Without a doubt the most famous of the 1930s/40s all girl orchestras was ‘Phil Spitalni’s Hour Of Charm All-Girl Orchestra.’ Typically, though, the most famous is somehow the least interesting. It’s not that the players aren’t terrific. It’s the choice of material–much more conservative and a silly combination of mickey-mouse
Yesterday I posted about the hard-kicking all-female big band Francis Carroll and Her Coquettes. Today we take a look at ‘The International Sweethearts of Rhythm’, who were believed to be the first racially-integrated all-female big band in the United States. Though they’ve been more or less lost to history–and that’s
When I was a kid I had a two-disc LP comprised of the audio of ‘Tonight Show’ segments. The Johnny Carson album was a big flop for some reason–Carson liked to joke about it–and I can’t remember quite why we had it since neither I nor my parents watched Carson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l-09_fAUSk (NOTE: CLICK ABOVE TO WATCH TODAY’S LINK ON YOUTUBE). Yesterday’s clip featured the lovely 1934 recording of ‘The Very Thought Of You’ by the Ray Noble orchestra with vocal by Al Bowly. I gave you a little info on Bowly but didn’t expect to find any actual film of
I’m not usually one for YouTube music/film mash-ups but I stumbled across this one and found it so evocative and lovely that I’ve decided to share it with you. It consists of clips from the 1934 version of W. Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage”, starring Leslie Howard and Bette Davis,
Yesterday I posted Busby Berkeley’s wonderfully choreographed ‘Hopping Dance’, performed by Bobby Van. The dance’s spiritual cousin–or perhaps it’s parent really–was a Berkeley production number from fifteen or so years earlier, ‘Horray For Hollywood’ from ‘Hollywood Hotel’ (1937). It features Benny Goodman and his then wildly successful swing era big
Here’s a ‘drum-off’ between the legendary Buddy Rich and Ed Shaughnessy, the drummer for the Tonight Show band for two decades. The big band arrangement that kicks things off belongs to a genre of music I always think of as ‘heart-attack jazz’, a very specific over-wrought big band mayhem sound