by Peter Cates

Al Jolson

Al Jolson – Tell That To The Marines (recorded September 10, 1918); Arthur Fields – You Can’t Beat Us (If It Takes Ten Million More, recorded September 19, 1918). Columbia A2657, ten-inch acoustic shellac disc.

Al Jolson

Born in Lithuania to a Jewish family, Asa Yoelson (1886-1950), better known as Al Jolson, was a singer who had extraordinary stage presence, vocal power and delivery, and would become extremely successful through stage, film, radio, records and touring.

His mid-’40s Decca 78s were my first exposure to him back during the early ‘60s, in particular his feisty renditions of George and Ira Gershwin’s classic song Swanee River, and Back In Your Own Backyard.

I also have memories of Jolson’s appearance in a 1939 biopic of songwriter Stephen Foster, also titled Swanee River, with Don Ameche.

Jolson starred in the 1927 film, Jazz Singer, which was the first talkie. His frequent appearances in blackface ironically generated respect from African-Americans, a controversy that will not be addressed here.

Tell That To The Marines was also written by Jolson and it is a very enjoyable example of World War I patriotic music, similar to George M. Cohan’s classic Over There.

After a grueling series of concerts entertaining troops overseas fighting in the Korean War, Al Jolson died of a massive heart attack while playing cards with friends at his New York City hotel suite. He was 64.

Side 2’s You Can’t Beat Us is also a stirring WWI ditty. Born Abraham Finkelstein in Philadelphia, baritone Arthur Fields (1884-1953) started recording in 1914 and was the first white singer to perform with an African-American band when he was hired ragtime pianist Ford Dabney.

After a generally successful career, Fields suffered a stroke in early 1953 and was living in a Florida nursing home, in Largo, Florida, where a fire broke out and he and several others perished.

Both selections are available on YouTube.

Christmas Music

Christmas Organ and Chimes – Merlin; Grand Prix KX-4, 12-inch LP, recorded circa 1960.

Usually a little bit of Christmas music on the pop organ and chimes goes a long way. This particular LP from well over 60 years ago and from one of the 87-cent dimestore labels has musicianship, character and intelligence, O Holy Night, Joy To The World and Come All Ye Faithful being given a nicely arranged exquisite treatment.

Information on the very good organist Merlin seems to be non-existent.

Joanna Cassidy

Joanna Cassidy

Still living at 79, actress Joanna Cassidy did good work in a recurring role as Mena Pride, mother of the lead investigator Dewayne Pride between 2019 and 2021, who is suffering from dementia. The range of detail Cassidy brought to her role, including ladylike poise, elegance, dignity, distress, anger and despair was one powerful example of how to craft a performance on film.

Maine Speaks

The anthology Maine Speaks has a poem, Aye! No Monuments, by Rita Joe (1932-2007) who was designated Poet Laureate of the native American Micmacs, who have over 1,500 members residing in Aroostook County (Miss Joe lived most of her life in Nova Scotia.).

It celebrates the wondrous majesty of the Maine and Eastern Canada landscape where so many of her ancestors lived and worked:

“Aye! no Monuments,
No literature,
No scrolls or canvas-drawn pictures
Relate the wonders of our yesterday.

How frustrated the searching
of the educators.

Let them find
Land names,
Titles of seas,
Rivers;
Wipe them not from memory.
These are our monuments.

Breathtaking views-
Waterfalls on a mountain,
Fast flowing rivers.
These are our sketches
Committed to our memory.
Scholars, you will find our art
In names and scenery,
Betrothed to the Indian
since time began.”

by Peter Cates

Fred Gaisberg

Fred Gaisberg

For collectors of the early shellac 78s, the 1999 biography, Sound Revolutions by Jerrold Northrop Moore is a fascinating biography of recording pioneer Fred Gaisberg (1873-1951) who, from 1894 when he landed employment at the Berliner Gramophone Company (later to become EMI) to his retirement in 1939, would develop a massive catalog of recordings of many of the world’s finest musicians and singers- Caruso, Chaliapin, Heifetz, Rubinstein, Paderewski, Kreisler etcs.

Prior to the 1930s, the artists were mainly recording short selections – operatic arias, piano and violin pieces and single movements from Symphonies and String Quartets.

Then Gaisberg started seeing the potential for complete Symphonies, Concertos, Sonatas if the right artists were matched to the repertoire and the financing provided through advance subscription from interested collectors.

Two notable projects were the Beethoven Society complete Sonatas and Concertos recorded by pianist Artur Schnabel and the Sibelius Society sets of all seven Symphonies of the Finnish composer.

In 1930, Bruno Walter (1876-1962) recommended that Sir Malcolm Sargent (1894-1967) engage Schnabel for a series of concerts in London. Prior to that, Schnabel was known mainly as a highly respected teacher at a Berlin Music School.

The pianist achieved success immediately and acquired a huge following as an interpreter of Beethoven’s 32 Sonatas and five Concertos.

A large number of Schnabel 78s and LP reissues here at the house reveal a pianist who played those Beethoven works like no other pianist, no matter how gifted otherwise. The sense of spirited freedom, rollicking rhythm, rapid playful tempos and an uncanny ability to gauge the emotions behind the notes could be heard in the Emperor Concerto’s first movement where Schnabel’s fingers were dancing on the keyboard.

Gaisberg wrote about his initial encounters with the pianist:

“It was given out that Schnabel would never stoop to recording as he considered it impossible for a mere machine to reproduce the dynamics of his playing faithfully. Therefore, when I interviewed him he was coy, but all the same prepared to put his theory to the test, though he would need a lot of convincing. At long last I was able to overcome all his prejudice. Tempted by a nice fat guarantee, he eventually agreed that it was possible to his ideals with machinery.”

Bruno Walter

The biography is loaded with other anecdotes. The inventor of the flat disc and owner of the Berliner Gramophone Company, Emile Berliner (1851-1929) was recorded around 1894 reciting the Lord’s Prayer and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star in, as described by Gaisberg, “in his typically broken guttural English!”

Just before the Nazi takeovers of Czechoslovakia and Austria, Gaisberg produced two legendary recordings:

In April 1937, he was in Prague to record the Dvorak Cello Concerto with Pablo Casals (1876-1973) and George Szell (1897-1970) directing the Czech Philharmonic.

January 1938, had Gaisberg in Vienna to record a live concert featuring Bruno Walter conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler’s 9th Symphony.

A retirement banquet for Gaisberg at London’s Savoy Hotel on April 21, 1939, had an honor roll of almost 70 guests from the musical world including most of the ones listed above. He lived long enough to see the first releases of the LP in 1948 and of the 45 rpm in 1949.

Fred Gaisberg died in his sleep on September 2, 1951.

by Peter Cates

Palace Records

Grieg 2nd Peer Gynt Suite and Liszt 1st Piano Concerto; Kurt Baumann conducting the Viennese Symphonic Orchestra; Palace PST-610, 12-inch stereo LP released mid-1950s.

Palace was one of many record labels that came and went during the 1950s. The jacket had a list price of $4.98 which was the usual retail price for stereo releases on major labels – RCA, Columbia, Capitol , Atlantic, MGM, Decca etc. – and which listed the real names of artists, not pseudonyms such as the non-existent Kurt Baumann and the so-called Viennese Symphonic Orchestra, which were often the practices of the dime store record labels.

However, despite the lack of information on the conductor, the orchestra and, with respect to the Liszt Concerto, the pianist (not even a fake name), the performances of both works were very exciting and the recorded sound quite good.

Taj Mahal

Taj Mahal

Taj Mahal – Recycling the Blues and Other Related Stuff; Columbia KC 31605, t12-inch stereo LP, recorded 1972.

Still living at 82, Henry St. Claire Fredericks Jr., better known by the stage name of Taj Mahal, is a multi-talented instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, etc., who could be labeled a blues singer but such a categorization would be a mistake.

Mahal has always been inspired by world music from Hawaii, the South Pacific and Caribbean, India, Africa and elsewhere as well as jazz and gospel, having been exposed to these influences from an early age by his parents owning a shortwave radio, Mahal’s mother singing in the church choir and both of them hosting friends who were jazz singers and musicians, including the great Ella Fitzgerald.

The title of this 1972 album, Recycling the Blues and Other Related Stuff, hints at these eclectic influences while song titles – Ricochet, A Free Song (Rise Up Children Shake the Devil Out of Your Soul), Cakewalk into Town, Sweet Home Chicago – hint at something more positive than the usual focus of the blues on mere misery and despair.

Among the several instruments Mahal has mastered are the piano, banjo, organ, steel guitar and harmonica.

Backup singers on this album include the Pointer Sisters.

Traditional bluesmen who plied the genre without Mahal’s multi-cultural interests have included the gifted B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Albert King and Muddy Waters. However, back during the ‘70s when I worked in Boston record stores, I noticed that the records of these blues artists were more frequently bought by whites whereas the soul albums of the Ohio Players, Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Temptations, Earth Wind and Fire, Four Tops and Ojays were purchased by African-Americans.

I inquired of an African-American colleague the reason; she replied that the blues artists were considered Uncle Toms by younger people whereas the contemporary soul singers were upbeat, assertive and even confrontational against the racism and other social injustices that unfortunately continue to exist a half century later.

by Peter Cates

Louise Dickinson Rich

Louise Dickinson Rich

The Coast of Maine by Louise Dickinson Rich (1903-1991) was first published in 1956 and subsequently revised in 1962 and 1970. Dipping in it, I came across the following:

“Considering its present and past eminence as a seaport, which always connotes-perhaps unfairly – sailors celebrating shore leave by bending the festive elbow, I think it is a little odd that Rockland, over a hundred years ago, organized the first Total Abstinence Society in America. I’m not talking about temperance now, but complete abstinence, an unheard-of thing at the time.”

“The tourist trade had its inception around 1870, when Bar Harbor, which was then little more than a collection of fishing shacks, was ‘discovered ‘, along with the other now well-known resort towns of the coast.”

Finally Kennebunk has a Unitarian Church containing a bell in its steeple that was cast by Paul Revere.

Rich’s book has numerous other anecdotes about past and, as of 1970, present Maine along with a number of striking black and white photographs by Samuel Chamberlain. For me personally, it lends itself better to browsing than cover to cover reading.

Sir Laurence Olivier

Sir Laurence Olivier

Sir Laurence Olivier (1907-1989) wrote in his autobiography Confessions of an Actor, published in 1982, of being asked to fire British actress Dame Edith Evans from a production he had directed in which she had the leading role because she was messing up her movements on stage, not remembering her lines and generally looking spaced out.

Feeling incapable of firing a much admired colleague and friend, Olivier strolled to the actress’s dressing room “to bluster it out with Edith”:

“As I was doling out the bubbling greetings of an old colleague, I caught sight of a pair of unworn eyelashes beside her makeup tray and burst out, ‘Edith, dear, why on earth didn’t you wear those?’ ‘Well, dear,’ she said, ‘I didn’t want to think of it as a performance!’

Preparing to drop “the bloody but necessary axe” if Edith still messed up, Olivier was much relieved when the actress delivered a much better “performance”, approaching her role as a “performance” and wearing the necessary eyelashes, and Olivier kept her on for the play’s entire run.

Olivier himself delivered a very memorable performance as the sadistic Nazi dentist Szell working on Dustin Hoffman’s teeth in the 1976 Marathon Man.

Dame Edith Evan

Other memorable roles were the earlier film classics Wuthering Heights, the suspenseful Rebecca directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Richard the Third with actress Claire Bloom and the Boys from Brazil as the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal opposite Gregory Peck as another Nazi doctor.

Olivier’s second ex-wife, Vivian Leigh, (1913-1967) performed exceptionally as Scarlet O’Hara in 1939’s Gone with the Wind with Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler and Olivia de Haviland’s lovely Melanie Hamilton.

Olivier’s third wife and widow Joan Plowright, still living at 95, delivered a sterling performance in the 2005 Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.

Olivier speaks of the challenges for memorizing lines when one is past 60: “When the brain is at its clearest, probably in the early morning, is the best time for learning; when you’re young, late at night is all right – well, any time’s all right for anything when golden youth is yours.”

Johanna Fiedler

by Peter Cates

Johanna Fiedler

In the Introduction to her 1994 memoir, Arthur Fiedler: Papa, the Pops, and Me, the late Johanna Fiedler (1944-2011) writes the following about being in New York City and watching the live CBS TV presentation of her father conducting the Boston Pops at the 1976 Bicentennial 4th of July concert at the Charles River Esplanade Shell:

“From the overhead shots taken by panning cameras on the roofs of neighboring apartment buildings, I could tell this was the largest crowd I had ever seen. People filled the Espla­nade and the adjacent highway, crammed boats on the Charles River Basin, and stretched back as far as the television cameras were able to show. Later I found out that the crowd had been just as dense on the Cambridge side of the river, where the music must have been almost inaudible. The Guinness Book of Records was to list this as the largest mass of people ever to attend a classical music performance. “

Arthur Fiedler

Arthur Fiedler’s Boston Pops records sold in the millions. My earliest memories as a classical record collector in seventh grade are the 12-inch Red Seal 78s gifted to me by kind relatives and friends of Jacob Gade’s Jalousie with Manuel de Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance on the reverse side; of Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours (itself the melody for Allan Sherman’s infamous early 1960s best selling record Hello Fadda, Hello Madda/Camp Granada); a spirited late 1940s 78 set of the Offenbach/Rosenthal Gaite Parisienne Ballet with its own Can Can; and hearing on the radio the Pops own semi-classical arrangement, with sweetly graceful strings, of the Beatles’ I Want to Hold Your Hand, for me the first enjoyable rendition of one of their songs, as during junior high I detested rock music, especially the Beatles, the Beach Boys and Elvis Presley.

With 13th birthday money, I bought a 1964 Boston Pops album (RCA Victor LM-2745) simply titled Music America Loves Best, and containing spirited performances of Rossini’s William Tell Overture, Handel’s Largo, Grieg’s The Last Spring, Wagner’s Prelude to Act 3 of Lohengrin, Johann Strauss’s Acceleration Waltz, and the Brahms’ 6th Hungarian Dance, at Al Corey’s Music Center, in Waterville.

It had a full spread cover photo of Fiedler sitting on a park bench with his baton against a green background. I played that record to death.

Fiedler seemed to be a slightly gruff but likable character and conveyed this persona in his public appearances over almost 50 years. However, like so many artists, he was a very complicated man.

In her book, Johanna writes of her father as loving, moody, fun-filled, harsh, generous, miserly, attentive, and indifferent; and of his own harrowing insecurities as his fame and wealth increased.

Examples:

She tells of her father, when she was a little girl, giving her one on one time cuddling with her while they both watched boxing matches on his bedroom TV. But when she was a teenager and dressed nicely for her parents, he’d put her down with comments such as “She looks like a French prostitute or…a piece of cheese.”

The parents constantly fought among themselves and with Johanna, while, as an adult, she was estranged from both of them for months.

Her father’s insecurities stemmed partly from the resentments of the classical music world at the success of the Pops concerts and records. And, as he grew older, he had paralyzing fears about losing his mental and physical health.

Again, Johanna writes:

“‘Poor Pierre Monteux [the conductor who founded a summer school in Hancock, Maine, for teaching conducting],’ Papa said in 1970. ‘Near the end, he could hardly get on the stand, and his legs were frozen during a concert.’ Only a year or two later, my father began having trouble with his own legs, the fate he had been predicting for himself for years. His walking and balance got so bad that he could barely lift his feet off the floor, and we had to install a stair elevator at Hyslop Road [the address of the Fiedler family home in Brookline, Massachusetts.].”

As a personal account of growing up under a famous parent, this book is highly recommended.

I recently heard a 1970s cassette anthology, American Salute, in which Fiedler and the Boston Pops do staples ranging from Aaron Copland’s Hoedown from Rodeo, William Schuman’s arrangement of the Revolutionary War hymn Chester and the title selection American Salute, by Morton Gould, to pop songs by Jimmy Webb – By the Time I Get to Phoenix and Galveston; the more traditional Down in the Valley and Deep in the Heart of Texas; TV themes from Bonanza, Maverick, Have Gun Will Travel, and Gunsmoke; guitarist Chet Atkins playing Tennessee Waltz; Saint Louis Blues, etc. These were all culled from previous Boston Pops LPs and done with the consistently spirited musicianship Fiedler was justly renowned for.

Finally one Arthur Fiedler album I absolutely cherish among the many here at the house is a late 1940s RCA Victor collection of four Overtures by 19th century French composer Daniel-Francoise Auber (1782-1871).

And YouTube abounds with Fiedler recordings, the PBS Evening at Pops episodes and more.