Can Anyone Here Tap Dance or Do a Soft Shoe?

Fred Astaire lent his name to several records in the 1950s on which he didn't actually appear. All were designed to promote the chain of dance studios that he co-founded in 1946, which competed with the well-established Arthur Murray studios, dating from the 1920s. Both chains are still in existence, far outliving their namesakes.

The first such "Astaire" album to appear was a 1952 pressing on the Capitol label. The company issued it both as a 10-inch LP and as a series of four singles. My own collection contains one of the singles, with a tap dance and soft shoe on the two sides.

These days, the record is of more interest for the arranger and conductor - Skip Martin - than for any titular involvement by Astaire. When the record was recorded, the big band veteran was in demand both for records and for film arrangements. He possibly came to Astaire's attention as orchestrator and conductor for the dancer's 1951 film, Royal Wedding.

Skip Martin

I transferred the single at the request of bandleader James Langton, formerly of the Pasadena Roof Orchestra, and now the New York All-Star Big Band. James, who likes to work from vintage arrangements, had discovered that a repository in Utah possessed the charts used for these records. But before he investigated further, he wanted to hear the record itself, to see if further effort would be worthwhile.

I don't want to make James' decisions for him, but it might be tough to adapt these arrangements for his band. The "military tap" number, "We Saw the Sea," has a Sousa-style arrangement, which may not be what his patrons are expecting. The "soft shoe," "Isn't This a Lovely Day," is more palatable, but both songs suffer from stop-time episodes that were designed to allow you, the listener, to dance along.

Following this Capitol LP, Astaire lent his name to RCA Victor's "Perfect for Dancing" series in 1955. Unlike the Skip Martin record, I believe the RCA LPs repackaged existing material. His competitor Arthur Murray was an old hand (or foot) at this sort of thing, lending his name to records as far back as the 1930s. While Astaire was endorsing the RCA series, Murray was busy issuing a competing series via Fred's old label, Capitol. The indefatigable Murray was back on RCA a few years later with yet another run of records. There was and continues to be a lively market for dance instruction.

I had no need for such lessons - my mother, the self-proclaimed former "Shirley Temple of Cleveland" - taught me my dance moves. I never learned to tap, but I can still fox-trot without injuring myself or innocent bystanders.

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Dueling Sabres: Five Pop Versions of Khachaturian's Most Famous Work

On my other blog, I discuss the genesis of Aram Khachaturian's most popular ballet, Gayane, and the runaway popularity of its most notorious selection, the Sabre Dance. The Kirov Ballet premiered the work in 1943, but it wasn't until after the war than it became known in the West. The Big 10-Inch Record details the earliest recordings (Golovanov in the USSR and Kurtz in the US), and how other conductors and record companies began to jump on the Gayane/Saber Dance bandwagon as 1947 drew to a close.

It wasn't just the classical musicians who noticed the popularity of the Sabre Dance. In late 1947, pop record producers rushed to record the jack-hammer rhythms of the dance before a musicians strike began on January 1, 1948,  Among the pop adaptations set down were three of the five that are featured here: pianist Oscar Levant, bandleader Woody Herman and Freddy Martin's band with pianist Barclay Allen.

Even though Oscar Levant's 78 was on the Columbia Masterworks label, I consider it a pop record because it was an arrangement for piano and orchestra from the composer's orchestra-only version. Levant lived off the piece for years. In 1949 M-G-M even incorporated his rendition of it into the Astaire Rogers film The Barkleys of Broadway. It's not clear who arranged the Columbia recording;  it was possibly Levant - he is listed as the arranger on the solo-piano sheet music. On the record, the distinctly thin-sounding "Columbia Concert Orchestra" is led by Lou Bring.

Woody Herman's Sabre Dance, also on Columbia, is in some ways closer to the composer's score than Levant's is. Like Golovanov's recording, the contrasting trio section is led by a soupy saxophone, although Woody's troupe plays it in swing tempo.

Freddy Martin has another piano-led adaptation, featuring soloist Barclay Allen. Arranger Lou Busch (who later made piano records under the name Joe "Fingers" Carr) incorporated a boogie-woogie bass figure that works nicely. This is a well-played version, actually better done than Woody Herman's.

When these records began climbing the charts in early 1948, Decca decided to get in on the action by recording the Andrews Sisters in a vocal rendition with fatuous lyrics by Allan Roberts and Lester Lee. Singers did not belong to the Musicians Union, so were not covered by the recording ban. Neither, apparently, were harmonica players - accompanying the siblings were the Harmonica Gentlemen. They appeared on only a few other records, backing the Andrews Sisters and Danny Kaye on three numbers, including "The Woody Woodpecker Song," all in 1948.

By 1949, parodies of the Sabre Dance were beginning to appear. One was a gem by the inimitable Mickey Katz, who called it the "Sadir [Seder] Dance." Katz was then recording for RCA Victor, which viewed him as an ethnic act and limited him to Yiddish language records. I don't understand Yiddish, so the only parts of Katz's vocal I could follow were "Take it easy or you're gonna plotz!" and "Happy Pesach!" I had no problem, though, enjoying Katz's klezmer-style deconstruction of the work. Later in 1949, he would move on to Capitol, which did not confine him to Yiddish recordings.

The download includes more images of sheet music, labels and ads.

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Pat Friday's Decca Recordings

In my earlier post on singer Pat Friday, I mentioned that I had been unable to locate her Decca recordings of 1940. My friend Bryan Cooper, an authority of music of the era, has come to the rescue with transfers from his collection, which I am very pleased to present here.

Along with the Enterprise 78s previously shared, these are the only commercial 78s that the singer recorded, although off-air dubs of some radio programs survive.

Decca matched Friday with stodgy staff conductor Harry Sosnik for one session on February 16, 1940, with four titles resulting.

The first single coupled "I've Got My Eyes on You" with the elaborately titled "Would'st Could I But Kiss Thy Hand, Oh Babe." Cole Porter wrote the former for Fred Astaire and Broadway Melody of 1940. The Porter song is taken too slowly and seriously. Astaire certainly couldn't have danced to this tempo.

Pat Friday

On "Would'st Could I," Sosnik livens things up a bit, and Friday copes well with the antique lingo. The tune was written and recorded by Will Osborne. No offense to Will - and I am no expert on archaic languages - but I wonder if "would'st could I" was ever appropriate grammar. If there are any 500-year-old people out there, would'st could thou enlighten us?

The second coupling was "You, You Darlin'" and "The Gaucho Serenade." The former song comes from a film titled Tear Gas Squad, which could not have been a musical. But it did star Dennis Morgan, who could sing after a fashion, and I assume he introduced the number, which was recorded quite a few times in the 1940s. Friday's reading is very effective.

"The Gaucho Serenade" was written for the film of the same name and its star, Gene Autry. Here the singer and conductor did not agree on the tempo. She seemed to think it too fast, and I agree with her.

Decca's sound is good, enhanced by Bryan's fine transfers. Many thanks to him for bringing these elusive records to light.

A Tribute to Pat Friday

Although she was virtually unknown, Pat Friday is my favorite among the vocalists who appeared with Glenn Miller during his abbreviated career - except she never actually "appeared" with him. Friday dubbed Lynn Bari's singing voice for both of Miller's films - Orchestra Wives and Sun Valley Serenade - resulting in superior versions of "I Know Why (and So Do You)," "At Last," "Serenade in Blue" and "It Happened in Sun Valley." But she never otherwise sang with Miller's band.

I got to know the soundtrack recordings from the album that appeared on 20th Century-Fox records in about 1960. Friday's vocal quality and command appealed to me then, and they still do now. I did a deep dive into the Sun Valley Serenade soundtrack recordings a few years ago on my other blog.

Capitol News, February 1945

Helen Patricia Freiday, born in Idaho in 1921, first came to notice as a vocalist on Bing Crosby's radio show, which led directly to the Miller dubbing assignments. She was a modest person, who seemingly did little to promote her great talent, but nonetheless became a regular on the Roy Rogers and Victor Borge radio programs, while making a few records for Decca and for the small Enterprise label. She also appeared on radio with Jack Webb, pre-Dragnet. Webb apparently adopted her surname for his Sgt. Friday character in Dragnet.

I haven't been able to locate the four Decca sides, but Internet Archive yielded needle drops of six songs made for Enterprise in about 1946. One of those records is her commercial recording of the Lecuona-Ruby song "Mi Vida," which she dubbed for Vera-Ellen in the film Carnival in Costa Rica. The version on the film soundtrack was among the 24 Lecuona recordings recently featured on my main blog.

Also in the Enterprise collection are fine recordings of the standards "Don't Blame Me" and "It Had to Be You," with backing by the veteran Bennie Kruger. The leader's sax obbligato is far too prominent in "Don't Blame Me." Krueger also provides the accompaniment for "Mi Vida" and its flip side, "Too Late for Conversation." For the latter song, Friday's singing voice is in a much higher key than usual. I have included a repitched version of the song, but it's just as unconvincing.

The other songs are "Pin Marin," a good novelty number which Friday handles with just the right amount of personality, and the effective torch song "Tonight I'm Alone." Here the backing is by the Song Spinners, an organ and accordion combo.

The UK Glenn Miller site has an illuminating interview with Friday, where she recounts her brief career. She seems to have left the music business behind in about 1950 for a career in finance. Little detail is provided, but it seems as though she and her husband did very well. She died in 2016.

Billboard ad, August 31, 1946

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More Silliness from Boston

Awhile back, good pal and fellow blogger Ernie gifted us with an EP produced in the palmiest (and silliest) years of the Boston Pops under Arthur Fiedler. Called Fiedler's Folly, it included four musical parodies as presented during the concerts of that legendary aggregation.

The idea was to break up the serious parts of the concert with mirth. Back then (1954) I think they used to sell beer at the old hall (see tie-in ad below), so perhaps the audience was in the mood for a hoot and holler - or at least a discreet giggle.

Now Ernie has returned with an additional and intriguing Pops find. It is artifact called "TV-ana," a product of longtime Pops arranger Richard Hayman, who played the harmonica and recorded mood music and pops albums of his own when not under Fiedler's patronage.

In this record, Hayman weaves together various television themes and jingles of the time in a jovial manner. These would have been instantly familiar to the Boston audience, but 65 years later may be more arcana than "TV-ana" to any of you who didn't overdose on American television back in the day.

Click to enlarge

I was a five-year-old at the time, and would happily watch anything from Norman Vincent Peale to I Love Lucy, so I have something of a grounding in the material Hayman covers. Even so, I didn't identify nearly all of the jingles he jangles at us. I caught (in order) the NBC theme, the Halo Shampoo and Oldsmobile jingles, the Dragnet music (an easy one), Ajax cleanser, Robert Hall (an early clothing discounter) and Colgate toothpaste. It says something about the memorability of this nonsense that I could recall these - and sing many of the them - many decades later. I am reminded that the Ajax and Colgate jingles were very similar. This allowed you to combine them thusly: "Use Ajax / the foaming cleanser (bah-bah-bah-ba-bum-bum-bum) / Cleans your breath as it cleans your teeth." Fortunately I did not put this into practice at the sink.

If any of you recognize anything else in Hayman's arrangement, please let me know. Ernie is far too young to be of much help - but I do thank him for the contribution, as always!

By the way, the other side of this 45 is "The Glow-Worm Turns" - but that number also appears on the Fiedler's Folly EP previously on offer.

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Doris Day - The V-Discs

For the second half of my tribute to Doris Day, I thought I might gather all the V-Discs she made with Les Brown and under her own name, including one duet with Buddy Clark.

As was common with V-Discs, some are dubs of commercial issues. Eight in this set of 12 fall into that category. The others are from a radio source, from unissued record company masters and from a special V-Disc session, complete with spoken introduction.

The first item in our collection is the most famous song recorded by Day when she was with Les Brown: "Sentimental Journey." This is not the Columbia recording; rather, it was taken from a November 1944 NBC broadcast of "For the Record."

Next in order of issue (although recorded first) was a special V-Disc made at a New Jersey army hospital in summer 1944, "Take Me in Your Arms." It includes a brief spoke introduction where Doris tells the soldiers not to take the title literally.

Les and Doris

"Till the End of Time" was one of the many classical-pop traductions of the time. On the label above, you can see that Kaye and Mossman didn't want to share the credit with Chopin. The second item is a Cahn-Styne topical piece called "He'll Have to Cross the Atlantic to Get to the Pacific" in the lyrics and by Columbia and "You've Got to Cross the etc." by V-Disc. We're going with the latter. Both songs come from a May 25 commercial session.

"You Won't Be Satisfied" is another Brown record for Columbia, dating from November 1945. It has a nice tenor sax solo by Ted Nash, who later had a very long career in studio orchestras.

From a March 1946 Columbia session, but unissued by the company commercially, comes a rocking number with the peculiar title of "Deevil, Devil, Divel," which may be why it remained in the vaults except for this V-Disc. It's a good workout for Brown's band, though.

By the next Columbia session, in June 1947, Doris had gone out on her own. The title selected for V-Disc was the commercial disc of "(I'm Still) Sitting Under the Apple Tree," which conveys a very different sentiment than "He'll Have to Cross the Atlantic to Get to the Pacific." Both were by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn.

Terry Melcher with mom's portrait

In September of that year, Cahn and Styne had turned their attention to the polka, penning "Papa Won't You Dance with Me." A second song, "That's the Way He Does It," dates from the same session. Doris' record came out on both the Columbia and V-Disc labels.

The following session, in November, resulted in an Columbia master unissued except for V-Disc. It's hard to understand why. It's a terrific reading of "No Moon at All" - then a new song - with a powerfully swinging arrangement by blog favorite George Siravo and a nice tenor solo from Toots Mondello.

From December 1947 comes "I've Only Myself to Blame," a rueful ballad by David Mann and Redd Evans, who also wrote "No Moon at All." This was issued commercially by Columbia.

The final title was a duet with another superb vocalist (and another blog favorite), Buddy Clark. From December 1948, "I'll String Along with You" is beautifully done with simple harmonizing by these two great artists. It's a fitting remembrance of both.

All these items except one come from lossy sources, but have come up well in the remastering. "I've Only Myself to Blame" does have some minor residual noise. I've substituted the commercial issue of "I'll String Along with You" for the very noisy V-Disc dub at hand.

Please see my other blog for another tribute to Doris.

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Music from 'Lady in the Dark' - But Not by Kurt Weill

The Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin-Moss Hart musical Lady in the Dark was a major hit on Broadway in 1941. Hollywood, as it usually did, made plans for a film version, and then, as it also usually did, began making changes. One of the main modifications was to toss out most of the famous score. Very little "My Ship" and "This Is New." No "Tschaikowsky" (no Danny Kaye either). "The Saga of Jenny" and "Girl of the Moment" did remain.

Paramount did add some non-Weill music to its 1944 release, however. This post concerns the few numbers from the film that came out on commercial records. It is a companion to a post on my main blog that compiles the original recordings from the Broadway Lady in the Dark.

"Suddenly It's Spring"

The most important piece of music written for the film is "Suddenly It's Spring," a wonderful song by leading tunesmiths Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen, who were most often found laboring on Bing Crosby's musicals. (They would win an Academy Award for "Swinging on a Star" from Going My Way that same year.)

Ginny Simms

Some record companies got behind "Suddenly It's Spring" - but not as many as you might think. Part of the problem was the ongoing musicians' strike, which was still in force for the biggest record labels in 1944. One company affected was Columbia; while it did record "Suddenly It's Spring" with Ginny Simms, it was with choral backing rather than orchestra. Her version is in the download. She aims to convey deep feeling, but ends up making this optimistic song ("You look at me / And suddenly it's spring") sound mournful.

One of the smaller companies that had made peace with the union also took up the song. HIT records, a budget label, enlisted Blue Barron's sweet band to record "Suddenly It's Spring" with the ever-chipper Tommy Ryan on vocals. The long-time Sammy Kaye vocalist had gone out on his own a few years before, and by 1944 was fronting the Barron ensemble for its leader, who was in uniform. On this record, you will hear Ryan introducing himself - it was common among such bands for the leader to announce the singer.

Technically, both Simms and Ryan do well by the song, which has a tricky release. I've included an aircheck by Frank Sinatra, where that great singer has trouble with the bridge on its second go-round. Nonetheless, only Sinatra's ecstatic version reveals the song's full stature. Too bad The Voice never did a commercial recording. The backing on the aircheck is almost certainly by Axel Stordahl.

"A Message for Liza"

The other music from Lady in the Dark to make it to record was, surprisingly, a bit of the movie score done by music director Robert Emmett Dolan. This music somehow came to the attention of Leopold Stokowski, who decided to record it in an August 1946 session with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, which he had founded the year before. The delightfully lush orchestral miniature is called "A Message for Liza" on the label and "Waltz" or "Glamour Waltz" in the discographies. It is probably what IMDb calls "Artist's Waltz." The orchestration is possibly by Robert Russell Bennett, who worked on the film.

Bonus Stoki silliness

I've also included the other side of the Stokowski 78, although it has nothing to do with Lady in the Dark. It is Brahms' Hungarian Dance No. 1 - but wait, what is different here? Stoki has thrown out the composer's orchestration, and substituted his own, complete with prominent xylophone and wild tempo changes that would have challenged even the most adept Hungarian dance troupe. The result sounds like Liszt at his most garish - and maybe that was the idea. The whole thing somehow reminds me of the Bugs Bunny parody of Stokowski conducting at the Hollywood Bowl - minus the tenor, of course.

Most of these recordings were found amidst the huge pile of stuff that is the Internet Archive, and remastered for your listening pleasure. The Sinatra came from a long-ago bootleg.

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