Gordon Jenkins Conducts Holiday Music

Gordon Jenkins

Let's take a look at some of the seasonal items that the great conductor-arranger-composer Gordon Jenkins put out from 1942-52, in company with such luminaries as Dick Haymes and Louis Armstrong.

Jenkins began recording for the new Capitol label just a few months after it began in 1942, both in support of vocalists Martha Tilton and Connie Haines and under his own name, with Bob Carroll for the vocal choruses.

It's the last team that made the first record in this collection, a cover version of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," which Bing Crosby had introduced in Holiday Inn that year and recorded for Decca. Carroll was a sonorous vocalist whom I admire and have featured here, but he was a more impersonal singer than Bing. At the time of the recording, he had most recently been with Charlie Barnet's band.

Jenkins began an association with Decca in 1945, and quickly found success with his first recording of his "Manhattan Tower." He soon was providing backing for such stars as Dick Haymes, including our next three recordings.

Bob Carroll, Dick Haymes

The first is a V-Disc of "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!," which came from a December 1945 aircheck of the CBS show Everything for the Boys. Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn wrote the tune earlier in the year, and it had become a hit for Vaughn Monroe.

That same year, Mel Tormé and Bob Wells produced one of the finest of all seasonal tunes, "The Christmas Song," a hit the following year for Nat Cole. Haymes and Jenkins covered it in 1947, a superb version. 

I believe "The Christmas Song" was actually the B-side of the Haymes release. The plug side was one of the new compositions that year: Irving Gordon and Lester Lee's "Christmas Dreaming." It's a superior song but has never become a standard, despite the Haymes-Jenkins recording and the better-known Frank Sinatra-Axel Stordahl competition.

Floyd Huddleston

In 1949, Jenkins produced a two-sided holiday release for Decca. One side was the excellent, and little-known "December." It was a new song written by two vocalists who also wrote music together - Al Rinker (once of the Rhythm Boys) and Floyd Huddleston. The latter is the soloist here; he acquits himself very well. It's an appealing piece in an affecting performance.

The other song was Jenkins' own "Happy New Year," an ironic title if ever there was one. The singer laments a lost love, wishing her a happy new year. It's a beautiful, depressing song, very much in the vein of Jenkins' earlier "Goodbye." The singer is another talented, although unheralded artist, Bob Lenn. (Decca misspells his name as "Senn" on the label.) Lenn worked in New York as a studio vocalist, vocal coach and actor. I placed this song at the end of the playlist.

The final record in this set features a performer today identified with the holidays, if not so at the time - trumpeter-vocalist Louis Armstrong. Decca had paired Armstrong and Jenkins as far back as 1949, and in 1952, the duo came up with a two-sided holiday release - "White Christmas" and "Winter Wonderland." The latter was written as far back as 1934, when it was a hit for Guy Lombardo. It had a comeback in 1946 via releases from Johnny Mercer and Perry Como. Armstrong is in characteristic form for this coupling, and he and Jenkins mesh better than I would have expected.

Armstrong recently appeared here on the blog with some of his earlier jazz records.

The sound on these vintage recordings is generally vivid.

LINK

Louis Armstrong

The Two 'Swedish Rhapsodies'

Hugo Alfvén, Swedish rhapsodist no. 1

Two different "Swedish Rhapsodies" became popular in postwar America (and elsewhere). The best known is the one by composer Hugo Alfvén (1872–1960). Written in 1903, he called it Midsommarvaka, or "Midsummer Vigil," with the subtitle "Swedish Rhapsody No. 1." (There are three by the composer, including the Uppsalarapsodi and Dalarapodi.)

Midsommarvaka is far and away the most popular, largely because of the colorful and memorable main theme - so memorable that the popular arranger Percy Faith adapted it for a Columbia single in 1953. That disc spawned a variety of other renditions, which form the bulk of today's post. We hear that distinctive theme on the organ, accordion with banjos, and a vocal version.

The Faith-Alfvén concoction, however, was not the first Swedish Rhapsody to become popular. In 1949 the Viennese composer-conductor Willy Mattes wrote one under the name Charles Wildman. It was composed for a French film titled Singoalla, released in the US as Gypsy Fury. His Swedish Rhapsody is an entertaining example of the bravura "piano concertos" that were popular in the 40s following the success of the Warsaw Concerto.

"Charles Wildman" (Willy Mattes), Swedish rhapsodist No. 2

The Wildman/Mattes Rhapsody spurred both pop instrumentals and vocals. This collection has an example of both.

The Offspring of Alfvén

But let's return to Hugo Alfvén's composition first. If you want to hear the original, conducted by the composer, you can head over to my other blog and this post of his 1954 stereo disc. That particular recording could well have been occasioned by the popularity of Percy Faith's 1953 adaptation.

Billboard, February 28, 1953

I don't know what led Faith to transform the Alfvén piece into a pop record, but it must have been a popular topic at his label, because at the same time Columbia's classical division was preparing a recording of the original composition by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Harold Smart and Ray Martin

The Faith recording inspired a number of other versions; it seemed to be particularly influential in England. Our first cover version is by organist Harold Smart, whose combo attacks the piece with some enthusiasm and as much skill as can be mustered in an adaptation of an adaptation.

The usual mood-music maestri took up the piece as well. Mantovani had his cascading strings and echo chambers working overtime in his version. We will hear from him below, but for this first Rhapsody let's instead have the recording by Ray Martin, active in England at the time but who actually was another Viennese conductor, born Kurt Kohn.

There also were versions elsewhere in Europe. Let's take a quick detour to Denmark and a peppy number by the duo accordionists Aksel og Erik with Pietro Tedesco's banjo orchestra. This one is over in a hurry, so listen fast.

Red Buttons

The above records all date from 1953. Came the following year, Columbia decided to capitalize on the Faith phenomenon by releasing a vocal version of the piece, with lyrics by Carl Sigman. The label's pop mastermind, Mitch Miller, decided to enlist actor-comedian Red Buttons (Aaron Chwatt) to sing it. Not such an odd idea - Buttons had a hit the year before with "Strange Things Are Happening." And he does just fine with this one, although Sigman's lyrics are cliché-stricken: "One little fellow on a Swedish street / Playing sweet - 'Tweet - tweet - tweet' / One penny-whistle and an oom-pah beat / Swedish rhapsody".

Warsaw Comes to Sweden

The English composer Richard Addinsell wrote the Warsaw Concerto for a 1941 film called Dangerous Moonlight (Suicide Squadron in the US). The bravura Rachmaninoffian piece was played by Anton Walbrook (dubbed by Louis Kentner) as a Polish concert pianist who became a fighter pilot. (That recording can be found in this collection.)

Addinsell's work spurred a stampede of melodramatic miniature piano concertos. One of the last was Wildman's "Swedish Rhapsody." It is derivative of a derivative composition, to be sure, but not less effective because of it.

Mantovani

Our instrumental version of the "Swedish Rhapsody" is the 1948 single by Mantovani with pianist Ivan Fosello. It's a good account, and Monti's echo chambers had not yet gotten out of control. Novello and Mantovani had combined in a popular version of the Warsaw Concerto earlier in the decade.

Dick Haymes

Came 1953, and the American Decca folks decided it was time for a vocal version of Wildman's piece. The lyrics are the handiwork of the well-known Don Raye, who called the piece "My Home Is in Your Arms." The vocals are handled by Dick Haymes with the backing of Gordon Jenkins' orchestra and Bernie Leighton's piano.

It's a very good record. Haymes sounds a little under-rehearsed, but also is in excellent voice and is suitably impassioned. Jenkins is the perfect choice for accompanist, and studio pianist Leighton has the style down pat.

Just to complete the circle, the Warsaw Concerto itself had a vocal version, too, recorded by several acts in 1958. Called "The World Outside," it again had lyrics by Carl Sigman. You can hear the Four Aces' version here.