Henry "Hot Lips" Levine

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.

Piatigorsky in Barber and Hindemith

This is something of a belated birthday card for Samuel Barber, one of my favorite composers, whose 100th birthday was earlier this month.

To celebrate, we have one of his Barber's less often heard works. It is the lyrical cello sonata from 1932, in a performance by the great Gregor Piatigorsky. To go with it on this 1956 RCA LP, the cellist programmed the Hindemith sonata, which was written for him in 1948. Ralph Berkowitz accompanies.

This is a well played, well recorded LP of fine music, so I don't have much else to say about it (other than I wish Barber's music was played more often).

I do want to comment on the cover photo of Piatigorsky because it is so different from the usual covers for classical recordings of the time - and of our own time, for that matter. The progenitor of this kind of black-and-white, available light, mood photography is as much film noir as it is the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. In classical music, its closest relative is probably Robert Hupka's photography of Arturo Toscanini (below left), which did so much to convey the conductor's magnetism.

The cigarette smoking is another cue - then and now conveying a self-possessed cool. The ever-present smoke and cocked eye of American news commentator Edward R. Murrow (above right) is an example. Television at that time was largely a grainy, black-and-white medium.

But the late-night, seen-it-all attitude was perhaps best suited to jazz musicians, and the Blue Note label made something of a specialty of the genre. Below are three examples - Hank Mobley 1 and 2, and Dexter Gordon, pulled from many, many such LP covers.


This is a style that the folks over at the highly amusing site called Crap Jazz Covers call "make me look intense and moody" - perhaps well suited to jazz musicians and incisive commentators, less so to a cello virtuoso from the Ukraine.

By the way, if you are more interested in Piatigorsky than in photos of smoking musicians, his autobiography, Cellist, is available in full online.

Digression No. 21

I wanted to mention a few things that aren't in the nature of a regular post but might be of interest to some of you.

First, a while back I posted Rolf Liebermann's Concerto for Jazz Band and Symphony Orchestra in the Sauter-Finegan/Chicago Symphony-Fritz Reiner recording from 1954. Ricardo (aka Rich) left a comment that he had the rare stereo tape version of that recording, and now he has made it available via the symphonyshare Google group. Rich has kindly consented to let me repost the link. Thanks Rich!

In response to a request over at a usenet classical music site, I recently transferred the New York Philharmonic/Artur Rodzinski recording of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, from February 1945. The sound on my early LP pressing is fairly rough, so I am not going to make the transfer a regular post at this blog, but here is a link for those who might want to hear the performance, which is quite good. (See label below.) Rodzinski is another musician who deserves more notice - several of his New York recordings are available via this blog.

I did also want to mention that a notable new archive is now on line at CHARM - the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, a consortium of several London educational institutions. The new archive makes available about 5,000 recordings by musicians of Britain and Ireland from the first half of the last century, focusing on materials that have not been transferred before.

I have pulled a number of fine items from the site already - Isolde Menges' recording of The Lark Ascending with Sargent conducting, Boyd Neel's recording of a Vaughan Williams Hymn Tune Prelude, and two folk songs in a setting by William Alwyn for harp and viola. I was particularly interested in the latter because I just read an article on the violist, Watson Forbes, in the Classical Record Collector. The transfers of all of these are quite good. I went ahead and redid the latter record to my own tastes, and thought a few of you might be interested. The music is rare and very lovely. The harpist is Maria Korchinska. Here's the link.

Johnny Desmond

This 1955 LP, responding to a request by Will Friedwald, finds Johnny Desmond in mid-career, looking for a hit to bolster his career. He had already sung with Bob Crosby and Gene Krupa before the war, notably with Glenn Miller's AEF band during the war, and solo for RCA and M-G-M before joining Coral in 1953.

This 10" album brings together several singles of greater or lesser success for Desmond. Perhaps the most successful was his version of "The High and the Mighty," which short-circuits the eerie whistling in favor of Johnny's vocal, which had nothing to do with the film. Two other film tunes are on board as well - "Tara's Theme" and the "Song from Desiree." The entire second side is collected from an 1954 EP of film tunes.

The title song did have some chart action, and was listed by Billboard as the 48th most popular record of 1955 (right above Chuck Berry's "Maybelline"). Johnny introduced this song on a TV show - the LP cover photo is taken from that program. The ad below comes from that period. It also features a bigger hit - the McGuire Sisters' cover version of the Moonglows' "Sincerely," another indication of the changing tastes of the time.

It would be a stretch to call "Play Me Hearts and Flowers" a great song, then again, the lack of great material doesn't bother me in the least. I am as much an admirer of the canonical American songbook as any vocal collector, but please, how many times can the canon fire off the same shells? If I never hear "Yesterdays" or "I Get a Kick Out of You" again, I won't be sad. I do like to hear lesser-known songs and sometimes they are well worth getting to know. Too bad this isn't one of those times. Perhaps the weakest song here is "A Woman's Loveliest When She Is Loved." The lyrics to this condescending anthem were written by Sylvia Dee, best known for "Too Young" and worst known for "Chickery Chick." There is some groove damage on this item, perhaps intentional. (Note (December 2023): most of the noise has now been removed.)

Johnny does sound good, as always. By this time he had modified the vocal approach that got him called the Creamer and the GI Sinatra (by his publicist, anyway) in favor of a more robust attack similar to Tony Martin. I like the earlier Johnny better, but it's a matter of taste. Desmond went on to record some excellent LPs, for Columbia in particular.

Note (December 2023): this has now been remastered in ambient stereo.

LINK

Jazz with Fritz Reiner

Tonight we present the world's only 12-tone jazz band symphony orchestra record - the only one in my collection, anyway.

Here by request is Rolf Liebermann's Concerto for Jazz Band and Symphony Orchestra, with the Chicago Symphony, led by that famous jazz hound, Fritz Reiner, in a 1954 recording.

In the goofy wire service article on the back cover (below), Reiner seems to take credit for the idea, but I think the Liebermann piece may have been the idea of the band. Contemporary Billboard articles make reference to the group taking the item on the road for appearances with symphony orchestras, apparently also including the New York Phil under that other noted jazz maniac, Dimitri Mitropoulos.

Eddie Sauter and Bill Finegan were arranger refugees from the swing band scene. Their dual-named outfit was something of a thinking person's band in the 1950s, leaving behind their dance band origins for a (mildly) quirky approach, something to the right of the Stan Kenton stentorian brass sound and to the left of the recidivist Ralph Flanagan-Ray Anthony approach. That said, the Liebermann piece is far away from the sound of their "Doodletown Fifers"; it's closer to Kenton.

Don't be put off by the 12-tone label - this music is actually quite enjoyable and very well put across by the Sauter-Finegan forces, the Chicago band and Fritz "Jazzme" Reiner.

Fritz Reiner and Rolf Liebermann

There are only a few recordings of Rolf Liebermann's music; and this is apparently the only composition of its type from his pen. He later gave up composing for many years and became a well known arts administrator, leading the opera companies in Hamburg and Paris. His 1999 obituary from The Gramophone is in the download; also an article from Down Beat reviewing the concerts that led up to this recording.

On the other side of the LP, Reiner trots out Strauss' Don Juan, something more in his usual line. 

The cover painting appears to have some representational intent among the splotches, and every time I look at it, I try to figure it out - it's either a man playing a saxophone or someone scraping food off a plate into a trash can. Let's go with the first one.

Note (August 2024): Both the Liebermann and the Strauss pieces were recorded in stereo, although not released as such until much later. For this new version I've transferred the first stereo issue of Don Juan, from a 1968 RCA Victrola LP. I don't have the stereo edition of the Liebermann composition, but for this version I've remastered the piece in excellent ambient stereo. However, the stereo version is also available separately. Fourteen years ago, Ricardo (aka Rich) made available the stereo tape version of that recording via this link, which still works. Thanks again, Rich!

LINK to the Liebermann in ambient stereo and the Strauss in stereo

Fritz Lehmann

The fine German conductor Fritz Lehmann died relatively young, at age 52, while conducting Bach. That was in 1956.

Lehmann recorded fairly often during his career, but not many of his recordings have been re-released. So I will be presenting a few of them here.

This post includes two 10-inch LPs he made for DGG in the early 1950s. The first is of Brahms' Tragic Overture and Schumann's Manfred Overture. The second is two of Dvořák's Slavonic Rhapsodies. The Brahms is with the Berlin Philharmonic; the others are with the Bamberg Symphony.

I recently had a request for Lehmann recordings, and by coincidence I found several of them on a public domain archive. Because I haven't been able to do any of my own transfers lately because of work commitments, I decided to refurbish these and provide them here. They are well worth your listening time, I think.

I will have a second set of Tchaikovsky and French overtures soon. You might want to go to Neal's Historical Classical Recordings Corner if you like these Lehmann recordings. He has a number of transfers of 78 sets.

Brahms with the New York Quartet

This 1949 performance of Brahms' first piano quartet has been a favorite of mine for many years; I have always been particularly fond of the pianism of Mieczysław Horszowski. So a while back I decided to present it here. 

Horszowski, and the starry group he has with him here - Alexander Schneider, Milton Katims and Frank Miller - were the members of the New York Quartet, but are barely identified as such here for some reason. (You also can here them on this blog in a performance of Copland's Piano Quartet, which is approximately contemporaneous with this recording.)

Alexander Schneider, Mieczysław Horszowski, Frank Miller, Milton Katims

Alexander Schneider had been in the Budapest String Quartet, and would be again in 1956. He also made a good number of records as a conductor. Milton Katims, too, would take up conducting, leading the Seattle Symphony for many years. Frank Miller was the principal cellist with the NBC Symphony when this record was made, and later would hold the same position with the Chicago Symphony. He, too, was a conductor. Horszowski had an extraordinarily long career as a pianist, playing well into his 90s.

The cover above is from the second pressing of this LP. The original pressing had one of those brown pebble-grain covers that are supposed to look like a leather book binding and lend the product some class. These look pretty dingy 60 years later, and probably did back then, as well.

Note (August 2023): this LP has now been remastered in ambient stereo.