Beecham and the Nutcracker Suite

It's always a pleasure to have contributions from our friends, and here's one from anonymousremains. It is a joyful performance of a suite from The Nutcracker by the Royal Philharmonic and its founder, Sir Thomas Beecham.

The recording, a very good one, was made in December 1953 in Walthamstow Town Hall. The transfer, which I have cleaned up a bit, is excellent.

Beecham had a way with this music, and there are few more exhilarating recordings than this version of the Waltz of the Flowers. Even if you have heard this music many dozens of times, you should hear this.

I've been trying to find identifications for the dancers on the cover, without luck. I think the woman may be Alicia Markova.

Thanks again to anonymousremains for his thoughtfulness.

A Visit to the Record Shop, 1939

If you were a Cleveland record collector in 1939, you might well have put Moore's Magazine & Music Shoppe on your itinerary. For one thing, it had an inventory of relatively cheap used records - and this was one of them, two worthy items from Kay Kyser's band, which came in the record sleeve above touting all the many features of Mr. Moore's emporium.

Step Up and Shake My Hand (vocal by Harry Babbitt) and Tears from My Inkwell (with Ginny Simms) were not among Kyser's many hits, so that's probably why this record was available inexpensively. The sleeve says Moore's received a fresh stock of records twice a week, likely from a distributor or juke box outfit offloading old stock.

That would be enough to keep me coming back, and indeed Moore's sounds like my kind of place in many ways - besides used records, it had magazines, newspapers, and books, and it was open until midnight. You also could rent a camera, order scratch pads, buy a greeting card, and get a Lock-a-Phone to make people pay to use your telephone.

If you had been the one to purchase this Kay Kyser disk back in 1939, you would be in possession of two enjoyable if unexceptional tunes, with arrangements would have seemed dated even 70 years ago. Both songs are well played, nonetheless, and Ginny Simms does wonders for Tears from My Inkwell. Listen via the link below.

LINK

Manfred in Indianapolis

Here by request is Tchaikovsky's Manfred in an early recording from the Indianapolis Symphony and Fabien Sevitzky.

This is another one of the LPs that RCA issued on its low-price Camden label using a pseudonym. In this case it transported the US Midwest to the south of England, turning the Indianapolis band into the Sussex Symphony.

This recording was made in January 1942, at the same time as recordings of music by Harl McDonald and Leo Sowerby, which were never issued. Sevitzky programmed American music quite extensively.

Similar to the feelings about Stokowski, opinions were divided about Sevitzky, with some thinking he was a charlatan, others an effective conductor. The performance here is good and well recorded - although it also can be tentative and the strings do not sound especially glamorous. There also is some pitch instability, possibly introduced in the transfer via tape to LP.

Regardless, I enjoyed the experience a great deal, and will be transferring the same forces' recording of Tchaikovsky's first symphony at a later date.

REMASTERED VERSION (JUNE 2014)

More Borodin from Stokowski

A short while back, we heard from Leopold Stokowski and His Symphony Orchestra (how many other conductors were billed as having his very own symphony orchestra? Beecham? others?) in music by Falla and Borodin.

Here is another Borodin piece - In the Steppes of Central Asia - that Stoki recorded during the 1950 session that also produced the Polovtsian Dances. The two works apparently were combined on this 1954 issue to capitalize on the increased interest in Borodin's music occasioned by the musical Kismet.

I love the cover photo. Stoki looks like he is trying to halt an orchestra stampede. This kind of overdramatic pose is great fun; puts me in mind of ferocious middle linebackers or marauding stage juveniles.

The download includes only the Steppes; see the Falla-Borodin post for the other music. The pressing is a little crackly - it was one of those stealth bad pressings that looks nice but plays noisy.

LINK

Hey Mabel - It's Ol' Diz and Double D

The postseason for Major League Baseball begins this week, so I thought I would present some miscellaneous baseball-related items that I forgot to share at the beginning of the season.

For our non-US friends, baseball is a game where almost nothing happens for hours on end. Pitchers unaccountably stare off into the distance. Batters step out of the box after every pitch to adjust equipment and bodily parts. There are frequent beer ads. Occasionally wood hits horsehide and people run. And that's about it.

As you can tell from the previous paragraph, I think the Great American Pastime is past its prime. But then so am I. This post looks back to the days when we both were a little livelier.

One connection between the days of old and today is the persistence of beer advertising. When I was a young fella, too young to drink the stuff, baseball broadcasts in our local market and some others were sponsored by Carling Black Label Beer. Throughout the 50s and into the 60s, Carling used the slogan "Hey Mabel! Black Label" and an associated jingle to sell the goods. "Hey Mabel!" was sung to the "salt peanuts" figure - apt for a beer, I'd say.

This campaign was concocted by Carling's ad agency, Lang Fisher & Stashower. Sometime in the early 50s, the agency prepared a 78 of the music, containing two instrumental versions of the Hey Mabel theme and the Carling Black Label jingle. One was a dance band version (label above), which combined the Carling material with Take Me Out to the Ballgame, the other a Dixieland arrangement as played by a number of well-known LA musicians. There are no vocals on the record, so my guess is it was sent to the radio stations carrying the baseball games for use as filler before breaks, as was the practice on radio stations at the time.

I've also included two 45s by Hall of Fame pitchers, Dizzy Dean and Don Drysdale. Ol' Diz was quite a character who spent many years broadcasting games after his arm gave out. He adopted a country-cousin persona for this role, mangling the language and singing the Wabash Cannonball, which Roy Acuff popularized. Sometime circa 1960, Dean recorded a single of the song on the Colonial label. The record has no number, which leads me to believe it was produced as a item to be sold or given away at Dean's promotional appearances. The Wabash Cannonball is backed by a song called You Don't Have to Be from the Country, and from Dean's performance, I doubt he had seen it before stepping before the microphone.

Like Dean, Drysdale became a broadcaster after his career ended, but unlike Diz, he made his record (sleeve below) during his prime as a player - in 1963, when his team, the Dodgers won the World Series. Ferocious on the pitching mound (said Orlando Cepeda, "The trick with Drysdale is to hit him before he hits you"), Double D was a sensitive soul in the recording studio, sounding a lot like Pat Boone. And frankly, I'm not sure he isn't a better singer than Boone. Sinatra fans in the crowd will recognize one of the Drysdale songs, Give Her Love. Frank recorded it in 1966, and it became the flip side of Something Stupid. Drysdale's arrangements are by Jack Nitzsche, a talented fellow who worked with everyone from Doris Day to Link Wray.

LINK (ambient stereo - February 2024)

More Steve Gibson and the Red Caps

One of the first posts on this blog was an LP by an early R&B group, Steve Gibson and the Red Caps, that had a particularly gaudy cover. Let's bring Steve back for an encore with the EP above and a selection of 78s.

The record industry has a long history of trying to get you to buy the same things over and over again (new, improved Beatles records, anyone?), and this EP is a good example, containing as it does two songs from the LP I shared previously ("Sentimental Me" and "I'll Never Love Anyone Else").

Otherwise, it contains two songs that later became hits for rock and roll artists. "Blueberry Hill," which first appeared in 1940 on singles by Glenn Miller and others, was a giant hit for Fats Domino in 1956, as much for Fats' great piano and the wonderful reed riff on the bridge as for the song itself. And "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" was a big winner for Elvis. I guess it shows the continuity of musical taste that the latter song was first recorded in 1927, and Elvis' arrangement (including the spoken part) is similar to that of Steve Gibson's 1950 version - which also was recorded at the same time by Blue Barron and Al Jolson.

But what shows the continuity of musical influences just as much are the Red Caps' performances themselves, which include everything from a Count Basie lick and Mills Brothers echoes from the 1930s, to Slim Gaillard and Louis Jordan influences from the 1940s, and pre-echoes of the Treniers and doo-wop groups of the 1950s.

Both the EP and the 78s included in the download were cut in 1949 and 1950. In truth, the 78s are more lively that the EP. One of the 78s is called "I've Been Living for You" on the label (see below), but that's a mistake. It's really "I'm Living for You" - and the Gibson group (called the Toppers at that point) had recorded it several years earlier under that title. (If this doesn't confuse you enough, you can read more about the group's long and convoluted history here.)

Speaking of reusing materials, you will notice that the EP cover above bears a striking resemblance to a figure on the cover the Vic Damone's Amor LP I posted not long ago. The couple there have been transported from the banks of the Seine to Blueberry Hill, where they are about to find their thrill.

Stravinsky in Berlin

Continuing our series of recordings that Igor Stravinsky conducting his own works on labels other than Columbia. I believe this may be the only recording he made for Telefunken and the only session with the Berlin Philharmonic.

Stravinsky wrote Jeu de Cartes (or as it is presented here, The Card Game) in 1936-37. Its premiere was in 1937 in New York. This recording, made the following year, was Stravinsky's first of the work and I suspect was the first by anyone.

Jeu de Cartes, a ballet score, was among Stravinsky's neoclassical works. Neither the Berlin orchestra nor the resonant acoustic are what we associate with this style, but the musicians put the unfamiliar music across with aplomb.

This transfer is from Capitol's early 50s Telefunken series, which in my experience was otherwise heavily devoted to Willem Mengelberg's prewar Concertgebouw recordings.

NEW LINK