by Peter Cates

Count Basie

Count Basie (1904-1984) recorded Broadway Basie’s Way for Enoch Light’s Command label on August 18 and September 7 and 8, 1966. It contained 12 classic Broadway tunes:

Hello Young Lovers from The King and I. A Lot of Livin’ to Do from Bye Bye Birdie. Just in Time from Bells Are Ring­ing. Mame. On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. It’s All Right With Me from Can Can. On the Street Where You Live from My Fair Lady. Here’s that Rainy Day from Carnival in Flanders.
From this Moment On from Out of this World. Baubles, Bangles and Beads, from Kismet. People from Funny Girl. Everything’s Coming Up Roses from Gypsy.

Basie’s arranger was the Cuban-born Chico O’Farrill (1921- 2001) and he had on hand the phenomenal trumpeter Roy Eldridge (1911-1989) who otherwise was a free-lancer after years in Gene Krupa’s band, and rhythm guitarist Freddie Green (1911-1987) who had been with Basie for over 30 years.

Except for a few desultory moments – almost as if everyone is on auto-pilot – the album is a good one. Part of its problem may have been the commercialized pressure to do tunes that the band wasn’t that excited about; what saved it from total boredom was the sheer professionalism of Basie and his players and their commitment to a minimum standard of quality and reliability in all of their sessions. As with Basie’s friend Duke Ellington (1899-1974), neither gentleman ever made a bad record and I have many of each of them.

Basie and his wife, Catherine, had one daughter, Diane, who was born in 1944 with cerebral palsy. The doctors told them she would never walk. His wife felt otherwise and taught the little girl to walk and swim.

Continuing with R. P. Tristram Coffin’s Kennebec Crystals:

“But back up on the farms the men were grinding their picks. Women were laying out armfuls of gray socks with white heels and toes, piling up the flannel shirts, packing up bacon and ham and sausage meat and loaves. Boys were oiling harness and polishing the glass sidelights of headstalls. Chains were clinking, and sleds were being piled with blankets and bedding and victuals and extra whiffle-trees, cant dogs, picks, and feed for the horses.”

More next week.

by Peter Cates

The Startup

A Netflix series, The Startup involves a cast of characters who are way too connected with each other for their own good. The locale is contemporary Miami, Florida, with its exotic palm trees and beaches, the year round weather ranging from balmy to scorching hot, and cesspools of criminality all too often on both sides of the law. Otmara Marrero portrays a skilled computer hacker, Adam Brody is a financial manager laundering money for his corrupt father, Edi Gathegi is a Haitian gang leader who threatens them with harm but then collaborates with them in a nefarious scheme (Gathegi was very good as the evil Mr. Robinson on NBC’s Black List), Martin Freeman is an FBI agent involved in his own racket on the wrong side of the law and murders a fellow agent who knows too much, while Aaron Yoo is a multi-billionaire who invests lots of money in the group scheme and who has a dangerous security chief named Vera who’s not as trusting as her boss.

Very, very highly recommended!

André Previn

A wonderful YouTube features the late André Previn (1930-2019) conducting the London Symphony in Dvorak’s incredibly beautiful 7th Symphony, a 2002 broadcast.

Robert P.T. Coffin
continued

Next paragraph from Robert P. Tristram Coffin’s Kennebec Crystals:

“The Kennebec was gray glass again, next dawn and next and next. It grew blacker as the days went by. In the third night the drums began, a single stroke, now and then, low bass and far away, rolling and reverating along the hills. Next morning there were white cracks on the dark drumhead to show where the drumsticks had struck. All at once, at four o’clock, the whole stretch of the river below the Augusta falls blossomed out with children in bright scarves, just out of school. A thousand young farmers and townsmen ground bark, cut figure eights, and yelled themselves hoarse at Ring-Leavo. Fat boys of six on their first skates stared wide-eyed at the green water weeds hanging still and going down into fearful darkness under their toes. At night bonfires ran down the river from bend to bend. Flame answered flame from Skowhegan to Swan Island. Everybody but those in slippers and those in the cradle was out on the ice. And next afternoon the horses had taken to the new ice highway that connected all the Kennebec towns. Men flew along behind them, mountains of robes in narrow sleighs. Their big mustaches smoked, and their breaths clung to them like mufflers straining out behind.”

More next week.

by Peter Cates

June Valli

A June 11,1953, seven-inch RCA Victor 45 record – 47 5368 – features June Valli (1928-1993) singing Cryin’ In the Chapel, which reached #4 on the Billboard charts. Artie Glenn wrote the song for his son Darrell, who recorded it a few months before Valli and had success. Numerous other singers would cover it .

Elvis Presley’s own version sold a million copies after RCA released it in 1965 without his permission, five years after he recorded it; supposedly he didn’t like the results and wanted it tossed.

Back to June Valli who gave a warm-hearted rendition with the very gifted arranger/conductor Joe Reisman (1924-1987) who led the orchestra and chorus. Side 2 was the mediocre Love Every Day You Live.

Valli came from the Bronx. After singing Stormy Weather at a friend’s wedding, she was invited to appear on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, where she won first prize, and on the Perry Como and Ed Sullivan Shows. She co-hosted an NBC summer replacement variety show with Andy Williams in 1957, toured with Fats Domino and Mel Torme and was the invisible singer for Chiquita Banana commercials.

June Valli died of cancer in 1993, at the age of 64, at her home in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Joe Reisman was a Dallas, Texas, native who produced hit records for Patti Page at Mercury, Perry Como, Eartha Kitt and André Previn at RCA Victor Records, eventually becoming Henry Mancini’s lead producer.

Reisman died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on September 15, 1987, one day before his 63rd birthday.

He recorded a very good easy listening album in 1957 for RCA entitled Door of Dreams. In much later years, he even produced sessions for the Grateful Dead.

Robert P. Tristram Coffin continued

Continuing with paragraphs from Robert P. Tristram Coffin’s essay, Kennebec Crystals:

“The thaw lasted eight days. Somebody saw a robin. He didn’t get any vote of thanks from his neighbors. A body could see his dead grandmother in such fog as there was. The graybeards by the barrel stove in Ephraim Doughty’s grocery store at Bowdoin Center shivered in their shoes. Ephraim had said earlier in the evening, as he looked out at the weather glumly, “Open winter, fat graveyards.” Active Frost cheated at checkers and got caught. Wash Alexander drank up all his wife’s Peruna.

“The only consolation in Kennebec county was the newspaper. It said it was raining all up and down the Hudson, from Saratoga to Staten Island.”

To be continued…

by Peter Cates

Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata

In 1818, Ludwig van Beethoven composed the Hammerklavier Sonata, #29 of his 32 Sonatas for piano; it is the most technically demanding of the group, a genuine knuckle buster, and very powerful music that, like the composer’s other masterpieces, ranges through many moods. The third movement Adagio is one beautifully-developed 15 minutes in which the composer lets loose his deepest emotions.

The year of its composition had been a difficult one for Beethoven. He hadn’t composed much during the previous two years, his deafness was getting worse, his physical health was terrible, and he was constantly worrying about finances. Finally, it was not performed in public until 1836, nine years after the composer’s death, by composer/pianist Franz Liszt (1811-1886), whose own technical wizardry at the keyboard was unsurpassed; when he gave a concert as a child prodigy, Beethoven came up on the stage and kissed him.

I recently listened to two performances on YouTube. The first is a recent video link from this past year by the Romanian pianist Viniciu Moroianu. It was very understated and maybe lacked the volcanic drama of other pianists such as Rudolf Serkin, whose own recording of over 50 years ago is highly recommended. However, Moroianu’s musicianship was commendable and scored points.

The second YouTube was an audio of the late ‘50s Dutch Phillips LP by the Spanish pianist Eduardo del Pueyo (1905-1986) whom I first heard through a very powerful mid-’50s Epic LP of Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain in a collaboration with Jean Martinon conducting the Lamoureux Orchestra of France, Martinon being a subject for another day. Del Pueyo recorded several Beethoven Sonatas during the ‘50s and would do the entire cycle in later years.

His Hammerklavier was both exquisitely phrased for its poetry and dramatically shaped with its own intensity. Both pianists brought something special to this piece.

Space travel buffs

For those who find the activities of NASA of particular interest, the show For All Mankind on Apple TV is a compelling dramatization of the lives of scientists, astronauts, and others involved in the space program during the 1960s and ‘70s of the moon landings and first space station. Be forewarned that it is a combination of fact and fiction, the most glaring example being that Ted Kennedy succeeds Richard Nixon as president.

Robert P. Tristram Coffin

Continuing with paragraph three of Robert P. Tristram Coffin’s essay, Kennebec Crystals:

“The cold spell was a real one. Farmers had to beat their arms each side of their buffalo coats. Next sundown the wind fell. It got still as a pocket. You could hear the stars sputter over the valley. The shopkeepers sat sipping their evening’s lime juice and gloated over their newspapers. ‘The Hudson Valley: continued mild weather, southerly winds, higher temperatures and showers for next week.’ It was a different story up here in Maine. The kitchen window panes had white ferns at their corners. A knife handle would have to be used on the water bucket in the morning. Down Hudson, up Kennebec! In the morning, there were no more waves running on the river. The water looked like a long, dark looking glass dropped between the hills. In a hundred sheds the grindstones were humming.”

by Peter Cates

Robert P. Tristram Coffin

Author and Bowdoin professor Robert P. Tristram Coffin (1892-1955) won the Pulitzer prize and achieved much renown particularly for his writings and poems about Maine. He was born in Harpswell to a family with seven children.

An essay, Kennebec Crystals, gives an evocative sense of life during the cold months in Central Maine along the Kennebec River during the 1800s. Too lengthy to re-print in full, I will offer a weekly paragraph until completed in full and begin below:

“The shopkeepers of Hallowell and Gardiner and Augusta had watched the January weather like hawks. They thumbed their ledgers and shook their graying temples at the lengthening columns of debit. The doctors had their eye on the sky as they felt of their lank wallets. Twenty miles deep each side of the river, farmers in small story-and-a-half farmhouses eyed their grocery-store thermometers at the side door, and bit more sparingly into their B.L. plugs. They chewed longer on their cuds, too. In the kitchen, the wife was scraping the lower staves of the flour barrel. The big bugs in the wide white mansions along the river looked out of their east or west windows at crack of day to see the state of the water. Teachers in school grew short with their pupils who confused Washington’s crossing of the Delawre with Clark’s fording of the fields around Vincennes. The mild weather continued. The river rolled on, blue in its ripples. Shopkeepers got short with their wives.”

Second paragraph next week.

A Hollywood character actor of film and TV, Tris Coffin (1909-1990), was a nephew of the author and appeared in good guy/bad guy roles on such shows as the Adventures of Superman.

Lorenzo Molajoli

 

A 1930 Columbia Master­works set of ten 12-inch 78s, OP-7, featured one of the label’s busiest house conductors, Lorenzo Molajoli (1868-1939), leading a very good cast of soloists and the Milan, Italy, Sym­phony Or­chestra – probably the same orchestra serving the city’s world-renowned La Scala Opera – in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. It has been reissued a number of times on compact disc.

The main role of Santuzza was sung by soprano Giannina Arangi-Lombardi (1891-1951) who left a number of complete recordings of operas such as this one, Verdi’s Aida and Boito’s Mefistophele back during the 1920s of heavy breakable sets. After praising Lina Bruna Rasa ardently in a recent column for her Santuzza in the 1941 recording with Mascagni himself conducting, I was quite impressed by a darker deeper quality to Giannina’s voice in this role. She doesn’t spill her tears with the intensity of Rasa but does bring a more controlled, gripping power uniquely her own.

Excerpts from this recording can be heard on youtube.

Sanford’s Famous Dance Band

A 1918 acoustic ten-inch shellac – Emerson, 10185 – has the long-forgotten Sanford’s Famous Dance Band giving charmingly perky performances of Victor Jacobi’s On Miami Shore and George Gershwin’s Swanee, of which Al Jolson (1886-1950) did a spirited recording on a Decca 78 in 1945.

A few other sides of this band can be heard on YouTube but not these two selections.

The Irregulars

A new British crime series, The Irregul­ars, is available on Netflix. The setting is Queen Victoria’s London and the show deals with a group of street kids living from hand to mouth. I have only seen the first episode in which they are utilized by, who else, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson for keeping their eyes and ears opened for information on several kidnappings of infants. There is also an evil connoisseur of ravens.

The leader of the group, a young woman named Bea, has a formidable honesty, courage and sassy spunk, especially against rich white trash, and is portrayed most memorably by the Irish actress Thaddea Graham.