In 1931 George and Ira Gershwin went to Hollywood for the first time to compose the score for a Janet Gaynor/Charlie Farrell musical called ‘Delicious’. No popular songs of any particular note came out of this endeavor but, Gershwin being Gershwin, a symphonic masterwork somehow snuck its way into existence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnAEHFhxuQIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxNbAtTMZXc Yesterday I posted a 1929 art film by Robert Florey called ‘Skyscraper Symphony’. Above is the experimental film he made the year before in collaboration with montage artist and film theorist Slavko Vorkapich called…well, read the title of this post. There’s a good deal to understand about how the
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
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,
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
Continuing our Friday Ernie Kovacs posts, here’s Kovacs most famous routine–The Nairobi Trio performing ‘Solfeggio’. Even if you’ve seen this before–and chances are that you have–it remains weirdly delightful and beyond definition. As always with Kovacs, the ‘meta’ of it all is also fascinating–how did he describe this routine to