Saturday, February 08, 2020

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 MinnetonkaMinnetonka 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


7 comments:

David Federman said...

Lee, The New York-based Harmonie Ensemble recorded Ferde Grofe's original arrangements for Paul Whiteman of "The Mississippi Suite" and "The Five Pictures of Grand Canyon" around 2010. Worth trying to find or, if you'd like, I'll share. "Father of Waters" is beautiful. It is indeed a shame Mr. Whiteman omitted this movement from his recording of the work.

Lee Hartsfeld said...

Wow! I've seen the cover to that CD umpteen times, but I never checked out the track listing, for some reason. Thanks for alerting me to its contents. I see the original Grand Canyon arrangement is on it, too. Thanks for the file offer, but I just went ahead and ordered the CD at Amazon. Got a slightly lower used price. I usually go for the cheaper used copies, but want to make sure I get the booklet and that it's not a ex-library copy, etc. So I paid a little more more a new copy. Saved a few bucks over Amazon's price.

Hope you enjoyed my rips. It's hard to calibrate my ears to early electrical era 78s. I have to have a feel for the dynamic balance and frequency spread. When I haven't done a 78 restoration for a while, I lose the groove. If that's an expression. Hm. "Lose the groove." Sounds like an LP title.... Anyway, thanks. I know I'll savor every moment of this CD.

David Federman said...

It seems the Metropole Orchestra also recorded the Five Pictures--plus Grofe's little-known "Tabloid Suite" from 1932. I don't know if this was written for Whiteman or not.

Lee Hartsfeld said...

Oh, I have that CD. Grabbed it the moment it came out. "Tabloid Suite" is quite cool. The opening section was reused as part of Grofe's score for "The Return of Jesse James."

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Lee, for the new rip and clean up. I replaced the earlier. I've yet to listen to Three Shades of Blue, so Grofe I've never heard awaits. Doc

Lee Hartsfeld said...

Doc, Hope you enjoy!

drizzz said...

I've been tossing homemade cds and trying to clean out my hard drive and backup as well- hard to let go but it is only being realistic- like you wrote, will probably never listen to all this stuff again. Very liberating to declutter and savor the stuff you really enjoy.