure, first in radio and then on television. His relaxed, conversational approach become influential during his tenure as the first host of NBC's Today show. Garroway even lent his name to a few albums for RCA Victor, although he actually only appears on one of them.
Alan Shulman's arrangements for Sullivan are facile, and particularly show his influence on Riddle in his backing for "Mad About the Boy," which is something of a pre-echo of Riddle's Close to You arrangements for Sinatra. For those, Riddle utilized the Hollywood String Quartet along with harp, clarinet and several other instruments.
The sound on this album is more than adequate; the Victor singles are uniformly excellent. All were remastered from lossless needle drops on Internet Archive.
