GLCD 5143 Animal Antics Reviews & Broadcast

THE GOLDEN AGE OF LIGHT MUSIC Animal Antics ROBERT FARNON, BERT KAEMPFERT, FRANCK POURCEL, RAY MARTIN, DAVID CARROLL, RON GOODWIN, BERNIE WAYNE, LAURIE JOHNSON, FRANK SINATRA, DAVID ROSE, CYRIL ORNADEL, GEOFF LOVE, MAHLON MERRICK, DOLF VAN DER LINDEN, LOUIS VOSS     02 The Waltzing Cat (Leroy Anderson)  - LEROY ANDERSON AND HIS ‘POPS’ CONCERT 04 The Donkey Serenade; introducing Sympathy (Rudolf Friml, arr. Sidney Torch) - SIDNEY TORCH AND HIS ORCHESTRA 08 Mosquitos’ Parade (Howard Whitney)  - SIDNEY BOWMAN AND HIS ORCHESTRA 10 The Glow Worm (Paul Lincke)  - NEW CONCERT ORCHESTRA Conducted by JAY WILBUR 11 Flamingo (,Ed Anderson Ted Grouya, arr. Richard Jones)  - THE PITTSBURGH STRINGS Conducted by RICHARD JONES 24 Bullfrog On A Spree (Burton, George Liberace)  - GEORGE LIBERACE AND HIS ORCHESTRA

Contents:

Those who observe strict adherence to the formal rules of pedantry will be quick to point out that the title of this collection is misleading … and they are quite right! Not all the tracks refer to animals; there are birds and insects among the other creatures thrown in for good measure. A more accurate title would be ‘non-human antics’, but somehow that lacks the attractive alliteration of “Animal Antics”. So please forgive us a small measure of indulgence, and accept our good intentions in allowing human composers to pay tribute to those creatures on our planet that are genetically different from us.

Our attractive opening number – Dance Of The Little Pink Horse - is yet another catchy novelty by the American Bernard Weitzner (1919-1993) who was known as Bernie Wayne. His career was riding high in the 1950s with tunes such as Vanessa, Port-au-Prince (on GLCD 5130), Veradero (GLCD 5111) and The Magic Touch (GLCD 5111). Two of his best-known numbers were songs: Blue Velvet which was a number-one hit single for Bobby Vinton, and (There She Is) Miss America sung by Bert Parks during the crowning moments of the Miss America beauty pageant.

Generations of musicians – both amateur and professional – will have automatically sung My Dog Has Fleas when tuning the four strings of the ukulele, banjo and variations of these once-popular instruments. Several composers have felt the urge to write tunes using the familiar quartet of notes, but surely the award for the most inventive must go to David Rose (1910-1990). Rather surprisingly he does not appear to have made an early commercial recording of this piece, but this is not really a disappointment since the version by Victor Young (1900-1956) is such fun.

Do donkeys fall in love? Perhaps Sidney Torch (1908-1990) thought so when he decided to include the love song Sympathy as part of his jaunty arrangement of Donkey Serenade. Both numbers were composed by Charles Rudolf Friml (1879-1972) and gained great popularity through the 1937 film “The Firefly”. This had first been an operetta (1912) and the big hit in the film – Donkey Serenade – was not included in the original score. Friml had written a piano piece called Chansonette in 1923, and composer Herbert Stothart (1885-1949 – he won an Oscar for his background score in “The Wizard of Oz”) assisted him in developing this into a popular song, with a lyric by Chet Forrest. Allan Jones (1907-1992 - the father of Jack Jones) sang it in the film, thus ensuring its lasting popularity. Rudolf Friml is a member of the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame.

Soorjo Alexander William Oliphant Chuckerbutty (1884-1960) was once described by fellow organist Quentin Maclean (1896-1962) as “the only organist I know who combines whole-time cinema work with whole-time church work and makes a job of both." He began playing piano at the age of six and was composing by the time he reached 14. In 1928 he recorded on organ with Hal Swain and his Band at the Café Royal, London, and continued to make 78s alongside his other duties as a church organist. Most of his compositions were for the organ, and few are heard today, apart from Paean (on Guild GMCD 7212 played by James Culp) which has entered the standard repertoire. Performing on the theatre organ he was known as ‘Wilson Oliphant’, and when writing about playing the organ he used the name S.W.Chuckerbutty. Fauns And Satyrs seems to be something of a rarity, although it is possible that he composed it as an organ work and, realising its potential, his regular publishers Bosworth decided to have it orchestrated for their mood music library. But what exactly are Fauns and Satyrs? Legend has it that they lived among the woods and hills and were he-creatures, like men, with the hind-legs of goats, short horns on their foreheads, and long pointed ears. But there was a difference between the Fauns and Satyrs. The Fauns were handsome, gentle, innocent, and rather foolish. The Satyrs were hideous, clumsy, hairy monsters, with flat faces, little eyes, and huge mouths, great gluttons, often drunk, and sometimes mischievous: most of them were dull and stupid, but many of them had plenty of sense and knowledge. How can one composer possibly encompass all of that within three minutes? Mr. Chuckerbutty did!

Donald James Dean Thorne (1901-1967) has not produced a large amount of light music, but he is remembered especially for one particular piece – Rippling Waters (on Guild GLCD 5112) which the BBC chose as the background music for their 1950s television interlude of angel fish in an aquarium. Donald Thorne spent his early musical career as a pianist for dances at the Savoy, Berkeley and Claridges hotels in London, as well as providing arrangements of popular tunes to leading bands such as Jack Hylton, Henry Hall, Jack Payne, Roy Fox, Debroy Somers and Carroll Gibbons. In 1934 he joined Granada Theatres at Tooting and Maidstone as a theatre organist, and thereafter spent much of his time at various venues on the circuit. Following war service he continued playing on electronic organs, one of his prestige bookings being aboard RMS Queen Mary. His other compositions (sometimes under the pseudonyms Eric Denville and August Leserve) include a suite “Lights of London”, which is rarely heard, and he wrote a few pieces for military band.

Paul Lincke (1866-1946) was one of many European composers who discovered that their talents were particularly well-suited to the operetta, that light-hearted and often frivolous kind of musical show that thrived around one hundred years ago, and even lasted well into the period when Hollywood was making lavish musicals during the first few decades of the talkies. Lincke was a successful theatre conductor, both in his native Berlin and also for a while at the famous Folies-Bergère in Paris.  Glow Worm is by far his most popular piece; he originally included it in an operetta called “Lysistrata” (1902) where it was called Glühwürmchen-Idyll. In the 1940s American lyricist Johnny Mercer added new words, giving it a fresh lease of life as Glow Little Glow Worm with a hit record by The Mills Brothers in 1952. The piece is a little unusual in that it has two separate and distinct main themes, and the performance on this CD is from the Boosey & Hawkes recorded music library, with the New Concert Orchestra conducted by Jay Wilbur in 1944. It is a longer version than the New Light Symphony Orchestra’s 1934 HMV 78 which was included on GLCD 5106. Paul Lincke is believed to have written more than 500 works, some of them under the unlikely pseudonym ‘Ted Huggens’.

Cedric King Palmer (1913-1999) was a prolific composer of mood music who contributed over 600 works during a period of 30 years to the recorded music libraries of several London publishers. He was able to adapt his writing to many different styles, and Meadow Lark finds him in a reflective, lyrical mood. To survive in the music business meant accepting many varied commissions, and King Palmer could turn his hand to making popular arrangements of the classics which he often conducted with his own orchestra on the BBC Light programme in the 1940s and 1950s. His many bright and tuneful pieces disguised the fact that he possessed a serious knowledge of music; at the age of 26 he completed a study of the work of Granville Bantock (1868-1946), and in 1944 Palmer wrote ‘Teach Yourself Music’ for the Hodder and Stoughton Home University Series which ran to several editions. He ceased composing mood music in the 1970s, and towards the end of his life he became a patient and popular piano teacher, with sometimes over 60 pupils on his books.

I Hear A Thrush At Eventide by the American composer Charles Wakefield Cadman (1881-1946) benefits from a beautifully sensitive arrangement by Edward Cecil Milner (1905-1989), a respected backroom boy in London music circles, arranging for many top orchestras such as Mantovani, for whom he supplied around 220 scores. He was also an accomplished composer in his own right (he was being recognised while still in his twenties), with his works willingly accepted by several background music publishers. Cadman is regarded as a truly American composer, supposedly unschooled in the European tradition which was usual for his contemporaries. He achieved early success with two songs, At Dawning and From The Land Of Sky-blue Water, but at various times it seems that he was prone to get involved in disagreements which may have hampered his career: in 1929 he was hired by Fox Studios in Hollywood to score several films for them, but became embroiled in a dispute with Dmitri Tiomkin, and subsequently left. After being virtually ignored during the second half of the last century, Cadman’s music is now gaining fresh interest in the USA, largely due to his life-long association with the Indianist Movement.

Among several very rare items in this collection is what appears to be the only 12” 78rpm record of light music ever released by the British Nixa label, before it grew into one of the larger independents towards the end of the 1950s when it also embraced the Pye and Polygon catalogues (the story of how Polygon became part of Nixa was told in the notes to GLCD 5130 – the 1950s Volume 4).

Eugene Ettore’s Butterfly Fantasy was given an imaginative orchestration by Mischa Michaeloff, who made its first British recording with his own orchestra. When the 78 was released in 1951, Nixa’s publicity stated: “it describes in sound-pictures the birth of a male butterfly and his first attempts at flight, which eventually land him on the ground with a resounding bump! Picking himself up, he espies a lovely lady butterfly and, after a series of tactics to attract her attention, finally succeeds and they fly away together.” The other side of this 78, Serbian Sunset, appeared on GLCD 5118 – Buried Treasures. Mischa Michaeloff (researches suggest his family name may have been Michailoff-Sissermann) was musical adviser to Auguste Cranz, Johann Strauss publishers, during the 1930s and he also worked with the tenor Richard Tauber. In the early 1950s he conducted the Mischa Michaeloff Mazurka Orchestra on BBC Radio, and contributed to programmes such as “Music While You Work” and “Bright and Early”. He recorded two albums “Wandering Gypsies” and “Strictly From Hungary” for RCA featuring his ‘Symphonic Gypsies’ and an LP of French tunes for Nixa.

Eugene Ettore, the composer of Butterfly Fantasy, is regarded as one of America’s outstanding Accordion Artistes of the last century. His father was a vaudevillian who gave his son a solid grounding in many aspects of music, revealing a passion for composing. During World War 2 he gained practical experience of a professional musician’s life in Military and Dance bands, and carried on the Italian tradition of father and son in the accordion world. He served three terms as President of the American Accordionists’ Association. Among his other popular compositions are Musette Polka, Bambi Samba and Spanish Holiday, and his works range from classical to boogie-woogie.

Bird Charmer was composed by Robert Farnon (1917-2005) with his son David in mind. The inspiration actually came from David’s mother Pat, who said that “he could charm the birds out of the trees!”  This was not the first time that Farnon had dedicated one of his creations to his children: Playtime (on GLCD 5125) was written for another son, Paul.

Those who think we may have made a mistake when crediting track 25 to The RAF Central Band should remember that military bands play not only for parades but also ceremonial dinners and other social functions, where an orchestral sound is sometimes more appropriate.  March Of The Penguins is one of several tracks recorded for Boosey & Hawkes in the late 1940s in which some of the musicians demonstrate their versatility by exchanging wind instruments for stringed ones with superb results.

On this occasion our title track actually closes the CD. It is also the oldest recording in this collection, having been released in 1931 with William Pethers conducting the London Palladium Orchestra. The sound gives a clue to the fact that electrical recordings were still relatively new (the first were issued in 1925) although it compares well with many others that were to follow later in the 1930s.  Animal Antics was composed by Colin Wark (1896-1939) who seems to have had a varied musical career – for a while working with Puccini and other Italian composers transcribing their works for piano. According to his son David, Colin Wark was responsible for launching Pasquale Troise and his Mandoliers in the early 1930s.                                                                                                                                                                                        David Ades

Page revised Tuesday March 25 2008