|
Music > Relaxation / meditation
Art Mooney had a simple and effective formula for success: make
recordings of old-fashioned melodies that everybody knows really
well, using a bevy of loud and All-American singers, a well-oiled
big band, accordion, glockenspiel and a banjoist to create an
atmosphere invoking hot dogs, cotton candy, boiled sweets, beer
buckets, ice cream, corn dogs, peanut shells and sawdust. Mooney,
who is said to have patterned his instrumentation after a
vaudevillian parade ensemble known as the Philadelphia Mummers,
sold a lot of records for MGM during the late 1940s and early '50s
using well-worn tunes with singalong titles like "Baby Face," "I'm
Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover," "Five Feet Two, Eyes of Blue,"
"Toot Toot Tootsie" and "If I Knew You Were Comin' I'd've Baked a
Cake." Mooney's star vocalists were Betty Harris, Madelyn Russell,
Cathy Ryan, Alan Brooks and Bud Brees. By far the weirdest record
Mooney ever made was "Doo De Doo on an Old Kazoo," an almost
alarming novelty featuring a team of vocalists who deliver the
stilted lyrics with heavy-handed simplicity and take an
instrumental chorus with kazoos wedged firmly in their mouths.
Although it's all in fun, if the playback volume is raised to
maximum output levels, some might find these harmonizing kazoos
just a wee bit demonic. Mooney's music took a long time to find its
way onto the digital reissue format. Released in 2007, Sepia's
Greatest Hits and More filled a perceived gap in the 21st century
musical marketplace. This bracing collection also includes a taste
of Mooney's motion picture soundtrack recordings. They are not
instrumentals, of course, but feature the signature Mooney ensemble
vocalists, whose bright tonalities, concise diction and formidably
wholesome harmonies were used in several Hollywood flickers
including George Stevens' Giant" and David Miller's The Opposite
Sex, which were both premiered in 1956. ~ arwulf arwulf
Gordon Jenkins' Manhattan Tower is a musical milestone in several
respects. It is a unique blend of elements, part pop orchestral,
almost classical suite, and part radio-styled narrative, part
musical, and part operetta. It began life in 1946 as a four-part
suite on a 78 rpm set of Decca Records, featuring a small cast
headed by actor Elliott Lewis. This modestly ambitious set took
hold in the hearts of New Yorkers and earned Jenkins the Key to the
City in 1950, presented to him after a semi-staged version of
Manhattan Tower appeared on Talk of the Town, an early version of
Ed Sullivan's televised weekly variety show. Manhattan Tower, with
its implication of romance and its lush and tasteful evocation of a
kind of idealized city life in New York, won Jenkins many friends,
and its unusual dramatic and musical format may have influenced the
rise of Industrial musicals, beginning in the early '50s. In 1956,
executives at Capitol Records, who were building their own pancake
stack-styled tower at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, invited
Jenkins to expand on his original concept, and the result forms the
heart of Sepia Records' The Complete Manhattan Tower. This time the
romantic element in the story moved from implicit to explicit, with
actress Beverly Mahr (Jenkins' own wife) added as a love interest,
Julie, to Elliott Lewis' Steven. With the project moving from the
78 album format into the LP arena, Jenkins was able to more than
double its content, though it is more "different from" than
"better" in regard to the 1946 version. People who the couple
encounters on their dates and travels together briefly step into
the story and comment on their own dreams and desires. The Sepia CD
is filled out with some miscellaneous tracks of Jenkins'
productions from the '50s, odd tunes from singles recorded for RCA
Victor's short-lived X imprint. Among the best of them are two
delicious Jenkins piano solos, a superb Tabby Calvin vocal on
"Tired of Waitin'," and a fun, wiseacre number called "Follow Me
Baby" featuring a vocal by the Pitch Pipes. Not much of this
material, and to some degree not even Manhattan Tower, wears very
well -- it is by turns lush, sentimental, street smart and
aggressively commercial, and stylistically it belongs to its time.
But it's highly intelligent and well crafted '50s camp, and holds
up a great deal better than say, Sunny Skylar's The Hidden Island
with actor David Janssen recorded about a decade later, which is by
turns hilariously awful and stomach churning by comparison. The
Complete Manhattan Tower may be made out of cheese, but it's highly
tasty cheese, and it's not hard at all to imagine listeners who
enjoy a little easy listening, and a light-hearted, romantic story,
to develop a taste for it. Fans of musical comedy will love the
party scene in Manhattan Tower -- it's one of many small things
that make this work so original and unusual. The sound of the Sepia
Records issue, taken from original master tapes, is excellent.
EMI/DRG released a condensed version of the album subtitled
Highlights, paring down the selections to a digestible 12 tracks. ~
Uncle Dave Lewis
|
You may like...
Simply Spa
Various Producers, Various Writers
CD
R111
R81
Discovery Miles 810
Promises
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, …
CD
R399
Discovery Miles 3 990
|