Grofe on Shellac--Queen of Egypt, Stop Your Kiddin'/Kidding, March for Americans, Wonderful One

This kind of post takes forever to put together!  I had to dig out all the 78s, then check discographical details, and... whew!  Lots of busy work.  And I had to make these things sound good, which I hopefully accomplished.  The too-bright sound on the Original Memphis Five's Stop Your Kiddin' was unavoidable--Regal was a low-quality label, and any amount of freeing the sound from the surface noise resulted in over-resonance.  Oddly enough, this moderately worn disc sounded better with my traditional 2.7 mil 78 stylus than when played with the 3.5 mil.  With worn discs, it's a toss-up, as the wider stylus sometimes only makes thing worse.  Sound restoration isn't a job for sissies.  Which would suggest that people who do sound restoration aren't sissies.  But it's a saying similar to "aging isn't for sissies."  Yet sissies do age.  Something to think about while I type gibberish.  Good grief.  It's only late afternoon.  I shouldn't be this zoned yet.

Grofe--yes.  I forgot we were talking about Grofe.  Well, I'll just go down the playlist and offer words of wisdom, support, and weird humor.  Despite the 1933 recording date, Count Your Blessings is from the 1934 Palooka, starring Jimmy Durante, and I've never seen it.  Which doesn't change the fact that it's from that movie.  For years, I thought Grofe had done the soundtrack for the film, though it turns out he only did this single, very pleasant song whose memory has been erased by the later, way more famous Count Your Blessings (Instead of Sheep), by that most American of Siberian-born songwriters, Irving Berlin.  It doesn't help, either, that there's a famous Sunday School Count Your Blessings (Edwin O. Excell, 1897).  Bad title choice on Ferde's part.

All I know about Conrad Thibault is from this Wikipedia entry. A popular radio singer, he definitely sounds like the Juilliard graduate and student of Emilio de Gogorza that he was.  His treatment of Short'nin' Bread is a classic period example of a spiritual given concert treatment, and Grofe provides the orchestra backing on both Thibault selections.  I'm assuming, but can't be sure, that Grofe arranged, too.  Sure sounds that way.

Clap Yo' Hands is fascinating.  It would have been merely a reasonably "hot" version of the Gershwin number, save for the musical quotations from Grofe's Mississippi Suite!  The quotations come from Father of Waters, the movement missing in Whiteman's recording of the piece.  This side is one of many relics from the 1920s that suggest Mississippi was quite a big hit, including in England.  I think Grand Canyon kind of took over as Grofe's signature work, though this wouldn't have happened right away.  I won't resort to the pun that Father of Waters must have made quite a splash in its day.  Oops.  I just did.

And we have another recording of Grofe and Peter DeRose's "Oriental Fox-Trot Romance" Suez--a good one, by Mark Markel's Orchestra on Okeh.  Then the trebly Original Memphis Five recording of the jazzy Stop Your Kiddin' (another Grofe-co-written number), which had its missing g restored in Frank Westphal's version, also recorded in 1922 but apparently released in 1923.  What's surprising is that both versions have an ODJB sound.  We'd expect that from the Original Memphis Five, but not from a dance band (though Paul Whiteman frequently ended his sides with a Dixieland-style chorus).  Westphal's polyphonic approach is more conservative than the OMF's, but it's still recognizably Dixie.  Westphal had a small discography on Columbia, which is too bad, since his sides were always interesting.

Wonderful One is a very nice waltz written by Whiteman and Grofe.  A huge hit in its day, it became a standard, so I have no idea why it took so much searching in my collection to find a single performance of it (besides Whiteman's own, which I skipped).  Here, the Columbia Dance Orchestra does a nice job with it, and in he year it first took dancers by storm--1923.  A gentle, quiet storm.  Nuthin' But (aka, Nothing But) is a jazzy number by Ferde, Whiteman's star trumpeter Henry Busse, and someone named Sam Ward, who isn't listed in Brian Rust's dance band discography, and so I don't know who he was.  This is the Whiteman version, and only because I lost my Georgians version in my 78 rows someplace.  It's reasonably "hot," though a little repetitious.   César Cui's Orientale was turned into a Fox Trot by Grofe and Whiteman, and we have the Whiteman recording, and I'd have featured the superior electrical-era redo if I had it.  Still, a fascinating example of a light Classic transformed into a dance number--a rather unlikely choice, too.  Queen of Egypt (Grofe and DeRose, again) features some classic Grofe chords, and I wonder if he arranged this.  Abe Lyman, 1923, and you should have seen the label before I Photo-shopped it.

Wang-Wang Blues is almost certainly a Grofe arrangement, and despite a draggy middle section, it's a magnificent example of "tamed" jazz.  It just needed a trumpet player with more imaginative ad-libbing skills.  Whiteman has been derided for the past century for his crime of arranging jazz, despite the fact that the man was simply anticipating the big bands to come, and despite the fact that reading, notating, and arranging are three skills required to function as a jazz musician nowadays, and have been for some time.  I keep hoping the idiot take on Whiteman will be revised, but it's carried on mindlessly and dutifully, as if discounted myths warranted respect simply because they're part of a critical tradition.

We get the acoustical and electrical recordings of By the Waters of Minnetonka, giving us a great chance to hear what the same score sounds like in both recording modes.  Putting them side by side makes for a fun effect, I think.  Grofe's typically amazing score is jazz only in the dated jazzing-the-Classics sense, and what's most fun is the ingenious opening, which anticipates the Indian-attack section of Mississippi Suite.

Gershwin's The Yankee Doodle Blues (1922) gets semi-ODJB treatment by Paul Whiteman's sub-group the Virginians, and the Williams College collection credits Grofe with an arrangement of this song--most likely, it's this one.  This is another worn disc that sounded better with my regular 2.7 mil stylus.  The whole-tone coda makes it about 100 percent certain Grofe scored this.

Then two more Grofe dance arrangements from the jazzing-the-Classics tradition, and they're beautifully done.  They are Rimsky-Kosakow (sic)'s Hymn to the Sun and Fritz Kreisler's Caprice Viennois, because nothing back then said "class" like using French in your titles.  The Whiteman/Grofe tradition of turning concert pieces into dance music was huge during the big band era, but because of the Whiteman-wasn't-jazz attitude, efforts like these are viewed as oddities rather than precursors or prototypes.

Whispering and The Japanese Sandman are two gorgeous 1928 Grofe re-arrangements of the two huge Whiteman hits of 1920, probably intended to show how far their music had evolved.  I'd call it a successful attempt.  Then we leap forward to 1941 for a rip that took some work to bring to life--Grofe's March for Americans, recorded in 1941 by Meredith Willson, from Willson's Modern American Music 12-inch 78 set, which I used to own in full.  Repeated attempts yielded a quiet rip with body and punch--hard to achieve when the pressing is noisy and slightly warped.  Best rip of the playlist, I think.  On CD, I have Whiteman doing the march on a radio broadcast.  Lightweight but pleasing, this march zips by so fast and with so much conviction, it can be forgiven all faults (such as a modulation that, after umpteen listens, still sounds wrong).  There's something irresistible about this march--completely without pretension, and penned by someone who loved and respected the march form.  And Willson's orchestra is pretty astounding on it.

A complete turnover in mood with Grofe's gorgeous arrangement of Edward MacDowell's timelessly beautiful To a Wild Rose, once such a standard light piece that it almost became a joke.  Too much popularity isn't always a good thing.  Nowadays, we can appreciate it as a masterful mood piece, and boy, does Grofe get the point.  Chester Hazlett's sub-toned clarinet is perfect for the minimal score, and the minimal score is perfect for Hazlett's clarinet.  Sound quality is astounding for 1929.  MacDowell, Grofe, and Hazlett are the winners on this side.  And the listener, to use the corny ad line.

Took work and time to get this together, and I wouldn't have done it for anyone but Ferde.  And you guys.  A typo on the Clap Yo' Hands file--"Columbia 802" should be "Columbia 802D."  Oops.





DOWNLOAD: Grofe on Shellac 




Count Your Blessings (From "Joe Palooka," Guest-Caesar-Grofe)--Will Osborne and His Orch., v: Osborne (Oriole 2807, 1933)
The Last Round-Up (Billy Hill)--Conrad Thibualt, Baritone, w. Ferde Grofe Orch. (Victor 24404, 1933)
Short'nin' Bread (Wood-Wolfe)--Same
Clap Yo' Hands (Gershwin-Gershwin)--Fred Rich and His Hotel Astor Orch.. v
 The Crooners (Columbia 802D; 1926)
Suez (F. Grofe-P. DeRose)--(Mike) Markel's Orchestra (Okeh 4614, 1922)
Stop Your Kiddin' (Mills-Grofe-McHugh)--The Original Memphis Five (Regal 9395, 1922)
Wonderful One--Waltz (Whiteman and Grofe)--Columbia Dance Orch. (Columbia A3859, 1923)
Nuthin' But (Busse-Ward-Grofe)--Paul Whiteman and His Orch. (Victor 19073, 1923)
Oriental (Cui's "Orientale," Arr. Whiteman and Grofe)--Paul Whiteman and His Orch. (Victor 18940, 1922)
Queen of Egypt (Grofe-De Rose)--(Abe) Lyman's California Ambassador Orch. (Brunswick 2481, 1923)
Wang-Wang Blues (Mueller-Johnson-Busse, Arr. Grofe)--Paul Whiteman and His Orch. (Victor 18694, 1920)
By the Waters of Minnetonka (Thurlow Lieurance, Arr. Grofe)--Paul Whiteman and His Orch. (Victor 19391, 1924)
By the Waters of Minnetonka (Thurlow Lieurance, Arr. Grofe--Same (Victor 21796, 1928)
Stop Your Kidding (Mills-Grofe-McHugh)--Frank Westphal and His Orch. (Columbia A3786, 1923)
The Yankee Doodle Blues (Gershwin, Arr. Grofe)--The Virginians, Dir. Ross Gorman (Victor 18913, 1922)
Hymn to the Sun (Rimsky-Korsakow, Arr. Grofe)--Paul Whiteman and His Orch. (Victor 19862, 1925)
Caprice Viennois--Waltz (Fritz Kreisler, Arr. Grofe)--Same
Whispering (John Schonberger, Arr. Grofe)--Same (Victor 21731, 1928)
The Japanese Sandman (Egan-Whiting, Arr. Grofe)--Same
March for Americans (Grofe)--Meredith Willson and His Concert Orchestra (Decca 29104, 1941)
To a Wild Rose (Edward MacDowell, Arr. Grofe)--Chester H. Hazlett of the Paul Whiteman Orch., Sub-tone Clarinet (Columbia 1844-D, 1929)



Lee