Axel Stordahl

Let's start a new series devoted to the vanished genre of easy listening records. This genre was a major factor in the LP era; it was sort of a hybrid of light classical and big band music, and its major practitioners would veer into one or the other depending on the record and their own proclivities and backgrounds.

Morton Gould has been featured several times already on this blog; he put out quite a string of easy listening items in the 10-inch LP era. Another exponent was Paul Weston, Jo Stafford's husband and accompanist.

Most of the easy listening items you find on the web are from its later phases, when it adopted hip and funky trappings that many people like these days (not me; that stuff makes my skin crawl).

But back in the postwar era, easy listening really was easy - so easy, it could lead to "Dreamtime," as this Axel Stordahl item is titled. It was pretty music for relaxation. Sort of like the function of new age music these days, I guess.

Stordahl, a former Tommy Dorsey arranger, made his name as Frank Sinatra's arranger during the Voice's first great era, when he recorded for Columbia. Stordahl's arrangements for Sinatra were consistently inventive and gorgeous, and he maintained a remarkably high standard throughout that period.

This album is not quite on that level, to my ears; just as Nelson Riddle's work on his own was not as consistently inspired as it was when he worked for Sinatra. Not sure why this should be the case, and perhaps I am over-generalizing.

Stordahl died young, at age 50 in 1963, soon after one last recording session with Sinatra, for the Capitol album Point of No Return.

This post is in response to a request by Mel. Sorry, there are a few sonic burbles in the mix, but it's generally quite listenable.

The Desert Song (Grayson)

As a follow-up to the very popular Kathryn Grayson collection, here is the 10-inch LP she made of songs from her 1953 starring vehicle, The Desert Song.

Warner Bros. paired her with Gordon MacRae for that operetta, but since MacRae was a Capitol artist, she did a "songs from" collection for RCA with Tony Martin. Meanwhile, MacRae paired up with Lucille Norman for his own competing collection.

Being non-partisan, I'll be presenting both versions, neither of which have appeared since their original issue, as far as I can tell. This post presents the Grayson collection, here from the 2-EP version of the LP.

This is a good collection sure to please admirers of these artists. It contains seven sings from the film and one Martin bonus song.

Mewton-Wood, Part 5

I'm very excited to be able to present an addition to our collection of recordings by pianist Noel Mewton-Wood. I recently found an unplayed copy of his recording of Chopin's second piano concerto. This record gives the best rendition yet of his beautiful tone, and is a spectacular performance as well.

As always, the conductor is the reliable Walter Goehr, who on this occasion leads the Radio Zurich Orchestra, which has a subtle tonal allure reminiscent of Spike Jones' City Slickers. But no matter - the piano is the attraction in Chopin, and no small attraction when the pianist is Mewton-Wood.

I can't recommend this highly enough.

LINK

Digression No. 9

Very big thanks to reader Jeff for letting us know more about the provenance of the Richard Rodgers recordings below. It turns out that my late 30s guess was correct about the recording date - it was 1938. But, much more interesting, the original issue of four 78 rpm disks came in the first record album ever issued by Columbia Records with the first cover ever designed by the eminent Alex Steinweiss.

Jeff points us to this article on the album, from which comes the image below of the original cover. He's not convinced that this is the first record cover ever issued. I am completely unconvinced - I have a HMV album of Horowitz playing Rachmaninoff in my basement that dates from 1930, and it certainly has a designed cover!

Rodgers Conducts Rodgers

I was surprised to discover recently that Richard Rodgers conducted not one but two LPs of his own music. I've had the 1954 12-inch LP for many years - that's the one made with the New York Philharmonic. But here is a 10-inch LP I'd never seen before.

I haven't yet been able to find out when it was recorded, so I'm going to resort to some informed guesswork. The LP was published in 1949, but I suspect these sides were made about a decade earlier. Why?

- Rodgers worked with Hart through 1942's By Jupiter, but the latest show represented here is 1938's The Boys from Syracuse.

- The solo singers here were both active in the 1930s.

- The uncredited arrangements are characteristic of the dance band sound of the 1930s.

Whatever its provenance, this is a very good set, with the female vocals by former Hal Kemp singer Deane Janis and the male vocals by Lee Sullivan, perhaps best known these days from being in the original Brigadoon cast.

Digression No. 8

I was surprised to find this blog showing up a PCL Link Dump the other day. Anybody coming here from there - welcome! The tone of the post there may lead you to think that we deal only in ironic hipster stuff like Mickey Spillane and Raymond Scott, but that's really not true (although we do have those tendencies here, admittedly). Whatever you would find on 10-inch LPs in the early 50s, you can find here, although I do ignore the records that are easily found elsewhere (Sinatra, Cole, Crosby, the more popular soundtracks and shows, etc.). Rather than Cole, you will find Page Cavanaugh. Rather than Sinatra, Herb Jeffries. Etc.

I did also want to mention a few things that I did in response to requests elsewhere. These are 12-inch LPs that may be of interest.

First, the Sons of Sauter-Finegan, which rip formed part of the Jazzman's extravaganza of albums by the recording band that was led by arrangers Eddie Sauter and Bill Finegan. The "sons" are the soloists from the band. Some of this LP is good and some of it is tepid, like many jazz albums from that era. Link below.

And then there is Bill Frawley Sings the Old Ones (also known as Fred Mertz Sings). Here's the way I described this gem over at Rocket from Mars' Vinyl Adventures at Franklynot:

"A word of warning - this album contains the following: wavering and hammy vocals by Bill/Fred/Bub, quasi-barbershop background singers, tack piano, banjo solos (had enough yet?), and a cover photo of Bill in straw boater and striped blazer.

"Vaudeville did not survive this kind of thing, and it's a wonder that Dot Records did."

Now I'm quoting myself, so it's time to go. The cover and link are below.

SONS | FRAWLEY

First Recording of Knoxville, Summer of 1915

Knoxville, Summer of 1915 is one of the high points of American music. It is a setting of a prose poem by composer Samuel Barber's exact contemporary, James Agee. Both the music and the words are inspired.

This is the first recording of the work, done by the distinguished American soprano Eleanor Steber, who commissioned it and first performed it with the Boston Symphony and Serge Koussevitzky in 1947. This November 1950 recording is of the revised version for smaller orchestra.

The modest LP above is also notable for including what I believe to be the first recording of Barber's Four Excursions, in a jaunty performance by Rudolf Firkusny. These items are based on familiar idioms, somewhat akin to the Copland and Gershwin piano pieces that are discussed below. Composed in 1944, they also were recorded in November 1950 in Columbia's 30th Street studio in New York.

Knoxville, Summer of 1915 is often considered a nostalgic idyll, but it is much more than that. in 1915, Agee was 5 years old, and the piece is a memory and meditation on an evening that summer, in the year before his father's death. Agee's words were set to music by Barber when his own father's death was near.

Agee places the themes of family, self, time, and place in a context that is at once extraordinarily specific and timeless, minute and cosmic; full of love for his family, the poem ends nonetheless with the remarkable observation that the members of his family "treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am." This unusual, rapt, evocative piece is set to music that could not be more right.

Steber also recorded the Barber composition later for her own Stand label; an intense live version. This version is cooler, with Steber's ample soprano and cloudy diction making the interpretation seem a little distant.

For this post, I have taken the soprano item from the 12-inch LP below (which has an excellent line drawing of Steber on the cover) because the source is much less noisy than the original issue. True to the usual form, the transfer engineer for the reissue has apparently added reverb. The piano pieces are from the 10-inch LP.