Its Friday so it’s Ernie Kovacs time. Here’s one of his weirdest quasi-music videos–a rendering of a piece of the 1812 Overture which melds the music with some frankly disconcerting images–I’ll let you watch rather than explain them. This is preceded by two of Kovacs beloved blackout sketches one of
Yesterday I posted a recording of Bunny Berigan singing (as well as trumpeting) ‘My Baby Says It’s So’, a lovely 1930s Warren/Dubin ditty. Berigan’s singing is so unusual and super-hip that I began to dig into his discography to find more than just the famous ‘I Can’t Get Started’ hit
I don’t mean to brag (really, I don’t) but I know hundreds–probably thousands–of old songs. It comes from a lifetime of non-stop listening to and playing of the music of the 1920s-50s and watching way too many musicals. So it’s a genuine surprise when I stumble across a song I
Here’s a nice little (fifteen minute) collection of daytime commercials aired on Chicago’s WGN-TV station in 1971. Since they are specifically daytime they lean heavily on kids toys and amusements, many of which are defunct. Ronald MacDonald was still appearing live at McDonald’s locations back then. A woman named Mrs.
Though by no means a bad movie, The Marx Brothers 1938 “Room Service” is not a particularly good one–it’s a curio at best. Originally a Broadway play which they had nothing to do with, it was adapted for the movies with them being wedged into it, filling roles that for
It’s Friday which is Ernie Kovacs time as far as we are concerned. Today I offer up his ‘kitchen symphony’, a fascinating and somewhat disturbing exercise in joining the movements of inanimate kitchen objects with the space-pop music of the master Esquival. The video looks amazing–the actual texture of it,
It’s always exciting for me to find glimpses of old New York captured on film at unexpected moments and I’ve got a real find to share with you today. The Florenz Ziegfeld produced 1929 musical movie ‘Glorifying The American Girl’ was filmed at the Astoria Studios in Long Island and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irSFb-DTeIs Yesterday I posted a lovely video mash-up of images (still and live) reconstructing the 1927 Ziegfeld Follies, accompanied by a twin piano arrangement of some 20s tunes taken from an Ampico piano roll. I mentioned that the twin piano act was a popular featured act in Vaudeville of the
Here’s a very well done made-for-YouTube concoction in which the style/feel/materials of Ziegfeld’s 1927 edition of his legendary ‘Follies’ show is reproduced, using stills, footage culled from various Vitaphone shorts of the era (and other musical films which I can’t identify), all set to a recording of an Ampico Piano
Here’s a remarkable piece of film. It’s the surviving five minutes from an otherwise lost 1933 film called ‘Mr. Broadway’, featuring a very young Ed Sullivan (you can see him in a couple of cutaways sitting at a table with Bert Lahr). The film is essential viewing for any devotee