Benny Goodman, Martha Tilton - AND THE ANGELS SING

Leaning a bit into the Christmas spirit... albeit without the "Hark the Herald..." part.

This was a Number One hit in 1939 for the Benny Goodman Band, so when he says here you could hear it everywhere back then, it was not hype.

It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing) - Duke Ellington & His Famous Orchestra (1932)

One of the great composers and band leaders of the 20th Century, doing a favorite of mine with Ivie Anderson on vocals.

From You Tube: "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" is a 1931 composition by Duke Ellington with lyrics by Irving Mills, now accepted as a jazz standard. The music was written and arranged by Ellington in August 1931 during intermissions at Chicago's Lincoln Tavern and was first recorded by Ellington and his orchestra for Brunswick Records (Br 6265) on February 2, 1932. Ivie Anderson sang the vocal and trombonist Joe Nanton and alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges played the instrumental solos. The title was based on the oft stated credo of Ellington's former trumpeter Bubber Miley, who was dying of tuberculosis. The song became famous, Ellington wrote, "as the expression of a sentiment which prevailed among jazz musicians at the time." Probably the first song to use the phrase "swing" in the title, it introduced the term into everyday language and presaged the Swing Era by three years. The Ellington band played the song continuously over the years and recorded it numerous times, most often with trumpeter Ray Nance as vocalist."

"Maple Leaf Rag" - Sidney Bechet and His New Orleans Feetwarmers

This is a 1932 rrecording by the great saxophonist/clarinetist Sidney Bechet, contemporary of Louis Armstrong and other great lights of American jazz.

For more about Mr. Bechet: http://www.sidneybechet.org/about-sidney-bechet/

The recording here is based on a 1899 composition by the "King of the Ragtime Composers", Scott Joplin, born in Marshall, Texas in 1868. Joplin, was underappreciated in his own lifetime. "Maple Leaf Rag" was his biggest hit in his lifetime and it aforded him time to work on other rags and two operas, neither of the latter being a success. The song title came from "The Maple Leaf Club", dubbed " a not -too respectable establishment in the red light district" of Sedalia, Missouri, than a thriving community where Joplin also went to music classes at the local college.

His groundbreaking musical pieces finally got the recognition he deserved--fifty-sixty years too late for Joplin, who died in 1917-- when his work was used in the 1973 Oscar-winning film "The Sting" with Paul Newman and Robert Redford as savvy con-men in the 1930's. (Why music from the turn of the 20th century was used in a film set decades later in Depresion America puzzled me when the film was released.)

But to more important matters:

Scott Joplin bridged the improvised syncopations of ragtime with the composition style of other types of concert and dance music. He traveled all over America as a young man, a prolific piano performer and composer, later making St. Louis his home.

Joplin first composed what was called "jig music" in Taxarkana, Texas and Sedalia. It was called "jig" because the infectious rhythms caused people to break into a jig. It combined the harmonies of black music with the marches and dances of the Old World that white Americans were used to.

Thirty years on, Sidney Bechet's jazzmen took the waltz-y elements out of the tune and made it pure hot jazz. Hope you enjoy!

One O'Clock Jump - Count Basie (1943)

This tune is one of the Big Band standards for its era. Released in the Summer of 1937, it became the signature tune for William "Count" Basie and his band, the purveyors of a new jazz sound that came out of the heartland metropolis of Kansas City, Missouri.

Basie (1904-1984) was already a big local success in night clubs and local radio shows when he was discovered via a late night program by a VIP listener, John Hammond, a producer for Benny Goodman and many other swing greats.

The Basie Band (which originally featured featured jazz legends like Lester Young on tenor sax and Buck Clayton on trumpet) proved popular enough to break out early and stay one of the top bands of the era.

One of Basie's earliest piano teachers was none other than the great "Mayor of Harlem" and piano virtuoso, Fats Waller.

Despite the loss of big band popularity in the early fifties, Count Basie continued to tour with his band and new members right in the 1980's. He recorded and performed with legends like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra in bands and smaller groups in Hollywood, New York and Las Vegas.

This clip is from a wartime B-picture from 1943 called "Reveille With Beverly" featuring future MGM star Ann Miller as the "disc jockey."

Gold Diggers of 1933 - "We're in the Money"

This film was one of the biggest hits Hollywood put out in 1933, the very teeth of the Great Depression, and the biggest film at the box office for Warner Brothers Studios in that year.

While the story varies little in the way most musicals of the time carry their slender plot-lines, it is still I believe a landmark film. The movie combines a popular and "high-kicking" attitude with the grim realities of a land of opportunity now totally veering toward a place as "tapped out" as any country that any emigrant came to America to get away from.

in this clip Ginger Rogers performs one of the most popular songs of the period. This is the opening sequence of the film, and its important to note that the film audience here is being intentionally mislead--this upbeat production masks a hard reality. The police are on the way to close the theater and seize the costumes and sets of the would-be Broadway production. Even the things that make for frivolous entertainment --uptempo songs that stay in your head long after the show, sexy costumes, romantic love scenes with attractive stars--are not immune to an America with one quarter of its labor force out of work, soup kitchens and hundreds of banks closing from sea to shining sea.

The film opening features Ginger Rogers singing part of the lyrics in "Pig Latin"--an innocent bit of fun she did in rehearsal with the other ladies of the chorus. She later confessed she thought that diversion might get her fired when the producers overheard this clowning about. Instead the musical director, Busby Berkeley, kept that interpretation in the number.

This also features an early use (in sound films at least) of a super camera close-up of the aforementioned star. I'm sure shots of Miss Rogers uncapped choppers had many dentists in the film audience quite engaged by the spectacle.

Not all of the film is so bally-hoo of course, as the last production number "Remember My Forgotten Man", makes clear. (The second production is viewable in the comments section below.) This one--which seemed so remote and distant to me when I first saw it years ago--has a familiar ring to it today. Joan Blondell, a forgotten star of musicals and comedies, delivers some very soulful goods here in a lament fro the lost dignity of soldiers, farmers and industrial workers cast aside by harsh economic conditions. The finale, with an army of "dough-boy" soldiers in retreat from a unseen battlefield, shows the mixed nature of what people wanted from films of this popular caliber---escape, yes, but also a recognition of the struggles facing most people just outside the doors of the local movie house.

The Three That Sent Up The Nile: "Cleopatra's Nightmare" (1933) - Jack Wilson, Joe Kepple, Betty Knox

While looking up some material for a brief blog celebrating Queen Cleopatra's impact on history I happened upon this video of a music hall trio (pictured above in 1932) that started in the 1920's and continued for decades. I found it both bizarre and curiously enjoyable.

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A bit of background, courtesy of Wikipedia:

"Wilson, Keppel and Betty were a popular British music hall act in the middle decades of the 20th century who capitalised on the trend for Egyptian imagery following the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Their stage act, called the "sand dance", was a parody of Egyptian postures, combined with references to Arabic costume. The lithe and extremely lanky Wilson and Keppel, who wore long mustaches and made up to emphasize the sharp angularity of the features so as to appear almost identical, would demonstrate their impressive suppleness in adopting wild gestures and dancing in identical "stereo" movements (using gestures vaguely reminiscent of Egyptian wall paintings), while Betty watched their antics. Theirs was a soft-shoe routine performed on a layer of sand spread on the stage to create a rhythmic scratching with their shuffling feet. The act was usually performed to the familiar Egyptian Ballet (1875), by Alexandre Luigini.

"Jack Wilson (29 January 1894- 24 August 1970), was born in Liverpool in England, and emigrated to the USA at a young age, making his stage debut in 1909 as a high-kicking dancer. He then travelled to Australia, where he joined Colleano's Circus. During the First World War Wilson served with the Royal Navy. Returning to Australia after the war, he met Joe Keppel (May 10, 1895- 1977), who was born in County Cork in Ireland. Like Wilson, Keppel had emigrated to the USA at a young age, and in 1910 made his stage debut in Albany as a tap dancer. During the First World War he served in the Royal Flying Corps, and after made his way to Australia, also joining Colleano's Circus, where he teamed up with Jack Wilson.



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This clip is apparently from a 1933 variety-show movie. Betty Knox--the fetching lady in the middle of the group --was an American-born dancer and comedienne, originally a vaudeville partner with the great comedian Jack Benny. The trio came together for what was supposed to be a brief engagement in London. Their act lasted as a long-running music hall staple.

Betty later "retired" form the act in 1940 and became a war correspondent. She also covered the Nuremberg Trails. Her daughter, Patsy, became the new "Betty" in the act, which kept going well into the Fifties in such venues as London's Palladium. After a couple more "Bettys" danced with them in various routines, Jack Wilson and his partner retired in 1963.

"Ten Cents A Dance" (1930) High Hatters

"Ten Cents A Dance"



A hit song by the songwriting team of Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart. The tune chronicles the trails of working-class women in the early days of the Great Depression. The vocal is of a "taxi dancer" at a dance hall who takes on all male customers for a dime. One of the many poignant tumes from this era. It also inspired a 1931 movie starring Barbara Stanwyck.

(1930) Fox-Trot
High Hatters
Conducted by Leonard Joy