Getting back to symponic jazz, vintage light music, etc.
Written by admin on August 12, 2009 – 12:25 am -
That is to say, choose your term. I like “easy listening,” but that word has been used to designate everything and anything that isn’t rock, so I’m forced to avoid it. Once, I’d settled on the term “vintage lounge,” though that could just as easily refer to, well, a lounge. And the furniture in it. These things get complicated.
Anyway, one of my goals–no, two of my goals–at this blog are as follows: 1) highlight the history of easy/lounge/light music; and 2) as a result, hopefully demonstrate that the genre was a major and very mainstream part of pop music history, and not anything like the marginal, oddball, reaction-against-rock-’n'-roll thing it’s widely mythologized to be. Seeing as we had music that sounded like Fifties mood music at least as early as the late 1920s, there’s not much chance this stuff was a reaction to Elvis, who hadn’t even been born yet.
Meanwhile, I have no idea when today’s material was recorded, though I’m nearly sure it comes from (or was made for) a radio broadcast. Robert Trendler conducts the WGN Orchestra, and I’m guessing sometime in the 1940s, but I don’t know. We do know that it’s post-1937 (the year Gershwin died). Anyhow, a very distinguished example of the kind of light fare that record critics went ballistic over during the 1950s when, to their horror, it outsold discs featuring Bach, Bartok, Honegger, and Scriabin about 1,000 to one. People wanted light, soothing sounds vice Edgar Varese, Charles Ives, or even most of Ravel’s catalog.
On the other hand, Gershwin wasn’t exactly an American music slouch (to be fair, those same critics were very much okay with him). And Mr. Trendler had to know his craft pretty impressively to land a gig as WGN’s musical director. So… please. Enoch Light’s 18 Top Hits label is the source for this, so I’m a little surprised the actual orchestra and conductor were credited, though the excellent singers are left anonymous. Anyway, fabulous easy/lounge/Americana. The two clipped beginnings, by the way, showed up that way on the record. Shame on you, 18 Top Hits.
Click here to hear: George Gershwin Memorial–Robert Trendler and His WGN Orch.
PLAYLIST
SONG OF THE FLAME
OH LORD, I’M ON MY WAY (From Porgy and Bess)
THEY CAN’T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME (From Shall We Dance)
OF THEE I SING
SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME (From Oh, Kay)
BIDIN’ MY TIME (From Girl Crazy)
Robert Trendler and His WGN Orchestra (18 Top Hits BR-9).
Lee
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