Over the weekend I found a fantastic record by the incomparable Yma Sumac – you may find a copy of 1950’s Voice of the Xtabay, her first recorded album, on Capitol, but the 10″ LP Mambo!, released in 1954, is much harder to come by and can sell for $130 – $200 depending on condition. I found mine for $6 at a yard sale, and though it’s not in fantastic shape, it doesn’t skip and the cover image is pretty much intact. Possessing an unparalleled five-octave range, Yma Sumac came to the United States from the mountains of Peru in apparently the late 1940’s. She signed with Capitol records with whom she recorded seven albums, and appeared in several films, including 1954’s Secret of the Incas. She is an astonishingly talented diva, and basically, she is fabulous.

Here, from 1954’s Mambo!, are the first three incredible tracks from side A:

Bo Mambo
Taki Rari
Gopher

Eat your heart out, Mariah Carey.

For more about Ms. Sumac, visit yma-sumac.com or sunvirgin.com, who both claim to be the official site.

There was a neat little subgenre in the fifties and sixties (and the forties, actually) that captured the spirit of the hard-boiled private eye or police detective – the Philip Marlowes of the age. It’s one of the few musical styles that is appropriate to snap one’s fingers to. Today, we have a couple of fine examples. The first comes from Enoch Light, whom we’ve already met briefly, from the 1959 album The Private Life of a Private Eye, on Command.

You can download the full album here, I think. Licorice Pizza is an incredible resource for some of the most amazing and wonderful albums and compilations of the fifties and sixties. If you’re ever looking for some music to class up your next party, go there first. For just a sample, you can download track seven here:

→ Blonde Bombshell

Next, we have a little something from Warren Barker, who is one of those prolific TV composers whose work is still hummed around the world from time to time. Examples include the theme to 77 Sunset Strip and Bewitched, including the xylophone wiggling the nose bit. I believe this track is from the 77 Sunset Strip album, but I can’t be certain since I got it from one of those compilations with titles like Leopard Lounge or Crime Jazz: Music in the Second Degree.

→ Caper at the Coffee House

Warren Barker also has this album called Warren Barker Is In, which I find to be a pretty good marketing technique – “It must be true if it’s in print! Warren Barker is in! I better buy this album so I’ll be in too.” The album even features a quiz to tell whether you’re “in” or not – sadly, I can’t find a large image of the cover, but here’s the quiz:

Do you like kazoos?

The only excuse for listening to a kazoo is an unquenchable enthusiasm for old Bob Burns records, which seem to be coming IN.

Do you listen to cool sounds?

You’re IN if you do, and that’s all there is to it. Except that we’d like to add that Barker’s as cool as they come.

Do you watch OUT movies on television?

This presents a problem. If it’s a film like “King Kong” or “Shipmates Forever,” you’re IN. If it’s a good Western, you’re OUT.

Do you like music you can smooch to?

Smooching is IN. Passion is OUT.

Do you prefer trumpets muted?

If so, you’re IN. If you like them muted with torn felt hats, you’re a leader.

Do you make a habit of coffee houses?

They’re IN only if you never drink coffee there.

Do you swing without vines?

If so, you’re IN. The only vines it’s permissable to swing with is Elsworth.

Do you dig Ira Ironstrings flambe?

You’re way IN. Ironstrings is very IN, but combined with flames, he’s the end. “The end,” by the way, is OUT unless we say it.

Do you read Moby Dick Saturday nights?

This makes you OUT. You must be re-reading Moby Dick to be IN.

Bonus points to anyone who can tell me who Ira Ironstrings was, and why he’s so much better engulfed in flames.

If you have a hankerin’ for music with a lot of tropical birds and other South Seas sounds in glorious stereo, Arthur Lyman is your man. He was born and raised in Hawaii, precociously playing marimba and vibraphone as a child. When he was 14, he was playing professionally with a small group with the best name ever, “The Gadabouts”, and began playing with Martin Denny (who is often credited with starting the Polynesian / tiki / lounge craze of the 1950’s) in 1951. ¹

Featuring heavy use of bird calls and other exotic environmental sounds, Lyman soon became as popular as Denny but recorded exclusively in Hawaii. He did play live shows stateside, and became an icon on lounge and tiki music. A 1962 Time article describes a typical performance:

A conch shell wailed, the conga drums thump-thumped, the bamboo sticks clattered,” the magazine wrote. “The four men on stage were constantly on the move — clacking wooden blocks, scratching a corrugated gourd, flailing away at Chinese gongs, weaving rhythms that were insistent, sinuous and hypnotic. Occasionally, when the spirit moved them, they barked like seals or whooped like cranes. The happy audience at Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel rattled the rafters whooping back.

Lyman’s recordings – of which there were many – were all made at the aluminum Kaiser geodesic dome auditorium in Honolulu. They’re all live, without overdubbing, and recorded after midnight to avoid traffic and crowd noises. I only own two of these recordings, Paradise and Bahia, which are, respectively, very low-key and hammock-friendly, and crazily cool and upbeat. This track is from Paradise, and is actually a more upbeat one for the record. Aloha!

Download Vini Vini (4.2MB mp3)

¹For more information, see Space Age Pop and for even more information, see Arthur Lyman’s Wikipedia entry.

Though I was given a timely notification of its existence by my friendly neighborhood music expert, I totally missed this exhibit at the Robert Berman Gallery at Bergamot Station: a tribute to Alex Steinweiss. Few would challenge a credit given to Steinweiss, now 91, as basically the inventor of the album cover. Before cover art, records were housed in unmarked paper sleeves accessed only by a store clerk. “You’d go to the counter and ask for the title you wanted. I needed to shake up the industry. We had to do something like European poster art to draw the attention of the buyer.”¹

And at this he succeeded. After graduating from Parsons in New York, he worked for a few years for Viennese poster maker Joseph Binder and then set out on his own. Steinweiss was next hired at Columbia records in the 30’s, and for the first year or so designed every record that came out of that label. His work is not always signed or labeled as his, so how do you know if you’ve found a Steinweiss cover?

Bold colors, modern fonts – heavy block fonts combined with hand-written script fonts a la Alvin Lustig (coming later) – two-dimensional drawings combined with three-dimensional illustrations, and a Columbia label are useful indicators. However, the same could be said for Jim Flora (also coming later), and Steinweiss also designed for RCA, Decca, and others. But record covers can be great design regardless of whether they have a name attached to them, and they’re a cheap way to add some colorful art.

You can find somewhat reasonably priced album cover frames at Urban Outfitters (2 for $22), in either black or neutral wood.

It can get a lot more expensive than that, but the next cheapest price I’ve found is around $14 per frame.

Now you have another reason to dig through the crates. Happy hunting!

¹ Jerry McCulley, Meet the Man Who Invented the Album Cover as We Know It, gibson.com, 2.12.08.

I can’t believe I’ve never written about Enoch Light before. He’s one of my hands-down favorite musicians of the mid-century, and really, has there ever been a cooler name for an orchestra project than Enoch Light and the Light Brigade?

In 1959, Light formed Command Records, whose first LP Persuasive Percussion was a huge hit (maybe I’ll put that one up sometimes, it’s fantastic) and demonstrated Light’s dedication to the stereo recording process. You really can’t go wrong with an Enoch Light record – even most of his records that are solely covers of songs from movies bring an exciting and original new interpretation to vinyl.

Today’s gems come from an album entitled A New Concept of Great Cole Porter Songs, released on Command in 1964 and again in 1971. I love Enoch Light album covers; while Herb Alpert was using girls clad in bikinis or whipped cream on his covers, Light used abstract shapes and colors instead of “too many girls in too few clothes.”¹

By the early 70’s, Command had been sold to ABC records and then to MCA, which continued to reissue Command recordings but in a budget sense – the artwork was more generic, the vinyl was recycled and thinner, the liner notes were sparse at best. Unfortunately, I only have the 1971 re-issue which, as I know of possessing original and rereleases of other Command records, lacks the depth and richness Light intended his recordings to have. Still, it’s a great listen. Both versions of this recording can sell anywhere from $30 to $200 depending on location and condition.

(1964)

One of the biggest differences between original Command recordings and the recycled ones is the packaging. Here in the original release, actual thought has been given to the cover design as it relates to the music: the C and P for “Cole Porter” has been used to create a sort of logo, and then replicated across the front in different colors, angles, transparencies, and outlines to represent new concepts on the same theme.

(1971)

By contrast, it appears that the designer of this cover was unaware of who Cole Porter was and was not really familiar with the record at all. The title “A New Concept” seemed to be enough information to generate a design using some lightbulbs to represent “ideas”. The title is in a much larger font relative to “of great Cole Porter songs” than that of its predecessor – the original designer felt that the title was only somewhat more important than the source of the tunes, while the latter designer includes the second line almost as an afterthought.

At any rate, these are indeed new concepts, and some very interesting and original interpretations of these old standards. Great cocktail party music, in my opinion.

Just One Of Those Things

My Heart Belongs to Daddy

¹Space Age Pop’s Enoch Light entry – the whole website reads like my record collection. Check it out. See also Spaced Out, the Enoch Light website.

It’s been so busy around the studio, I didn’t even get to put up my what’s coming this weekend post, although I have added two new flea markets to the thrifty guide. We’re working on a super-secret super-awesome project for a new community site that I think is going to be amazing, and I want you all as beta testers! Anyway, because I’m so swamped, I’m going to cheat and post a record today.

But what a record it is! I adore Perez Prado y son mambos exquisitos. Prado made like a million mambo records in the late 40’s, 50’s, and early 60’s, mostly for RCA. This is by no means his best or most popular album, but it’s on my computer here at work, and it’s fabulous party or background music. Enjoy!

(I know, I hate RapidShare too. It took too long with my own server.)

One of the best things about cleaning the house is finding some great records to play while doing it. From the show tunes department, here’s ‘I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin” from Porgy and Bess.

While I mostly post music popular in America, Edmundo Ros primarily exported Latin American music to the UK. He was a royal favourite and owned one of the most exclusive clubs in London, as well as being the entertainer to play at all royal events at the insistence of Queen Elizabeth.

Here, from 1960, is ‘I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’‘.

Since I’m busy at work, and music is the easiest thing to do, here, have another one. And to super-cheat, I’m just going to steal someone else’s description of this because I could not have said it better (from unpleasant.org):

“For some reason, in the 1950s and 1960s the USA had a morbid fascination with the nations it conquered and exploited. Witness the number of Hawaiian-themed records, souvenirs, and decorations. Native Americans became a popular image to emulate as well, with Tonto and the stereotypical indian Brave. After World War II, Japan was likewise unspared. Or, as the album’s liner notes puts it, “After humiliating surrender, the Japanese people found they had a friend in their conquerer.”

This album (appropriately enough put out by Honolulu Records) boasts the best in rejecting Japanese music’s traditional past. Again, citing the liner notes, “no longer is music tightly compartmentalized, rejecting change and adulteration.” In honor of this, they got women with names like Aiko Bingo and Sparky Iwamoto to sing big band-style songs–in Japanese!

So anyway, let this be a lesson to future conquered nations– not only can we colonize your country, but we will assimilate your music as well!”

So here’s Tokyo Boogie Woogie, in honor of our Japan trip. Sayonara and farewell, Tokyo.

I haven’t done any music for a while, so here’s a good one. Cary Grant is my favorite actor, and Charade is one of my favorite movies. I’ve seen it about ten times, and Henry Mancini gave it a fabulous soundtrack. This version of the theme song is performed by Si Zentner and his orchestra. Zentner was a very talented trombonist, and his career spanned six decades as he moved from classical to commercial music; touring big band gigs to a Las Vegas gig and back to the road.

This track is from The Best of Si Zentner Vol. II.

Download Charade

I missed it yesterday, but I wanted to throw a little tune up here to kick off the week. Although I’ll always have a soft spot for Doris Day, and the Misty Miss Christy makes me all dreamy, Keely Smith (not to be confused with Keely Shaye Smith, the Watson to Robert Stack’s Sherlock Holmes in the latter days of the series “Unsolved Mysteries”) is probably my favorite vocalist of the century. Her voice is just so unbelievably clear without being too sweet – it’s the perfect combination of soulful huskiness and ringing clarity. Although she became well-known for her collaboration (in more ways than one) with Louis Prima – they played Vegas when that was actually cool – she’s an enormous talent on her own and a tremendous performer.

Here, from the Essential Capitol Collection (not vintage, I know, whatever), is Keely Smith singing What is This Thing Called Love?

Download