Gordon Jenkins Conducts Holiday Music

Gordon Jenkins

Let's take a look at some of the seasonal items that the great conductor-arranger-composer Gordon Jenkins put out from 1942-52, in company with such luminaries as Dick Haymes and Louis Armstrong.

Jenkins began recording for the new Capitol label just a few months after it began in 1942, both in support of vocalists Martha Tilton and Connie Haines and under his own name, with Bob Carroll for the vocal choruses.

It's the last team that made the first record in this collection, a cover version of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," which Bing Crosby had introduced in Holiday Inn that year and recorded for Decca. Carroll was a sonorous vocalist whom I admire and have featured here, but he was a more impersonal singer than Bing. At the time of the recording, he had most recently been with Charlie Barnet's band.

Jenkins began an association with Decca in 1945, and quickly found success with his first recording of his "Manhattan Tower." He soon was providing backing for such stars as Dick Haymes, including our next three recordings.

Bob Carroll, Dick Haymes

The first is a V-Disc of "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!," which came from a December 1945 aircheck of the CBS show Everything for the Boys. Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn wrote the tune earlier in the year, and it had become a hit for Vaughn Monroe.

That same year, Mel Tormé and Bob Wells produced one of the finest of all seasonal tunes, "The Christmas Song," a hit the following year for Nat Cole. Haymes and Jenkins covered it in 1947, a superb version. 

I believe "The Christmas Song" was actually the B-side of the Haymes release. The plug side was one of the new compositions that year: Irving Gordon and Lester Lee's "Christmas Dreaming." It's a superior song but has never become a standard, despite the Haymes-Jenkins recording and the better-known Frank Sinatra-Axel Stordahl competition.

Floyd Huddleston

In 1949, Jenkins produced a two-sided holiday release for Decca. One side was the excellent, and little-known "December." It was a new song written by two vocalists who also wrote music together - Al Rinker (once of the Rhythm Boys) and Floyd Huddleston. The latter is the soloist here; he acquits himself very well. It's an appealing piece in an affecting performance.

The other song was Jenkins' own "Happy New Year," an ironic title if ever there was one. The singer laments a lost love, wishing her a happy new year. It's a beautiful, depressing song, very much in the vein of Jenkins' earlier "Goodbye." The singer is another talented, although unheralded artist, Bob Lenn. (Decca misspells his name as "Senn" on the label.) Lenn worked in New York as a studio vocalist, vocal coach and actor. I placed this song at the end of the playlist.

The final record in this set features a performer today identified with the holidays, if not so at the time - trumpeter-vocalist Louis Armstrong. Decca had paired Armstrong and Jenkins as far back as 1949, and in 1952, the duo came up with a two-sided holiday release - "White Christmas" and "Winter Wonderland." The latter was written as far back as 1934, when it was a hit for Guy Lombardo. It had a comeback in 1946 via releases from Johnny Mercer and Perry Como. Armstrong is in characteristic form for this coupling, and he and Jenkins mesh better than I would have expected.

Armstrong recently appeared here on the blog with some of his earlier jazz records.

The sound on these vintage recordings is generally vivid.

LINK

Louis Armstrong

Columbia Promotes 'The Louis Armstrong Story'

After Columbia Records launched the LP format in 1948, it took just a few years to start mining its back catalogue for reissue candidates. One obvious artist emerged - Louis Armstrong, the trumpeter-vocalist who was the most important figure in early jazz. The right producer was already on staff, young George Avakian, who had been compiling Columbia's "Hot Jazz" albums on 78 for some time - including some of Armstrong's legendary recordings.

Promo label; George Avakian and Louis Armstrong; LP cover

The resulting Louis Armstrong Story was a four-record set (the LPs were issued separately) that came out in 1951. To promote the albums, the label had Avakian record introductions for some of the selections. Columbia then sent the intros with the appropriate cuts to disk jockeys, hoping they would air the package as a half-hour program.

There actually were two such promotional sets; today's post presents the second of them. I've gathered and remastered the seven Armstrong recordings and accompanying Avakian intros from needle drops on Internet Archive. The sound has a great deal of impact, as you will discover on the first Armstrong cut, "West End Blues" from 1928, which is one of the most famous jazz records of all time.

"West End Blues" begins with a spectacular Armstrong solo, astonishingly virtuosic for the time, which contrasts starkly with the stodgy playing of trombonist Fred Robinson and clarinetist Jimmy Strong, but not the fluid pianism of Earl Hines, like Armstrong resident in Chicago and advanced in his musical thinking. "West End Blues" also contains an early example of Armstrong's wordless vocalizing - I would call it "inimitable" if it hadn't inspired an army of imitators.

Earl Hines and Louis Armstrong

"West End Blues" was credited to "Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five," but by the time the next cut in this program was recorded late in 1928, the credit was simply "Louis Armstrong," here again in the company of Earl Hines and again producing a jazz classic, "Weather Bird."

For the next selection, Avakian returned to the June session that produced "West End Blues," choosing "Don't Jive Me." He notes in his introduction that Armstrong popularized many familiar jazz terms - including "jive." Here, Armstrong's solo is again riveting, but more space is allotted to Jimmy Strong, for whatever reason. In his solo, Hines demonstrates one of his stylistic hallmarks, playing out of time. Surprisingly, this record was unissued until Avakian included it in one of his "Hot Jazz" 78 compilations, in 1941.

Reissue label

Avakian introduces "Knockin' a Jug" as being the product of a jam session in the studio. For the first time, Armstrong is heard with one of his longtime associates, trombonist Jack Teagarden (whose solo for once is not all that good), and with the short-lived guitarist Eddie Lang. Louis has the last word, and thankfully the over-miked drummer Kaiser Marshall lays out for the climax.

Internet Archive's copy of "Knockin' a Jug" comes from an early reissue, dating from 1938 and sponsored by an enthusiast group called the United Hot Clubs of America. The 78 was issued by the Commodore Music Shop of New York, best known for its own label. These UHCA releases appeared even before Columbia started reissuing Armstrong's records.

Avakian says that Armstrong's managers wanted him to start recording more pop material, so in 1931 he took on "Star Dust" in his own way, remolding what Avakian terms Mitchell Parish's "prosaic" lyrics into something entirely new. Armstrong does sing some of Parish's words, while replacing others with vocalese, improvising just as he did on the trumpet. The band's chugga-chugga backing is highly amusing.

"I Can't Give You Anything But Love" is more of the same, only different, with Louis moaning his way through a chorus, whipping through a brief stop-time interlude, then returning to his vocal improvisations. The concluding trumpet solo is one of Louis' best.

Avakian concludes the program with "Muggles" (a slang term for marijuana). This 1928 record only takes flight when Armstrong plays his concluding solo - not unusual on these records.