Posted 6:29 PM by Gene

Ever since I started this blog I've wanted to devote every week to a review of CDs I have, and so if you will forgive my verbosity I discuss tonight a great jazzman and a great record producer.

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Though he cut only twenty commercial sides in his horribly short life (he died of TB at 22), Charlie Christian was a huge influence in jazz because he brought it the electric guitar. He was to the instrument what his boss Benny Goodman was to the clarinet: precise, never wasting a note, with a born intelligence for improvising, and when the music required it, a warm, understated eloquence. It stretches credulity to claim he invented bop, as some would, but its primordial stirrings are surely there. His impact was immediate -- we hear it in the King Cole Trio, which owes a lot of its emotional wallop to the guitar -- and it was long lasting, through his de facto "pupils" Wes Montgomery and George Benson, whose sound is uncannily like Christian's, but then they obviously studied under the right teacher.

Two years back Sony issued a four-disc box (literally a box, shaped like Christian's Gibson guitar amp) of his tracks with Goodman's sextet, plus three sides with the band. Calling it The Genius of the Electric Guitar is pure show-biz bunk but we can't deny something God-given is here, something more than mere talent. The sextet is odd for its low-key, almost cerebral sound, thanks to the pairing of Goodman's high-polished style and Lionel Hampton's vibes; it sounds like jivey chemists at work. But if it didn't scream it was never less than sublime. With the band Christian did two jazz classics: Fletcher Henderson's up-tempo "Honeysuckle Rose" and the great "Solo Flight," exactly as named. The set ends with a remarkable document: a twenty-four-minute jam session with the sextet minus Benny and bass, which despite extremely variable audio emerges as jazz in its rarest of forms: swinging and ethereally beautiful.

I recommend this box but with two big qualifiers: first, because Christian recorded so little and because jazz buffs are obsessive completists it has LOTS of repetitive alternates (Benny seems to have loved his own tunes; one has ten takes through two sessions); it's best to skip those on first hearing and just go for the good parts. Second is its notorious packaging: the imitation guitar amp was okay, but someone decided to win a Grammy® by putting the discs not in jewel boxes but in a foam piece with slits; mine came from the factory scuffed, and one was scratched. To be sure, scuffing and scratching do nothing to the sound, but it is exasperating to work the discs in and out, and the design can't prolong their life. (Fortunately Sony's excellent Count Basie set came in a conventional jewel box. More on that later.)

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Goddard Lieberson was the Bill Paley of music. If this sounds like an insult (and one could think that given what Paley's life ultimately amounted to) it isn't; despite his surface flash and flair (he signed his letters "God") he was perhaps the greatest producer and businessman records ever knew. He helped push the LP; he all but invented the audiobook by greenlighting Ed Murrow's I Can Hear It Now (the most important record ever made, but that requires some time); he pioneered mail-order media by founding what is now Columbia House, and most important, he signed a galaxy of stars, from Leonard Bernstein to The Nose to Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan; he made Columbia the preeminent label through two decades, until Steve Ross's embalmers at Warner invented disposable music. (Several minuses: he was two years behind RCA in recording in stereo, and he hired LEGENDARY DAVIS, who hired LEGENDARY YETNIKOFF.)

His greatest triumph of all, the reason his name will live, was in his cast albums, almost ninety of them, some of the finest recordings the industry knew; superb albums with taste and intelligence and an unmistakable sound; he brought Broadway to records, and thus to the masses, and for long as he recorded cast albums the musical thrived, though it was already in its waning days. Lately the niche label DRG has been licensing some Sony/CBS product, mostly flop musicals from the early sixties; that hardly matters because these albums are highly entertaining.

Bravo Giovanni for one stars the Italian tenor Cesare Siepi and Michele Lee in a show that I think has something to do with an Italian restaurant in Rome that serves chicken chow mein (one cannot be sure with flop musicals, or their liner notes), and the producers seemed to know it was a commercially dubious proposition because they ordered its orchestrator make the music LOUD!, and the conductor to play it LOUDER!!, and the songs (by Milton Schafer, who had one hit in his career, "He Touched Me") have cute little annoying tics, but they're so well sung (especially by the great character actor George S. Irving; who knew he had such a voice?) you don't notice.

First Impressions was a misbegotten Abe Burrows adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, with a score by three writers (including George David Weiss, co-inventor of "Can't Help Falling in Love") who don't know when to set the music, so they set it anywhere; Polly Bergen and Farley Grainger's accents suffer from jet lag. Happily Hermione Gingold has the time of her life after her smash in Gigi, and if Miss Bergen's part should really be sung by a Barbara Cook -- she's too breathy alto and worldly-wise -- again it scarce matters when a whole album has such a smiling glow.

The Happiest Girl in the World was a short-lived attempt to set Aristophanes's Lysistrata to Offenbach and E. Y. "Yip" Harburg; but somehow the great operettist seems mildly antediluvian next to sex, and Harburg's lyrics are very good as always (he held down the preciousness this time), but not wickedly funny as they must be; it's the sort of show that can only exist in the ideal of one's head, as uninhibited eroticism and real life don't mesh. Lieberson's firm hand overcomes the weaknesses, not least in some of the singing; and there will never be another Cyril Ritchard.

Upcoming on DRG's release schedule is something unaccountably out of print for decades: The Mad Show. I've never heard it; I question how mirth-provoking it can be with songs by the tuneless Mary Rodgers and a pseudonymous lyric by HERR DOKTOR SONDHEIM. Still it's one more reissue to look forward to. Now why couldn't DRG license What Makes Sammy Run? from the schlockmeisters Steve and Eydie and do some vault research to issue it in stereo?

P. S. I see one of the omnipotent POWER LINE gang acknowledges that Mark Steyn wrote a book about musicals, and all but confesses it's beyond his understanding by labeling it "eccentric," but we'll assume it's okay because he's a true believer. Honest, what SUPERMEGAGIGABLOGGERS will TYPE....