15668. (Franz Josef Haydn) Trio for Piano, Vio­lin and Cel­lo in F, H.XV:2
15669. (Franz Josef Haydn) Trio for Piano, Vio­lin and Cel­lo in B‑flat, H.XV:8
15670. (Franz Josef Haydn) Trio for Piano, Vio­lin and Cel­lo in F, H.XV:6
15671. (Fin­ger Eleven) Fin­ger Eleven
15672. (Franz Josef Haydn) Trio for Piano, Vio­lin and Cel­lo in D, H.XV:7
15673. (Franz Josef Haydn) Trio for Piano, Vio­lin and Cel­lo in A, H.XV:9
15674. (Franz Josef Haydn) Trio for Piano, Vio­lin and Cel­lo in E Minor, H.XV:12
15675. (Dmitri Shostakovich) Sym­pho­ny #2, Op.14
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Ernest Evans (stage name “Chub­by Check­er”, a spoof of “Fats Domi­no”) is an exam­ple of a per­fectly com­pe­tent singer who might have had a long and high­ly respect­ed career, if not for the fatal pop­u­lar­ity of one hit tune. He is the only record­ing artist to have five albums in the Top 12 all at once. He is the only artist to have a song reach #1 twice, with the dread­ed “Twist”. I am lis­ten­ing to that sad lit­tle item on the orig­i­nal Park­way album, Your Twist Par­ty, in its 1961 Cana­di­an press­ing — a nice lit­tle rar­i­ty in my vinyl col­lec­tion. “The Twist” was noth­ing but a lit­tle dit­ty that trig­gered a brief dance craze, but it brand­ed Check­er as the musi­cal equiv­a­lent of hoola hoops, and he was nev­er per­mit­ted to sing much of any­thing else again, and nev­er tak­en seri­ously. This is the sad­dest aspect of show busi­ness. In some ways, utter fail­ure offers some dig­nity. To be briefly wor­shiped for some lame, triv­ial accom­plish­ment, then cast aside and mulched back into the earth must be utter­ly humil­i­at­ing. Checker’s singing was quite styl­ish, and some of his per­for­mances of rock-and-roll and show stan­dards on this album, such as “Ballin’ the Jack”, “Blue­berry Hill” and even “I Could Have Danced All Night” show that he could have been a long-term success.

Moscow’s University’s Theramin Cen­ter pre­serves the only exist­ing ANS pho­to-elec­tron­ic musi­cal instru­ment. The ANS (named after the ini­tials of Scri­abin), worked on the prin­ci­ple of revers­ing the nor­mal process by which music is record­ed on film sound­tracks. A hand­ful of Sovi­et com­posers clus­tered around this obscure project in the 1960s, and most of them sub­se­quently became famous as orches­tral or film score com­posers. This was dur­ing the “loose” peri­od of Krushchev’s regime, when lots of cre­ative projects flour­ished in obscure cor­ners or sci­ence, music and academia.

There is cur­rently a CD release from Elec­troshock Records, Elec­troshock Presents: Elec­troa­coustic Music Vol­ume IV: Archive Tapes Syn­the­sizer ANS 1964 – 1971, which cov­ers this peri­od. There is an excel­lent, detailed review of it on the enter­tain­ing and infor­ma­tive site of Ing­var Loco Nordin*, an exper­i­men­tal music fan in Nykop­ing, Swe­den. Nav­i­gate his site from there, because it con­tains lots of leads to inter­est­ing elec­tronic and exper­i­men­tal music. Nordin notes that many of the pieces sound like they were lift­ed from a vinyl record­ing, and it hap­pens that I have the orig­i­nal vinyl. It is a small-for­mat Melodiya album with works by Arte­myev, Kre­ichi, Nemtin, Kallosh com­posed on the ANS syn­the­sizer. All of these men sub­se­quently flour­ished as com­posers, most­ly in film music. Arte­myev is par­tic­u­larly known for his scores for Tarkovsky films. The most ambi­tious work on the record is a sound­track item for the film “Cos­mos”, a col­lab­o­ra­tion of Arte­myev and Kre­ichi. How­ever, a short piece by Kallosh, “North­ern Tale’, strikes me as the most inven­tive. Most of these pieces still hold up fair­ly well, even though any­one could now eas­ily syn­the­size sim­i­lar sounds on their com­puter. A plod­ding, murky treat­ment of a Bach chorale pre­lude is an embarrass­ment, but every­thing else holds up well as music.

*Nordin’s site is no longer active.

Ivan Skobtsov was an oper­at­ic bass at the Bol­shoi for 28 years, but his real achieve­ment was as an inter­preter of Russ­ian folk song. The small for­mat 33&1/3 Melodiya album in my col­lec­tion has only six songs, with unpre­ten­tious accor­dion arrange­ments. From its disc num­ber, I would guess it dates from the late 1960s or ear­ly 1970s. The songs are most­ly dark, trag­ic, or plain­tive, of course.… … total­ly Russian. 

15574. (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) Fever To Tell
15575. (Matt Dusk) Two Shots
15576. (Wailin’ Jen­nys) 40 Days
15577. (Ludacris) Chicken-N-Beer
15578. (Gor­don Down­ie) Bat­tle of the Nudes
15579. (Anton Bruck­n­er) Mass #1 in D Minor Read more »

For­tu­nately, this 1955 record­ing on a small Cal­i­for­nia label is in good con­di­tion. It pre­serves some of the lit­tle-remem­bered “San Fran­cisco Sound” of the ear­ly 1940s. In a time when the swing and big band sounds dom­i­nated, a minor­ity of jazzmen sought to revive the more inti­mate sound of Dix­ieland. There were three local­izes “schools” of this “back to the basics” move­ment: one in New Orleans, anoth­er in Chica­go, and a third in San Fran­cisco, lead by Lu Wat­ters and Turk Mur­phy. The 1941 and 1942 ses­sions on my disc, record­ed on Van Ness Avenue in San Fran­cisco, have Lu Wat­ters and Bob Scobey on cor­nets, Turk Mur­phy on trom­bone, Ellis Horne on clar­inet, Wal­ly Rose on piano, Quire Girs­back on tuba, Bill Dart on drums, and two ban­jo play­ers, Cla­cy Hayes and Russ Ben­nett. The inter­play is between Wat­ters, Mur­phy and Horne (whose clar­inet is par­tic­u­larly sweet). Wat­ters was most influ­enced by King Oliver’s band, with Louis Arm­strong, in its hey­day, but there are also echoes of W. C. Handy and Jel­ly Roll Mor­ton. Some of the mate­r­ial they played was vir­tu­ally anti­quar­ian even in 1941: they do an excel­lent, slow-paced ver­sion of the Tiger Rag, a piece that can be traced to the French quadrilles of Old New Orleans. The San Fran­cisco sound fea­tured ban­jo and tuba in the rhythm sec­tions, which played in a 2‑to-the-bar rhyth­mic style. There was a light­heart­ed “good time” feel­ing to it, which dis­tin­guishes it from the more plain­tive sound of the New Orleans revival.

For­got­ten by all but con­cert dou­ble-basists, Bottesi­ni was the most renowned soloist and com­poser on that instru­ment in the nine­teenth cen­tury. An Ital­ian from Lom­bardy, he worked var­i­ously in Amer­ica, Cuba and Eng­land. Much of his music sounds like Brahms or Schu­mann, and not much of it is strik­ingly orig­i­nal, but most of it is quite pret­ty. I have twelve pieces, ten ot them slight [an Alle­gretto Capric­cio, an Alle­gro di Con­certo “Alla Mendelssohn” , a Bolero, a Capric­cio di Bravu­ra, three Ele­gies, an Intro­duc­tion and Gavotte, a Melo­dia, and a Rêver­ie, all for Dou­ble Bass and Piano]. Two more are fair­ly seri­ous works. The Con­certo #2 in B Minor would be well known if it was for cel­lo. It’s as good as many cel­lo con­cer­tos in stan­dard reper­toire. Best of all is his Gran Duo Con­cer­tante for Vio­lin and Dou­ble Bass, which was orig­i­nally scored for two bass­es. It is an intel­li­gent work, and I sus­pect that I would pre­fer it in its orig­i­nal form. How­ever, the ver­sion with vio­lin seems to be the only one available.

15513. (Good Char­lotte) The Chron­i­cles of Life and Death
15514. (Flam­ing Lips) Yoshi­mi Bat­tles the Pink Robots
15515. (Alessan­dro Stradel­la) Sin­fo­nia avan­ti il Barcheg­gio in D for Trum­pet, String
. . . . . Orches­tra, Trom­bone and Harpsichord
15516. (Alessan­dro Stradel­la) Sin­fo­nia in A Minor for Two Vio­lins, Cel­li, Dou­ble-Bass, Lute
. . . . . and Harpshichord
15517. (Alessan­dro Stradel­la) Sonata a quat­tro in D for Dou­ble Orchestra
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I’ve always been a suck­er for low-reg­is­ter instru­ments. A cel­lo or a vio­la da gam­ba will move me much more eas­ily than any vio­lin, and I get all dreamy if I hear a con­tra­bas­soon even tun­ing up. Edgar Mey­er is wide­ly regard­ed as the finest dou­ble-bassist alive. But I will con­sider him here as a com­poser. Now, many ter­rific solo per­form­ers have giv­en forth embarass­ing turkeys when they turned to com­pos­ing, but this is not the case with Mey­er. His Dou­ble Con­certo for Cel­lo and Dou­ble Bass, which he per­forms with the inim­itable cel­list Yo-Yo Ma, has none of the surly chug­ging along you expect from the instru­ment. It’s a spright­ly com­po­si­tion, with pleas­ant melodies, and some sar­cas­tic pas­sages that Prokofiev would be proud of. The Con­certo in D for Dou­ble Bass and Orches­tra, is down­right weird. It starts with lit­tle waft­ed frag­ments of melody, resolv­ing them every now and then into an orches­tral tut­ti, and plays lit­tle games of syn­co­pa­tion and call-and-answer. The sec­ond you think you know where the piece is head­ed, it twists out of it like a wrestler break­ing a Boston crab grapevine leg lock. It even­tu­ally drifts into a slight­ly sin­is­ter and puz­zling end­ing. The over­all effect is sur­pris­ingly pleasing.

Mey­er is a long-time friend of folk ban­jo vir­tu­oso Béla Fleck, and they’ve put out an album togeth­er that I’m most eager to hear. If any­one out there has heard it, send me a review. The two con­certi are togeth­er on the CD Mey­er and Bottesi­ni Con­cer­tos, along with two works by the 19th cen­tury Lom­bard com­poser, Gio­vanni Bottesi­ni, whose music I’ll dis­cuss next.