Three Shades of Blue (1928), Mississippi Suite (1927)--Paul Whiteman Concert Orch.--improved rips!

Hi.  I'm still here.  (Or is it some alien parasite typing this?  Some super-virus from beyond who took over Lee's body?)  I realized I should post something.  All week, I've been clearing my hard drive of my backlog of MAGIX "projects"--unfortunately, I have mild hoarding tendencies, so I feel a need to burn every project from my hard drive to CD-R, which has resulted in high stacks of CDs (in mini-cases, luckily) all over my bedroom and inside this Media Room.  Burning the things is highly time-consuming, and the fact is, I don't listen to 90 percent of them, ever, so I really have to start questioning the tradition.  I'll have to go through all my burned CDs and toss out the ones I'm never going to listen to--which, really, would be most of them.  Maybe one out of every 500 will turn out to be something I would have wanted to keep.  But the other 499, I'll never miss.  Luckily, I'm nowhere near the severe range, hoarder-wise.  I won't be on TLC anytime soon.  But it's horrifying to imagine what things would be like if I'd kept every CD-R I've ever burned, and every vinyl and shellac record I ever bought.  I'd be typing this from under an avalanche of stuff.  The entire house couldn't hold all that stuff.

It's a weird feeling, not having at least two posts ready to go.  Kind of liberating.  Actually, come to think of it, I do have a couple things.  Being less than happy with my Three Shades of Blue and Mississippi Suite Paul Whiteman rips, I redid them yesterday or the day before.  I present them now.  For the former title, I just lowered the treble on the existing file.  The latter is a new rip, and it's less noisy.  The disc is one of those Victor label electrics that looks mint but which seems to have had hiss pressed into it.  Bad shellac formulation?  Moisture over time?  I do not know.  But I got it to sound better.

The Whiteman Mississippi Suite--composed, of course, by Ferde Grofe, then Paul's chief arranger--omits the wonderful first movement, and this hurts the piece.  Luckily, what remains is beautifully done, so....  Still, I'd have loved to hear Father of Waters as done by the Whiteman band.  Maybe, in some multi-verse, he did.  Or, in a reverse universe, it was recorded by Nametihw Luap.  In outside-in fashion.  But not in this universe.

By the way, the Indian-attack portion of Father of Waters is vastly similar to the first part of Grofe's 1924 arrangement of By the Waters of the Minnetonka.  Minnetonka was redone, electrically, in 1926.  That adds some extra irony to Whiteman's omission of Father of Waters.  "Oh, we already recorded that Indian-attack thing.  No point in repeating ourselves."--Paul.  "But... but..."--Ferde.

In totally unrelated news, I learned from the Science Channel why our planet has lots of water, despite our being close to the Sun.  We got it from Jupiter, back when Jupiter was in a different spot--as in, much closer to the center of the solar system.  I would never have guessed.  The planets have moved around over the billions of years.  Apparently, entire solar systems migrate within galaxies, too.  It's too much to take in.  To the Grofe/Whiteman.  And I wish my spell-checker would get used to "Whiteman" and stop underlining it, dang it:






DOWNLOAD: Three Shades of Blue--Mississippi Suite--Paul Whiteman (1928, 1927)





Three Shades of Blue (Grofe)--Paul Whiteman and His Concert Orch.

1. Indigo
2. Alice Blue
3.  Heliotrope

(Victor 35952; 1928)

Mississippi Suite (Grofe)--Paul Whiteman and His Concert Orch.

1. Huckleberry Finn
2. Old Creole Days
3. Mardi Gras

(Victor 35859; 1927)



Lee