Benny Goodman 1938 concert revived

Benny Goodman 1938 concert revived

I stumbled across this item at the weekend and it instantly put me in a Big Band mood, as well as delighting me with the news that one of the seminal live concerts of the 1930s (and in the history of jazz in general) is going to be reproduced at Cadogan Hall in London this year.  I was less pleased to note that it's being put on in less than a week's time - the 26th January (although to be fair that does mark as near as dammit the 76th anniversary of the original performance).  Thanks for that advanced bit of reporting, Daily Telegraph(!).

However, this looks to be not the only Big Band concert playing at Cadogan Hall in 2014; thanks to this article I've discovered there's also a 100 Years of Big Band Jazz concert on 15 June as well as another Carnegie Hall revival on the 14th November, this time celebrating the 1939 performances of Benny Goodman's and Glenn Miller's Orchestras (plus selections from Louis Armstrong's and Count Basie's appearances).

Well done to Pete Long and his colleagues for helping to keep these wonderful bands' songs alive.  It's splendid to see this music of the 1930s & '40s still performed for audiences of today with such enthusiasm - and this is only at one venue!  Who knows what other events are on elsewhere in the country?  (Seriously, do tell if you know of any!).

source - BBC Four

Could 2014 in fact be a renaissance year for early 20th century jazz, I wonder?  Viewers in the U.K. have already been treated to the excellent B.B.C. Four programme Len Goodman's Dance Band Days, broadcast over Christmas (and already expertly covered by Mim over at Crinoline Robot; eagle-eyed readers will also have spotted Matt from Southern Retro in the above clip), and I note that off the back of it Mr Goodman will be appearing with Michael Law's Piccadilly Dance Orchestra at Littlecote House, Buckinghamshire, on the 25th July. 

Clare Teal's Sunday night Radio 2 show has also evolved nicely even if she still doesn't play the early British dance bands that her predecessor Malcolm Laycock did and there are more and more DAB and Internet radio stations appearing that are devoted to early dance and big bands (such as Angel Radio and Radio Dismuke - again, if you know of any others do give them a mention).

All these events and broadcasts popping up gives me great hope for a jumping and jiving year ahead.  Now I'm off to listen to more Benny Goodman.  Let's Dance!

The sun has got his hat on!

And it goes without saying that so should you, if you're out making the most of this summer weather.  Boaters, Panamas, pith helmets - but not baseball caps! - it doesn't matter so long as your bonce is covered.

Health advice dispensed, it's time for me to move on to the meat of this post.  Summer has most definitely arrived here in Britain and is making up for lost time by posting several consecutive hottest days of the year.  What better time then, in the lack of any other interesting news at the moment, to post a few of my favourite sunny, summery songs from the 1930s.



The song that lends itself to the title of this post, The Sun Has Got His Hat On is still well-known as a nursery rhyme but was originally written by Noel Gay and Ralph Butler in 1932 and recorded by two of the top British bandleaders of the time - Bert Ambrose and Henry Hall (the latter well-known for his child-friendly nursery-rhyme recordings).  The lyrics have, unfortunately, in one place in particular not dated well as you will undoubtedly hear (I shouldn't have to tell you to remember, of course, the time in which this song was recorded and the different attitudes and sensibilities that existed then but I will mention it just in case...!) and in later versions the offending line was changed to "roasting peanuts".



The Henry Hall recording remains my favourite of the two but they're both still jolly good fun!

Another jolly solar-themed recording from 1932 (was that also a "hottest year", I wonder?  Looks like it was a bit) is this cracking number by Jack Payne & His Band.  Easily matching the pep of The Sun Has Got His Hat On this tune fairly trots along!



What summer soundtrack would be complete without the great, inimitable Noël Coward and his wonderful song Mad Dogs and Englishmen.  Recorded here in November 1932 (again!) it was written the year before and first performed by Beatrice Lillie before Coward incorporated it into his cabaret act and made this version with the Ray Noble Orchestra.

Sadly I'm not much of an Englishman in this regard as I'm not overly fond of the heat and tend to avoid the blazing sun at its zenith (in all seriousness, for those of you in London and its environs the Department of Health has just officially declared this a Level 3 heatwave and advised people to stay out of the sun as much as possible between 11am - 3pm) and even now I'm finding it almost too hot to type!



Red Sails in the Sunset is another firm favourite and a popular song of 1935, since when it has been recorded by a multitude of artists including Guy Lombardo, Bing Crosby, Al Bowlly and Vera Lynn.  Once again I find myself drawn to the Ambrose version, though, and the images it conjures of stylish, relaxing summer evenings on holiday at the likes of Burgh Island, Cannes, or Le Touquet.



On the other side of the Atlantic, Glenn Miller recorded several songs with "Sun" in the title including Sunrise Sunset, Sunrise Serenade (originally written by Frank Carle and first performed by Glen Gray and the Castle Loma Orchestra in 1939 it was successfully recorded by Miller the same year as a companion "B-side" to Moonlight Serenade) and Sun Valley Jump.  Sunrise Sunset isn't on Youtube but the other two are and as I can't put a pin between them for preference here they both are:





Sunrise Serenade I always find particularly evocative, lending to my mind's eye images of "sunrise on the farm" in some little American homestead - the first rays just peeping over the barn, cockerels crowing and the farmer starting out for his fields on a tractor, that sort of thing.

I'll finish with a song that extols you to keep On The Sunny Side of the Street.  First written and performed in 1930 (its Depression-era roots are even more apparent in earlier, slower versions like this one by Ted Lewis) it became a more up-tempo jazz standard by the end of the decade and is performed in this instance by Lionel Hampton & His Orchestra:



Regardless of whether you enjoy this level of heat or not (and with apologies to those of you who might not be enjoying such sunny conditions where you are) I hope you all continue to walk "on the sunny side of the street" - with your hats on, of course! - and have a great summer.

All aboard the song train

The starting of a new job seems to have coincided with a bit of a downturn in vintage news (not to mention my third cold in as many months!) - hence I have been absent from the blogging circuit for nearly two weeks, for which I must continue to crave forgiveness!  I still haven't forgotten about you all though (I read all your posts of an evening, or at the weekend, as something very much to look forward to) nor this blog of mine.

Sitting on the train during the commute into work I often find myself thinking of potential subjects for this site and, while listening to my portable i-gramophone last week, it occurred to me that the very mode of transportation I was using - and the music I had playing - would make an excellent topic.



The railway train has always had an instantly recognisable rhythm and one that naturally lends itself to a musical beat.  There have been countless songs over the years featuring trains and rail travel to some extent or another but it is the half-a-dozen or so favourites in my music collection that I intend to focus on here.

The first song, Choo-Choo, neatly sums up the steam train in typical Thirties onomatopoeic style and is wonderfully redolent of period rail travel.  Written and recorded by American bandleader Frankie Trumbauer in 1930, it was almost immediately cut by a multitude of other bands on both sides of the Atlantic.  While the original Trumbauer recording is excellent, my favourite from the U.S. is Paul Whiteman's version, above, made in the same year.



In the U.K. the two Jacks - Jack Payne and Jack Hylton - both recorded versions of Choo-Choo a year later in 1931 and again, while Jack Payne's version is wonderful, Hylton's arrangement just shades it for me.



Arguably a more famous "Choo-Choo" is Glenn Miller's brilliant 1941 record - Chattanooga Choo-Choo, a song that instantly conjures up images of transcontinental railway journeys in the 1940s and '50s.



A year or two earlier Glenn Miller had had similar success, reaching number 1 on the U.S. Billboard chart with another train-themed number - Tuxedo Junction.  The song had actually been written in 1939 by American bandleader Erskine Hawkins and while his original version made it to number 7 in the charts it remains less well-known today than the classic Miller arrangement.



Another railway tune that has become inextricably linked to its [co-]composer - so much so that it is invariably called his "signature song" and found in every compilation of his music - is Duke Ellington's Take The 'A' Train.  It is a reputation that it thoroughly deserves, being one of the defining examples of 1940s big band music never mind rail-based songs.



One of my very favourite "songs of the track", though, is this one - Honky-Tonk Train Blues.  Although written and first recorded as long ago as 1927 by the noted early boogie-woogie pianist Meade Lux Lewis, this 1938 arrangement by Bob Crosby (Bing's brother) with Bob Zurke on the piano really rolls along splendidly.

For me all of these help rekindle some of the fun and romance that seems to have been lost from modern train travel, as I commute to and from work in a characterless and brightly-coloured plastic tube.  Sometimes I can even imagine seeing something steaming past the station platform, or pulling the far more luxurious carriage I picture myself travelling in... porter! My case please!

Musical Interlude: Glenn Miller & His Orchestra - A String Of Pearls (1942)

Partly because I haven't done one of these in a while and partly because I don't want another seven days to slip by between posts, I thought it about time for another one of my desert island discs.

Frankly I had a bit of a job just selecting one Glenn Miller song (I very nearly went with my original plan for this post - Fletcher Henderson or 'Red' Nichols numbers - but as you'll see I've in fact selected four, plus my main choice, Miller tunes for this post so I'll save them for another time) as he and his band had so many hits between 1938 and Glenn's untimely death in 1944.  I could easily have picked one of his most famous arrangements - In The Mood or Moonlight Serenade for example - but as much as I like them all I've settled upon the 1942 classic A String Of Pearls.  To me it is one of the most complete examples of the Miller "sound" and an almost seamless composition.  In fact I rather like his more obscure recordings (like Sun Valley Jump,  Slow Freight, Sunrise Serenade or Boulder Buff, for instance, which I'm generously going to throw in to this post for you).





While it could be said that Glenn MIller's music has become so synonymous with the Second World War that it borders on cliché (what documentary doesn't feature a snippet of one of his songs to get the viewer into a wartime mood?!) I think it is a testament to the uniqueness and quality of his musicianship that it can still be fresh in the minds of people today (and not forgetting that actually Miller had nearly 4 years of [American] peacetime success before he formed The Army Air Force Band).



The sound of Glenn Miller & His Orchestra was, in fact,one of the first aspects of vintage that this blogger was exposed to, over 15 years ago (God that makes me feel old!).  The exact first when and where is lost to the mists of time - perhaps it was one of those war documentaries, perhaps it was helping out my nan at the local WRVS luncheon club where it was played constantly; I forget (I do vaguely remember picking up an original LP of the The Glenn Miller Story in a charity shop, since when my collection of Miller records has grown inordinately).  But along with Laurel & Hardy it set me on a path and that has led to this point and which continues to stretch into tantalisingly into the distance.  For that reason alone this music will always have a special place in my heart.

Glenn Miller clue found in Reading plane-spotter's log

Glenn Miller clue found in Reading plane-spotter's log

source

The music of Glenn Miller & his Orchestra was one of my first experiences of vintage; shortly after I started watching Laurel & Hardy and Harold Lloyd films at the age of about 9 or 10 I somehow stumbled across this Big Band sound.  Maybe I first heard it at my nan's WRVS club; if memory serves I seem to recall buying an old LP of The Glenn Miller Story soundtrack from a charity shop - my first record, I think.  As a youngster I lapped up anything to do with the man and his music until I became quite well-versed in it.  Since then my tastes have expanded to include most bands and musicians of the 1920s, '30s & '40s but Glenn Miller will always have a special meaning as my introduction to Big Band and Swing.

The fact that he mysteriously disappeared in 1944 - in an aeroplane no less, another interest of mine - simply added to the legend.  That his "sound" has endured to this day, and has become synonymous with World War Two (despite Miller's success predating the war by a few years) is a testament to the unique, instantly recognisable quality of the songs.  The Glenn Miller Orchestra still records and tours today and books, musicals and documentaries about Miller's career continue to be made.

The mystery of his disappearance over the English Channel on the 15th December 1944, in a flight from Bedford in England to Paris where he was due to join his band for a performance, has continued to puzzle Miller enthusiasts for nearly 70 years.  There have been various crackpot theories that I won't endorse with publication here, but a few years ago the account of an RAF navigator came to light that until now was widely accepted to be most likely - Miller's aircraft had strayed into the South Jettison Area, an agreed-upon place in the Channel where Allied bombers returning from abortive raids could unload their bombs safely, and had been struck by bombs jettisoned by a flight of Lancasters on their way  back from Siegen in Germany.

Glenn Miller death: teenage planespotter's logbook 'scotches conspiracy theory'

A Noorduyn UC-64 Norseman, of the type in which Glenn Miller disappeared

However, with the discovery of this latest information found in a young plane-spotter's book, that hypothesis now looks rather shaky to say the least.  There appears to be no doubt that the aircraft this young lad claimed to have seen that day was the UC-64 Norseman taking Glenn Miller to Paris.  Provided it stayed on course, it would not have gone anywhere near the South Jettison Area and so couldn't have been the aircraft seen to crash by the Lanc navigator. 

The quashing of this previously-favoured theory now means that we are once again no closer to knowing what became of Glenn Miller.  If he was travelling on course and was not struck by RAF bombs, then what did happen to cause him to disappear like that?

The last British government documents relating to such incidents during Second World War won't be declassified until 2025, eighty years after the end of the conflict.  There may be something in them that will shed some light on this enduring mystery but until then this particular enigma looks to remain unanswered.

Christmas is coming!

Today is the 1st of December and that can only mean one thing - Christmas is just around the corner! I try to make it a general rule to avoid Christmas as much as possible before the actual month itself, which is practically impossible outside my own four walls as it's usually prevalent in shops from the about the middle of September. It seems to me that in these more austere times things have been rather low-key up until now compared to previous years, though. I shan't be putting up any decorations for another week yet - I know Advent was last Sunday but my parents always used to operate a "two weeks either side of Christmas Day" policy and I continue to follow that tradition. However I feel more than happy to start playing Christmas songs now, and have dug out my CDs and stuck them on the iPod.

For years all my Christmas music consisted of was mainly modern interpretations of classic tunes, such as by the new Glenn Miller Orchestra. The furthest any of my CDs went back to was 1950s Dean Martin and Nat King Cole recordings which, while perfectly pleasant, soon started to pall slightly after so many Christmases. I was just beginning to think that nobody recorded any Christmas standards prior to 1940 and was despairing of finding anything to supplement my existing collection of songs when I came across a 2CD set a couple of years ago (now sadly out of print - or whatever CDs are when they're no longer available) called A Vintage Christmas Cracker: 47 Original Mono Recordings 1915-1949. The title says it all really - a wonderful selection of traditional carols and classic Yuletide favourites recorded by some long-forgotten performers of the first half of the Twentieth century. It's the perfect accompaniment to the more usual songs of the season and just what I was after. Below are some of the highlights, courtesy of Youtube:

We begin in 1930, with Ray Noble & The New Mayfair Orchestra and their recording of the Savoy Christmas Medley. Despite this being a popular selection with many of the dance bands of the '30s, it's difficult to find now. In fact I couldn't actually find the version on the CD, so this is the original Debroy Somers and his Savoy Orchestra cut from the previous year:



Was there ever a more distinctive voice than that of Paul Robeson? He's long been a favourite in our family and this traditional spiritual was recorded by him in great style on the 16th December 1931 in London:



Now a special treat for you all. This next tune is apparently the first ever recording made of Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. This is Harry Reser & his Orchestra, with vocalist Tom Stacks, recorded in New York on the 24th October 1934:


Winter Wonderland now, but not one of the more well-known versions by the likes of Dean Martin, The Andrews Sisters or Perry Como. This is British bandleader Lew Stone & his Band with vocalist Alan Kane, recorded in London on the 28th December 1934. For my money this is one of the best versions of this perennial favourite:



The next two tunes are both by the BBC Dance Orchestra under the direction of Henry Hall and were cut just over a year apart. The Santa Claus Express features vocals by Dan Donovan (and chorus) and was recorded in London on the 23rd October 1935; The Fairy On The Christmas Tree with vocal trio The Three Sisters on the 29th November 1936. Both are archetypal 1930s Christmas songs and highly enjoyable:





On the same day that Henry Hall was recording The Fairy On The Christmas Tree in London, Fats Waller and his Rhythm were busy recording Swingin' Them Jingle Bells in Chicago. No video for this one, but the typically jazzy Waller recording can be heard here.

I mentioned that I have a Christmas CD by the current Glenn Miller Orchestra but the only Christmas song Glenn and his band ever recorded themselves was Jingle Bells, in New York on the 20th October 1941. Tex Beneke, Ernie Carceres and The Modernaires sing the vocals:



No Christmas record would be complete without at least one recording by the great Bing Crosby, and this CD set has several. Three of my favourites follow - Silent Night, Holy Night recorded in Los Angeles on the 8th June (that must have been weird!) 1942, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town recorded with The Andrews Sisters on the 30th September 1943 and I'll Be Home For Christmas recorded on the 11th October 1943:







Finally, we end with Fred Waring & His Pennsylvanians, who recorded this in L.A during December of 1944, especially for the American Forces. Two years previously Waring's version of this 19th Century poem A Visit from St Nicholas became his first and only million-seller:



Well, that's a sample of the music I shall be singing and swinging to in the run-up to Christmas; I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. I shall undoubtedly post again before the 25th, but whatever you're up to in the next three weeks I hope you have fun doing it to a festive soundtrack.