[Dixielandjazz] Glenn Miller Orchestra is looking for a pianist
Jon Stutler
jon at razzmajazz.com
Wed Dec 12 21:04:30 PST 2007
Just received this today.....
The Glenn Miller Orchestra is looking for a pianist to join the band starting January 10, 2008 in Florida. If you know of anyone who is looking to go out on the road, please have that person contact our road manager Bart Delaney as soon as possible. Many thanks for your help. If possible, please forward this email to your musician friends.
Bart Delaney bartdelaney at hotmail.com (407) 620-4485 cell
Bart is in Japan through December 17, so email him first.
Glenn Miller Productions, Inc.
801 International Parkway, 5th Floor
Lake Mary, Florida 32746
http://www.glennmillerorchestra.com/
office: (407) 562-1924
fax: (407) 562-2001
cell: (407) 620-9270
email: glennmillerproductions at yahoo.com
THE MILLER SOUND LIVES FOREVER!
Thanks,
Jon Stutler
817-233-4149 Toll Free 877-477-1997 Fax 817-274-2974
Razzmajazz Dixieland Bands www.razzmajazz.com
----- Original Message ----
From: "dixielandjazz-request at ml.islandnet.com" <dixielandjazz-request at ml.islandnet.com>
To: Jon stutler <jon at razzmajazz.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 2:00:04 PM
Subject: Dixielandjazz Digest, Vol 60, Issue 18
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Today's Topics:
1. Spike Jones reviewed (Bill Haesler)
2. Re: Live It Up (philwilking)
3. Re: Musical Variations - was fugues. (Ron L)
4. "Spike Jones: The Legend" - New DVD Collection (Steve Barbone)
5. Re: Dixielandjazz Digest, Vol 60, Issue 17 (Rob Wright)
-----Inline Message Follows-----
Dear friends,
This one via the Australian Dance Bands list.
I can't say that I agree with all that Mr Frieldwald writes on this
occasion, but the information regarding this new DVD release may be of
interest to some listmates who, like me, consider Spike Jones OKOM.
Kind regards,
Bill.
> A Flicker of Spike on the Small Screen
> by Will Friedwald
> New York Sun, December 10, 2007
>
> It is hard to think of a performer whose music changed as radically
> from one medium to another as did that of the great Spike Jones. Call
> him the Marshall McLuhan of American popular culture. During his
> glory years in the 1940s, Jones was constantly on the road with his
> Musical Depreciation Revue, training from town to town with his merry
> band of musical comics and sound-effects specialists.
>
> Nearly all the writing about Jones recounts his extravagant, almost
> indescribable stage shows. Even though he had several million-selling
> records and at least one No. 1 hit, very little attention was paid to
> his records when they were new on the shelves. Since his death in
> 1965 at age 53, his live shows have largely been forgotten, though
> his recordings have inspired several generations of comic musicians,
> from Esquivel to P.D.Q. Bach, Frank Zappa, and "Weird Al" Yankovic.
>
> Jones, who is the subject of a new DVD collection from Infinity
> Entertainment, "Spike Jones: The Legend," brought two major
> innovations to American pop. The first was the idea that sound
> effects used on radio and film soundtracks, when used in tempo and
> rhythm, could become an essential part of the music; instead of
> building to a rim shot or a clarinet break, Jones would punctuate a
> melody with a gunshot, a cowbell, a car backfiring, or a woman
> screaming. Ornette Coleman once expressed admiration for this element
> of Jones's performance -- the idea of dissolving the barrier between
> noise and music -- and one can imagine John Cage or the avant-
> gardists of any other musical epoch feeling the same way.
>
> Before Jones, nearly every bandleader played novelty songs, but they
> were considered the low-slung end of the music business: Jones
> discovered that it was possible to extract great comedy from great
> music, from Tchaikovsky (as in "The Nutcracker") to Johnny Mercer
> ("That Old Black Magic" and "Laura"). Jones also played silly songs,
> but he was funniest when he took a piece of real music and
> relentlessly gagged it up -- not just with garbage cans, barking
> dogs, bird calls, and falling anvils, but with a band that sounded
> like Salvador Dali's idea of Dixieland. Owing to the extremely visual
> nature of Jones's touring act, one might think that the band would
> have been a major hit on television. He eventually had a show that
> ran for 20 episodes in 1957, but Jones's TV shows somehow lacked the
> panache and punch of his classic recordings. Blame it on McLuhan:
> Jones was brilliant in the hot, audio-only media, but not nearly as
> effective in the cool medium of the small screen. Part of it is just
> the economics of the era, in that TV producers and sponsors reduced
> Jones's inspired lunacy to mere grist for the variety-show mill, with
> guest stars and sketches that were almost never as funny as we'd have
> liked them to be.
>
> Yet this new release provides the missing link in Jones's evolution.
> The gem of the four-disc package, which collects four hours of his
> 1951 and 1952 television specials, is his first major TV appearance,
> telecast live on February 11, 1951, as part of the "Colgate Comedy
> Hour" series. This hour-long show is easily the most entertaining
> piece of visual footage that Jones and his band, the City Slickers,
> left us. As time passed and he did more television, the more like
> everyone else Jones became, but this first show is more or less a
> camera pointed in the direction of Jones's legendary touring stage
> show.
>
> All the bits that you've heard about are here: the bass saxophonist
> who sends a frog flying out of the bell of his instrument;
> trombonists whose trousers fall and rise according to the pitch of
> the note they play; two headless dudes enjoying a pantomime
> conversation; the bass fiddle that gives birth to a midget; two
> chickens serenading each other to the tune of "Holiday for Strings,"
> as if to illustrate that hope is the thing with feathers or that they
> know why the guy in the bird suit sings; the harpist on the sidelines
> of the action who spends most of the show knitting and puffing on a
> nasty-looking stogie during her own solo. You can't trust any
> instrument: Everything from the piano to the violin is liable to
> explode at any moment.
>
> Then there's the ringleader himself, who, when he isn't conducting a
> classical piece with a toilet plunger for a baton, chasing a chorus
> girl with a giant sword, or parading in mermaid drag, is a remarkably
> understated presence, looking on from the side with a David Letterman-
> like smirk.
>
> Ironically, Jones began to run out of steam in the mid-1950s, just as
> television and rock 'n' roll were getting to know each other. He said
> that it was impossible to parody the new pop music since it was so
> ludicrous to begin with, which proved untrue -- there would be plenty
> of City Slicker-inspired satirists in the rock era. But he was
> correct in that there had been a sea change in the culture, which,
> retroactively, makes Jones's TV shows harder to appreciate. Viewed by
> 21st-century sensibilities, the "straight" portions of his shows look
> no less surreal. There's the appearance of a busty female acrobat,
> built rather like Jayne Mansfield, wearing a low-cut French maid
> outfit and enormous high heels, bouncing up and down on a trampoline;
> somehow it seems more contemporary than anything else on the discs,
> like something Howard Stern would stage.
>
> The first show, which begins with the Slickers' rendition of the
> Middle-Eastern-flavored favorites "In a Persian Market" and "The
> Sheik of Araby," also includes a rare TV appearance by the spastic
> spoonerist Doodles Weaver, as well as a full-dress treatment of "Glow
> Worm," delivered by a stout soprano whose giggling and jiggling
> midriff are the funniest parts of the piece. The later shows include
> some wonderful guest stars, such as the great Billy Eckstine (whose
> numbers are unforgivably deleted) and the Liberace Brothers, as well
> as Jones's talented chanteuse wife, Helen Grayco (who sings an
> Argentine tango in Gypsy get-up). But as early as the second show, a
> lot of time is wasted on a long Foreign Legion sketch, which is
> redeemed only by a villain named "El Schlemiel."
>
> This is as close as anyone ever came to staging a Tex Avery cartoon,
> not just in live action, but live in person, before our very eyes. As
> Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Betty Comden and Adolph Green (not to
> mention Mel Brooks), and others have proved in other contexts, great
> comedy and great music are flipsides of the same coin. As Jones says
> in a rare on-camera interview on the third disc, "If it wasn't for
> good music, what would I have to wreck?"
Dear friends,
This one via the Australian Dance Bands list.
I can't say that I agree with all that Mr Frieldwald writes on this
occasion, but the information regarding this new DVD release may be of
interest to some listmates who, like me, consider Spike Jones OKOM.
Kind regards,
Bill.
> A Flicker of Spike on the Small Screen
> by Will Friedwald
> New York Sun, December 10, 2007
>
> It is hard to think of a performer whose music changed as radically
> from one medium to another as did that of the great Spike Jones. Call
> him the Marshall McLuhan of American popular culture. During his
> glory years in the 1940s, Jones was constantly on the road with his
> Musical Depreciation Revue, training from town to town with his merry
> band of musical comics and sound-effects specialists.
>
> Nearly all the writing about Jones recounts his extravagant, almost
> indescribable stage shows. Even though he had several million-selling
> records and at least one No. 1 hit, very little attention was paid to
> his records when they were new on the shelves. Since his death in
> 1965 at age 53, his live shows have largely been forgotten, though
> his recordings have inspired several generations of comic musicians,
> from Esquivel to P.D.Q. Bach, Frank Zappa, and "Weird Al" Yankovic.
>
> Jones, who is the subject of a new DVD collection from Infinity
> Entertainment, "Spike Jones: The Legend," brought two major
> innovations to American pop. The first was the idea that sound
> effects used on radio and film soundtracks, when used in tempo and
> rhythm, could become an essential part of the music; instead of
> building to a rim shot or a clarinet break, Jones would punctuate a
> melody with a gunshot, a cowbell, a car backfiring, or a woman
> screaming. Ornette Coleman once expressed admiration for this element
> of Jones's performance -- the idea of dissolving the barrier between
> noise and music -- and one can imagine John Cage or the avant-
> gardists of any other musical epoch feeling the same way.
>
> Before Jones, nearly every bandleader played novelty songs, but they
> were considered the low-slung end of the music business: Jones
> discovered that it was possible to extract great comedy from great
> music, from Tchaikovsky (as in "The Nutcracker") to Johnny Mercer
> ("That Old Black Magic" and "Laura"). Jones also played silly songs,
> but he was funniest when he took a piece of real music and
> relentlessly gagged it up -- not just with garbage cans, barking
> dogs, bird calls, and falling anvils, but with a band that sounded
> like Salvador Dali's idea of Dixieland. Owing to the extremely visual
> nature of Jones's touring act, one might think that the band would
> have been a major hit on television. He eventually had a show that
> ran for 20 episodes in 1957, but Jones's TV shows somehow lacked the
> panache and punch of his classic recordings. Blame it on McLuhan:
> Jones was brilliant in the hot, audio-only media, but not nearly as
> effective in the cool medium of the small screen. Part of it is just
> the economics of the era, in that TV producers and sponsors reduced
> Jones's inspired lunacy to mere grist for the variety-show mill, with
> guest stars and sketches that were almost never as funny as we'd have
> liked them to be.
>
> Yet this new release provides the missing link in Jones's evolution.
> The gem of the four-disc package, which collects four hours of his
> 1951 and 1952 television specials, is his first major TV appearance,
> telecast live on February 11, 1951, as part of the "Colgate Comedy
> Hour" series. This hour-long show is easily the most entertaining
> piece of visual footage that Jones and his band, the City Slickers,
> left us. As time passed and he did more television, the more like
> everyone else Jones became, but this first show is more or less a
> camera pointed in the direction of Jones's legendary touring stage
> show.
>
> All the bits that you've heard about are here: the bass saxophonist
> who sends a frog flying out of the bell of his instrument;
> trombonists whose trousers fall and rise according to the pitch of
> the note they play; two headless dudes enjoying a pantomime
> conversation; the bass fiddle that gives birth to a midget; two
> chickens serenading each other to the tune of "Holiday for Strings,"
> as if to illustrate that hope is the thing with feathers or that they
> know why the guy in the bird suit sings; the harpist on the sidelines
> of the action who spends most of the show knitting and puffing on a
> nasty-looking stogie during her own solo. You can't trust any
> instrument: Everything from the piano to the violin is liable to
> explode at any moment.
>
> Then there's the ringleader himself, who, when he isn't conducting a
> classical piece with a toilet plunger for a baton, chasing a chorus
> girl with a giant sword, or parading in mermaid drag, is a remarkably
> understated presence, looking on from the side with a David Letterman-
> like smirk.
>
> Ironically, Jones began to run out of steam in the mid-1950s, just as
> television and rock 'n' roll were getting to know each other. He said
> that it was impossible to parody the new pop music since it was so
> ludicrous to begin with, which proved untrue -- there would be plenty
> of City Slicker-inspired satirists in the rock era. But he was
> correct in that there had been a sea change in the culture, which,
> retroactively, makes Jones's TV shows harder to appreciate. Viewed by
> 21st-century sensibilities, the "straight" portions of his shows look
> no less surreal. There's the appearance of a busty female acrobat,
> built rather like Jayne Mansfield, wearing a low-cut French maid
> outfit and enormous high heels, bouncing up and down on a trampoline;
> somehow it seems more contemporary than anything else on the discs,
> like something Howard Stern would stage.
>
> The first show, which begins with the Slickers' rendition of the
> Middle-Eastern-flavored favorites "In a Persian Market" and "The
> Sheik of Araby," also includes a rare TV appearance by the spastic
> spoonerist Doodles Weaver, as well as a full-dress treatment of "Glow
> Worm," delivered by a stout soprano whose giggling and jiggling
> midriff are the funniest parts of the piece. The later shows include
> some wonderful guest stars, such as the great Billy Eckstine (whose
> numbers are unforgivably deleted) and the Liberace Brothers, as well
> as Jones's talented chanteuse wife, Helen Grayco (who sings an
> Argentine tango in Gypsy get-up). But as early as the second show, a
> lot of time is wasted on a long Foreign Legion sketch, which is
> redeemed only by a villain named "El Schlemiel."
>
> This is as close as anyone ever came to staging a Tex Avery cartoon,
> not just in live action, but live in person, before our very eyes. As
> Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Betty Comden and Adolph Green (not to
> mention Mel Brooks), and others have proved in other contexts, great
> comedy and great music are flipsides of the same coin. As Jones says
> in a rare on-camera interview on the third disc, "If it wasn't for
> good music, what would I have to wreck?"
-----Inline Message Follows-----
Search for the title on Google. It should refer you to dealers who stock the
DVD or VHS.
PHIL WILKING
Those who would exchange freedom for
security deserve neither freedom nor security.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Romans" <cellblk7 at comcast.net>
> Live It Up, a movie starring Kenny Ball...Where can I buy this film? 1963
> is when it came out!
>
Search for the title on Google. It should refer you to dealers who stock the
DVD or VHS.
PHIL WILKING
Those who would exchange freedom for
security deserve neither freedom nor security.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Romans" <cellblk7 at comcast.net>
> Live It Up, a movie starring Kenny Ball...Where can I buy this film? 1963
> is when it came out!
>
-----Inline Message Follows-----
I've seen the wonderful tuba player, Eli Newberger play tuba and piano at
the same time, doing both very well, of course.
Ron L
-----Original Message-----
From: dixielandjazz-bounces at ml.islandnet.com
[mailto:dixielandjazz-bounces at ml.islandnet.com] On Behalf Of Steve Barbone
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 11:54 PM
To: lherault at bu.edu
Cc: Dixieland Jazz Mailing List
Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Musical Variations - was fugues.
Ginny at Gluetje1 at aol.com wrote (polite snip)
> Maybe I'm not so old after all. If I am in your audience I invite you to
> include all of the variations (snip)
Reminded me of one I left out. A few years ago, we had a pianist who also
played reeds, brass, banjo & bass. He loved to play piano with one hand and
flugelhorn with the other. He would solo that way, accompanying himself, no
other players, once or twice a night. It was always a treat to watch the
audience as they searched for the horn player until they realized it was the
pianist. Then they'd all start pointing. BTW he could play real Bach like
fugues with himself that way on tunes like Hoagy's "New Orleans".
He would also trade fours with himself sometimes on piano and a horn, other
times on two horns with just a bass back-up. VERY EFFECTIVE as he is a
master jazz musician in his second life after retiring as a Master Chief
Musician from the US NAVY band. Too bad he lives in Annapolis MD and is just
a little too far away from us.
Maybe Sheik who lives down that way, knows him . . . Dick Glass.
Cheers,
Steve Barbone
_______________________________________________
To unsubscribe or change your e-mail preferences for the Dixieland Jazz
Mailing list, or to find the online archives, please visit:
http://ml.islandnet.com/mailman/listinfo/dixielandjazz
Dixielandjazz mailing list
Dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com
I've seen the wonderful tuba player, Eli Newberger play tuba and piano at
the same time, doing both very well, of course.
Ron L
-----Original Message-----
From: dixielandjazz-bounces at ml.islandnet.com
[mailto:dixielandjazz-bounces at ml.islandnet.com] On Behalf Of Steve Barbone
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 11:54 PM
To: lherault at bu.edu
Cc: Dixieland Jazz Mailing List
Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Musical Variations - was fugues.
Ginny at Gluetje1 at aol.com wrote (polite snip)
> Maybe I'm not so old after all. If I am in your audience I invite you to
> include all of the variations (snip)
Reminded me of one I left out. A few years ago, we had a pianist who also
played reeds, brass, banjo & bass. He loved to play piano with one hand and
flugelhorn with the other. He would solo that way, accompanying himself, no
other players, once or twice a night. It was always a treat to watch the
audience as they searched for the horn player until they realized it was the
pianist. Then they'd all start pointing. BTW he could play real Bach like
fugues with himself that way on tunes like Hoagy's "New Orleans".
He would also trade fours with himself sometimes on piano and a horn, other
times on two horns with just a bass back-up. VERY EFFECTIVE as he is a
master jazz musician in his second life after retiring as a Master Chief
Musician from the US NAVY band. Too bad he lives in Annapolis MD and is just
a little too far away from us.
Maybe Sheik who lives down that way, knows him . . . Dick Glass.
Cheers,
Steve Barbone
_______________________________________________
To unsubscribe or change your e-mail preferences for the Dixieland Jazz
Mailing list, or to find the online archives, please visit:
http://ml.islandnet.com/mailman/listinfo/dixielandjazz
Dixielandjazz mailing list
Dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com
-----Inline Message Follows-----
This is a must read for Don Ingle, whose dad Red played with Spike Jones and
other Spike Jones Fans. Love the description of the band as sounding like
Salvatore Dali's idea of Dixieland. From the NY Sun Online. Don, would Red
be on these clips?
Cheers,
Steve Barbone
A Flicker of Spike on the Small Screen
Jazz - By WILL FRIEDWALD - December 10, 2007
It is hard to think of a performer whose music changed as radically from one
medium to another as did that of the great Spike Jones. Call him the
Marshall McLuhan of American popular culture. During his glory years in the
1940s, Jones was constantly on the road with his Musical Depreciation Revue,
training from town to town with his merry band of musical comics and
sound-effects specialists.
Nearly all the writing about Jones recounts his extravagant, almost
indescribable stage shows. Even though he had several million-selling
records and at least one No. 1 hit, very little attention was paid to his
records when they were new on the shelves. Since his death in 1965 at age
53, his live shows have largely been forgotten, though his recordings have
inspired several generations of comic musicians, from Esquivel to P.D.Q.
Bach, Frank Zappa, and "Weird Al" Yankovic.
Jones, who is the subject of a new DVD collection from Infinity
Entertainment, "Spike Jones: The Legend," brought two major innovations to
American pop. The first was the idea that sound effects used on radio and
film soundtracks, when used in tempo and rhythm, could become an essential
part of the music; instead of building to a rim shot or a clarinet break,
Jones would punctuate a melody with a gunshot, a cowbell, a car backfiring,
or a woman screaming. Ornette Coleman once expressed admiration for this
element of Jones's performance ‹ the idea of dissolving the barrier between
noise and music ‹ and one can imagine John Cage or the avant-gardists of any
other musical epoch feeling the same way.
Before Jones, nearly every bandleader played novelty songs, but they were
considered the low-slung end of the music business: Jones discovered that it
was possible to extract great comedy from great music, from Tchaikovsky (as
in "The Nutcracker") to Johnny Mercer ("That Old Black Magic" and "Laura").
Jones also played silly songs, but he was funniest when he took a piece of
real music and relentlessly gagged it up ‹ not just with garbage cans,
barking dogs, bird calls, and falling anvils, but with a band that sounded
like Salvador Dalí's idea of Dixieland. Owing to the extremely visual nature
of Jones's touring act, one might think that the band would have been a
major hit on television. He eventually had a show that ran for 20 episodes
in 1957, but Jones's TV shows somehow lacked the panache and punch of his
classic recordings. Blame it on McLuhan: Jones was brilliant in the hot,
audio-only media, but not nearly as effective in the cool medium of the
small screen. Part of it is just the economics of the era, in that TV
producers and sponsors reduced Jones's inspired lunacy to mere grist for the
variety-show mill, with guest stars and sketches that were almost never as
funny as we'd have liked them to be.
Yet this new release provides the missing link in Jones's evolution. The gem
of the four-disc package, which collects four hours of his 1951 and 1952
television specials, is his first major TV appearance, telecast live on
February 11, 1951, as part of the "Colgate Comedy Hour" series. This
hour-long show is easily the most entertaining piece of visual footage that
Jones and his band, the City Slickers, left us. As time passed and he did
more television, the more like everyone else Jones became, but this first
show is more or less a camera pointed in the direction of Jones's legendary
touring stage show.
All the bits that you've heard about are here: the bass saxophonist who
sends a frog flying out of the bell of his instrument; trombonists whose
trousers fall and rise according to the pitch of the note they play; two
headless dudes enjoying a pantomime conversation; the bass fiddle that gives
birth to a midget; two chickens serenading each other to the tune of
"Holiday for Strings," as if to illustrate that hope is the thing with
feathers or that they know why the guy in the bird suit sings; the harpist
on the sidelines of the action who spends most of the show knitting and
puffing on a nasty-looking stogie during her own solo. You can't trust any
instrument: Everything from the piano to the violin is liable to explode at
any moment.
Then there's the ringleader himself, who, when he isn't conducting a
classical piece with a toilet plunger for a baton, chasing a chorus girl
with a giant sword, or parading in mermaid drag, is a remarkably understated
presence, looking on from the side with a David Letterman-like smirk.
Ironically, Jones began to run out of steam in the mid-1950s, just as
television and rock 'n' roll were getting to know each other. He said that
it was impossible to parody the new pop music since it was so ludicrous to
begin with, which proved untrue ‹ there would be plenty of City
Slicker-inspired satirists in the rock era. But he was correct in that there
had been a sea change in the culture, which, retroactively, makes Jones's TV
shows harder to appreciate. Viewed by 21st-century sensibilities, the
"straight" portions of his shows look no less surreal. There's the
appearance of a busty female acrobat, built rather like Jayne Mansfield,
wearing a low-cut French maid outfit and enormous high heels, bouncing up
and down on a trampoline; somehow it seems more contemporary than anything
else on the discs, like something Howard Stern would stage.
The first show, which begins with the Slickers' rendition of the
Middle-Eastern-flavored favorites "In a Persian Market" and "The Sheik of
Araby," also includes a rare TV appearance by the spastic spoonerist Doodles
Weaver, as well as a full-dress treatment of "Glow Worm," delivered by a
stout soprano whose giggling and jiggling midriff are the funniest parts of
the piece. The later shows include some wonderful guest stars, such as the
great Billy Eckstine (whose numbers are unforgivably deleted) and the
Liberace Brothers, as well as Jones's talented chanteuse wife, Helen Grayco
(who sings an Argentine tango in Gypsy get-up). But as early as the second
show, a lot of time is wasted on a long Foreign Legion sketch, which is
redeemed only by a villain named "El Schlemiel."
This is as close as anyone ever came to staging a Tex Avery cartoon, not
just in live action, but live in person, before our very eyes. As Fats
Waller, Louis Armstrong, Betty Comden and Adolph Green (not to mention Mel
Brooks), and others have proved in other contexts, great comedy and great
music are flipsides of the same coin. As Jones says in a rare on-camera
interview on the third disc, "If it wasn't for good music, what would I have
to wreck?"
wfriedwald at nysun.com
This is a must read for Don Ingle, whose dad Red played with Spike Jones and
other Spike Jones Fans. Love the description of the band as sounding like
Salvatore Dali's idea of Dixieland. From the NY Sun Online. Don, would Red
be on these clips?
Cheers,
Steve Barbone
A Flicker of Spike on the Small Screen
Jazz - By WILL FRIEDWALD - December 10, 2007
It is hard to think of a performer whose music changed as radically from one
medium to another as did that of the great Spike Jones. Call him the
Marshall McLuhan of American popular culture. During his glory years in the
1940s, Jones was constantly on the road with his Musical Depreciation Revue,
training from town to town with his merry band of musical comics and
sound-effects specialists.
Nearly all the writing about Jones recounts his extravagant, almost
indescribable stage shows. Even though he had several million-selling
records and at least one No. 1 hit, very little attention was paid to his
records when they were new on the shelves. Since his death in 1965 at age
53, his live shows have largely been forgotten, though his recordings have
inspired several generations of comic musicians, from Esquivel to P.D.Q.
Bach, Frank Zappa, and "Weird Al" Yankovic.
Jones, who is the subject of a new DVD collection from Infinity
Entertainment, "Spike Jones: The Legend," brought two major innovations to
American pop. The first was the idea that sound effects used on radio and
film soundtracks, when used in tempo and rhythm, could become an essential
part of the music; instead of building to a rim shot or a clarinet break,
Jones would punctuate a melody with a gunshot, a cowbell, a car backfiring,
or a woman screaming. Ornette Coleman once expressed admiration for this
element of Jones's performance ‹ the idea of dissolving the barrier between
noise and music ‹ and one can imagine John Cage or the avant-gardists of any
other musical epoch feeling the same way.
Before Jones, nearly every bandleader played novelty songs, but they were
considered the low-slung end of the music business: Jones discovered that it
was possible to extract great comedy from great music, from Tchaikovsky (as
in "The Nutcracker") to Johnny Mercer ("That Old Black Magic" and "Laura").
Jones also played silly songs, but he was funniest when he took a piece of
real music and relentlessly gagged it up ‹ not just with garbage cans,
barking dogs, bird calls, and falling anvils, but with a band that sounded
like Salvador Dalí's idea of Dixieland. Owing to the extremely visual nature
of Jones's touring act, one might think that the band would have been a
major hit on television. He eventually had a show that ran for 20 episodes
in 1957, but Jones's TV shows somehow lacked the panache and punch of his
classic recordings. Blame it on McLuhan: Jones was brilliant in the hot,
audio-only media, but not nearly as effective in the cool medium of the
small screen. Part of it is just the economics of the era, in that TV
producers and sponsors reduced Jones's inspired lunacy to mere grist for the
variety-show mill, with guest stars and sketches that were almost never as
funny as we'd have liked them to be.
Yet this new release provides the missing link in Jones's evolution. The gem
of the four-disc package, which collects four hours of his 1951 and 1952
television specials, is his first major TV appearance, telecast live on
February 11, 1951, as part of the "Colgate Comedy Hour" series. This
hour-long show is easily the most entertaining piece of visual footage that
Jones and his band, the City Slickers, left us. As time passed and he did
more television, the more like everyone else Jones became, but this first
show is more or less a camera pointed in the direction of Jones's legendary
touring stage show.
All the bits that you've heard about are here: the bass saxophonist who
sends a frog flying out of the bell of his instrument; trombonists whose
trousers fall and rise according to the pitch of the note they play; two
headless dudes enjoying a pantomime conversation; the bass fiddle that gives
birth to a midget; two chickens serenading each other to the tune of
"Holiday for Strings," as if to illustrate that hope is the thing with
feathers or that they know why the guy in the bird suit sings; the harpist
on the sidelines of the action who spends most of the show knitting and
puffing on a nasty-looking stogie during her own solo. You can't trust any
instrument: Everything from the piano to the violin is liable to explode at
any moment.
Then there's the ringleader himself, who, when he isn't conducting a
classical piece with a toilet plunger for a baton, chasing a chorus girl
with a giant sword, or parading in mermaid drag, is a remarkably understated
presence, looking on from the side with a David Letterman-like smirk.
Ironically, Jones began to run out of steam in the mid-1950s, just as
television and rock 'n' roll were getting to know each other. He said that
it was impossible to parody the new pop music since it was so ludicrous to
begin with, which proved untrue ‹ there would be plenty of City
Slicker-inspired satirists in the rock era. But he was correct in that there
had been a sea change in the culture, which, retroactively, makes Jones's TV
shows harder to appreciate. Viewed by 21st-century sensibilities, the
"straight" portions of his shows look no less surreal. There's the
appearance of a busty female acrobat, built rather like Jayne Mansfield,
wearing a low-cut French maid outfit and enormous high heels, bouncing up
and down on a trampoline; somehow it seems more contemporary than anything
else on the discs, like something Howard Stern would stage.
The first show, which begins with the Slickers' rendition of the
Middle-Eastern-flavored favorites "In a Persian Market" and "The Sheik of
Araby," also includes a rare TV appearance by the spastic spoonerist Doodles
Weaver, as well as a full-dress treatment of "Glow Worm," delivered by a
stout soprano whose giggling and jiggling midriff are the funniest parts of
the piece. The later shows include some wonderful guest stars, such as the
great Billy Eckstine (whose numbers are unforgivably deleted) and the
Liberace Brothers, as well as Jones's talented chanteuse wife, Helen Grayco
(who sings an Argentine tango in Gypsy get-up). But as early as the second
show, a lot of time is wasted on a long Foreign Legion sketch, which is
redeemed only by a villain named "El Schlemiel."
This is as close as anyone ever came to staging a Tex Avery cartoon, not
just in live action, but live in person, before our very eyes. As Fats
Waller, Louis Armstrong, Betty Comden and Adolph Green (not to mention Mel
Brooks), and others have proved in other contexts, great comedy and great
music are flipsides of the same coin. As Jones says in a rare on-camera
interview on the third disc, "If it wasn't for good music, what would I have
to wreck?"
wfriedwald at nysun.com
-----Inline Message Follows-----
>It's really a stretch calling a front line playing without rhythm section
"a
>capella", especially since the term means "in the chapel style" and, as
>previously mentioned, refers to unaccompanied singing. But as long as the
banjo
>player understands what it means, it'as all good.
Shoot, and I thought a capella was a cape for a little person.
I'm surrounded by assassins! Rob
>It's really a stretch calling a front line playing without rhythm section
"a
>capella", especially since the term means "in the chapel style" and, as
>previously mentioned, refers to unaccompanied singing. But as long as the
banjo
>player understands what it means, it'as all good.
Shoot, and I thought a capella was a cape for a little person.
I'm surrounded by assassins! Rob
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