Blue Skies - selections (1927) Jay Whidden and his New Midnight Follies Band скачать в хорошем качестве

Blue Skies - selections (1927) Jay Whidden and his New Midnight Follies Band

BLUE SKIES – Selection Part 1 ~ [0:00] BLUE SKIES – Selection Part 2 ~ [3:33] Jay Whidden and his New Midnight Follies Band (Whidden announces in Part 2 at 6:50) Columbia 9239 (17 September 1927) I bought this 12-inch expecting a selection of tunes from a 1920s stage musical. In fact it comprises popular tunes by various composers from 1926-27. BLUE SKIES was a very successful cabaret-revue which opened at the Vaudeville Theatre London on Monday 27 June 1927 and had its 100th performance on Monday 19 September (two days after this recording was made). Whidden and his band were in the show. If the record label is any guide, Whidden appears to have supplied a few compositions. The only other names I recognise in newspaper reports of the revue’s original line-up are Jack Smith, ‘the Whispering Baritone’, and The Hamilton Sisters & Fordyce who joined in September whilst in England en route from Europe back to the USA, and during which time they recorded for HMV. Only Whidden’s band is on this record. Neither the label nor Brian Rust lists the tunes. The following is my stab at identifying them (trying to tally with the label credits): PART 1: Introduction, and BLUE SKIES (Irving Berlin, 1927) ~ unidentified tune (Jay Whidden) ~ AT SUNDOWN (Walter Donaldson, 1927) ~ IN A LITTLE SPANISH TOWN (Mabel Wayne, 1926) [The fade-out at the end of Part 1 is on the record; an unusual practice at that time.] PART 2: BIRTH OF THE BLUES (Ray Henderson, 1926) ~ A RUSSIAN LULLABY (Irving Berlin, 1927) ~ two unidentified tunes (Jay Whidden) ~ ME AND MY SHADOW (Jolson, Rose and Dreyer 1927; though the music is Dreyer’s) ~ Reprise: BIRTH OF THE BLUES. I suspect that ME AND MY SHADOW, and the way it was presented with a voice-over (by Whidden?), was the stage signature tune of Whidden’s New Midnight Follies Band. Also on the record, but not as uploaded, are high levels of vertical low frequency rumble/vibration. This seems to be common on Columbia recordings of this period; and I may have an explanation: London Underground trains. Columbia’s ‘London’ studios were on Petty France, a street not far from St James’ Park Underground Station, in a building that was a standard late-Victorian/early-Edwardian multi-storey office structure on a fire-proof frame of cast-iron pillars; not good for noise/vibration isolation (as I’m sure many an apartment-dweller in a converted warehouse has discovered). There iron pillars intruded in the middle of studios, which were not clear spaces. The Metropolitan and District underground lines ran in a cutting not far behind the building. The premises had been used from acoustic recording days. In March 1931 Columbia merged with HMV under their new joint-holding company, EMI, and later moved to HMV’s complex of three studios in St John’s Wood, which (formally) opened in November 1931. Columbia’s record-pressing moved to Hayes in 1932, marking the end of the low-noise, laminated-records. Columbia also vacated the Petty France building in 1932. It narrowly survived a V1-rocket explosion at the Wellington Barracks across the street on 18 June 1944. Number 73/75 Petty France with adjacent properties was demolished around 1950. It stood on the right-hand portion of what is now Clive House: once the Passport Office; now (in 2016) premises of the Orwellian-sounding Ministry of Justice.