A Portrait Of Shorty

Last week I was trolling for LPs in one of my favorite antique malls and came across a superb copy of Portrait Of Shorty (left), the 1958 release by Shorty Rogers And His Giants on the RCA label.  Except for one light paper scuff, the vinyl appears unplayed.  And except for a small rub at the bottom, the jacket looks like it just came out of the shrink wrap.  It's a solid NM/EX copy.

I'm always amazed to find albums that are almost as old as I am  in nearly new condition.  After I bought it and brought it home, I couldn't help but wonder where the album has been for the last 64 years.  Did someone buy it in 1958, play it once (or not at all), and then put it in the closet where it sat until their grandkids found it while cleaning out the house?  A possible clue is that the back of the album is stamped "Special Issue," a marking I've never seen before, but which likely indicates that it was a promotional pressing, maybe sent out to a music critic, newspaper, or other publication in the hopes of generating a favorable review or a mention in a roundup of new releases.  Alas, we'll never know.  

Although Portrait Of Shorty came out the same year (1958) that the first commercial stereo LPs were released in the U.S., there is no stereo version of this disc.  Which is no matter, because Shorty's big-band arrangements sound terrific in glorious mono.  The album appears on RCA's "white dog" label (right) and is a deep-groove pressing from RCA's plant in Rockaway, NJ.  The jacket and labels promote RCA's "New Orthophonic" High Fidelity sound.  [In case you're wondering, the term Orthophonic was first used in 1925 to indicate a record that was no longer recorded acoustically (i.e. by yelling into an inverted  megaphone), but by using electronic amplifiers and microphones.  RCA's "New" Orthophonic sound was the name for RCA's version of the RIAA curve, a process used to decrease the bass while cutting the lacquer in order to keep the groove size more uniform (and keep the stylus from jumping off the record.)  The bass was/is added back by the phono preamp during playback.]  But never mind all of that: The sound is fabulous. 

Shorty Rogers

Rogers' 18-piece big band on Portrait Of Shorty includes a Who's Who of West Coast jazz all-stars, including Herb Geller, Bill Holman, Pepper Adams, Frank Rosolino, Al Porcino, Bob Enevoldsen, Conte Candoli, Monte Budwig and Richie Kamuca.  The liner notes provide a handy list of the soloists on each track so you can follow along while listening.

The songs and arrangements on Portrait Of Shorty are an excellent representation of the sophistication and imagination of Rogers' arranging and composing skills.  The album also neatly combines both major facets of Rogers' musical career - his formative early years in some of the best big bands in the country, and the transition to small group, improvisational jazz that was taking place in the mid to late 1950s.  While Portrait is very much a swinging big band album, Rogers and most of the other musicians get plenty of room to stretch out and solo in front of a wall of sound.

Shorty's 1st release (1952)

Shorty Rogers was born Milton Rajonsky in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1924.  A precocious talent on trumpet, by the early 1940s he was already performing professionally with groups led by Will Bradley and Red Norvo.  After a stint in the Army, Rogers was hired by Woody Herman and in 1945 moved to California to become part of the legendary band leader's "Thundering Herd."  The various iterations of the "Herd" made up some of the finest ensembles of jazz musicians ever assembled, and helped launch the careers of such notable musicians as Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Serge Chaloff, Flip Phillips, Buddy Rich, Pete Candoli, Red Norvo, Jimmy Rowles, Gene Ammons, Oscar Pettiford, Terry Gibbs, Shelly Manne, and of course, Shorty Rogers.  In addition, the Herd was the crucible of what would later become the West Coast jazz movement. 

Playing and arranging for Herman, it wasn't long before Rogers began to attract more attention in the jazz world.  Not surprisingly, in 1950 rival band leader Stan Kenton hired Rogers away from Herman.  During the two years that Rogers was with Kenton, his compositions and arrangements further cemented his reputation as one of the jazz world's brightest young stars.  In 1952, Rogers left Kenton and put together his first group -- Shorty Rogers And His Giants -- a band that included Art Pepper, Shelley Manne, Jimmy Giuffre, and Hampton Hawes.  They recorded their first release (a 10" LP), Modern Sounds (above), for Capitol that same year.  Rogers' tight and innovative arrangements on this recording are considered by many to be as important musically as Gil Evans' arrangements for Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool.  

For the next decade, Rogers continued to perform, arrange, and release new albums, becoming one of the seminal figures in the West Coast jazz movement.  However, in the early 1960s, as jazz music was being swamped by the tidal wave of rock 'n' roll, Rogers made the prudent decision to stop performing and devote himself to the more financially secure work of writing and arranging music for television and motion pictures.  The 1962 album, Jazz Waltz (right), was his last recording with the Giants for the next 16 years.

During the 1970s and 80s, Rogers became a prolific contributor to television and to a lesser extent films.  Among the series he scored or wrote incidental music for were "The Partridge Family," "The Mod Squad," "The Rookies," "Starsky and Hutch," and "The Love Boat." He also composed and conducted the music for a number of innovative cartoons featuring the work of Dr. Seuss and Stan Freberg.

In the 1980s, Rogers returned to performing, eventually forming a combo with West Coast legend Bud Shank on alto sax and releasing a number of new albums. Sadly, Rogers was diagnosed with melanoma in the early 1990s and died in 1994.  [NB: Much of the bio info above was cribbed from Wikipedia and  Spaceagepop.com, because, how in the world would I remember all this stuff?]

I mention all this because not too long ago I was watching some old episodes of "Peter Gunn" on Amazon Prime.  "Peter Gunn" is one of the hippest TV shows of all time.  It ran for three seasons on NBC (1958-1960) and starred Craig Stevens as the sophisticated, unflappable, and impeccably-dressed private eye, Peter Gunn.

Lola Wants You (1957) and Dreamsville (1959)

The show was one of the first TV programs to prominently feature jazz music, not only in the dynamite theme song by Henry Mancini, but as a motif.  When he isn't chasing bad guys, our hero Peter Gunn hangs out in an LA jazz club called Mother's, where his girlfriend Edie Hart (played by actress Lola Albright) is the singer.  The club appears in nearly every episode, as does Edie, who gets to sing a song in about half the episodes.  Before "Peter Gunn," Lola Albright was an aspiring actress and singer who had appeared in several TV shows and movies, and who had put out an album in 1957 called Lola Wants You (above).  Following the success of the first season of "Peter Gunn," Albright released a second album in 1959 called Dreamsville (above) which was arranged and conducted by Henry Mancini, who scored all the music for "Peter Gunn."  [In 2017, the reissue label Fresh Sounds put out a two-fer CD with the Google-search friendly title of The Jazz Singer On The "Peter Gunn" TV Series that contains both albums.]

Lola Albright at left, Shorty Rogers in the middle

The neat thing about the jazz sequencies in "Peter Gunn" is that Edie's on-screen backup bands feature a rotating cast of top West Coast jazzmen, including our very own Shorty Rogers.  Rogers appears in an episode called "The Frog," which was the fifth episode of the first season.  

After the opening sequence, when our hero Peter Gunn gets roughed up and shoots a bad guy, he turns up at Mother's (with not a hair out of place) where Edie is rehearsing the classic song "How High The Moon," which includes a tasty flugelhorn solo by Rogers [watch here].  

In his 1989 biography "Did They Mention The Music?", Henry Mancini talks about how as a struggling young composer/arranger he got his first big break scoring the music for "Peter Gunn."  Mancini says that he was coming out of the barber shop on the lot of Universal Studios one day when he ran into the producer Blake Edwards.  The two knew each other from some previous work together, and after a few minutes of chit chat, Edwards asked Mancini if he would be interested in working on a new series he was producing, called "Peter Gunn."  Mancini eagerly accepted even though he initially had the impression that "Peter Gunn" was a Western.  Edwards told Mancini to meet with Lola Albright to work out an arrangement for a song that Albright would sing in the show.  Mancini and Albright got on well together, and Edwards was pleased with the arrangement, so he hired Mancini and asked him to compose a theme song for the show.  The result is the iconic music for "Peter Gunn," which, even if you think you don't know it, you do.  [Listen here.]  

Mancini goes on to say that when the producers decided to release a soundtrack album for "Peter Gunn," he immediately tried to get the much more well-known and experienced Shorty Rogers to arrange and play the music.  Rogers, however, urged Mancini to record it himself since it was his music. 

Though RCA wasn't thrilled about releasing an album by the relatively unknown Mancini, they reluctantly agreed.  The album (right), which was released in 1959, was an overnight sensation and eventually sold more than a million copies, spending two years on the Billboard charts and launching Mancini's recording career.  It also won him the first two of his 20 Grammy awards.  [Not to mention four Oscars and a Golden Globe].  

One last note.  In 1959, a year after the successful debut of "Peter Gunn," NBC thought it would be a good idea to launch yet another jazz-themed detective show, this one called "Johnny Staccato."  It stars John Cassavetes as a jazz pianist who's a private detective on the side.  He works out of a club called Waldo's (this time in Greenwich Village).  But the similarities don't end there.  "Staccato" features a driving theme song that calls to mind "Peter Gunn" (though written not by Mancini but the great film composer Elmer Bernstein).  In addition, Staccato's band features another stellar group of West Coast jazzmen.  The first episode actually opens with a nice easy jam played by Pete Candoli on trumpet, Barney Kessel on guitar, Shelly Manne on drums, Red Mitchell on bass, Red Norvo on vibes, and Cassavetes (actually Johnny Williams) on piano [watch here].  Unfortunately, "Johnny Staccato" only ran for one season.  Most, if not all of the episodes are available on YouTube.  It's don't miss TV.

Enjoy the music!

A Brief Classical Interlude

While it has become nearly impossible to find nice, clean copies of jazz and rock albums at thrift stores or in the dollar bins at used record stores, I regularly come across pristine copies of classical LPs selling for next to nothing.  Even though I don't listen to a lot of classical music these days, I often will pick up a few titles just because it's hard to resist like-new pressings on venerable labels like Deutsche Grammophon, Angel, Mercury Living Presence, ECM, or Harmonia Mundi. 

One of my recent thrift shop finds

In a recent trip to drop off some donations at our local thrift store, I stopped (as I always do) to see what LPs they had.  I rarely find anything interesting; the selection is nearly always a pile of scratched up 1960s soundtracks, along with the collected works of Barbra Streisand and Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass.  However, this time there was a pretty large cache of like-new classical titles.  Since they were only fifty cents apiece, I didn't really look too closely at the titles, but just bought the whole bunch, about 25 LPs.  

I spend about 85% of my listening time playing jazz records.  The other 15% of the time I play classic rock, vocals, and R&B, with some international music and a few soundtracks thrown in.  Many years ago, I used to listen frequently to classical music.  I have a particular fondness for Vivaldi, and have dozens of LPs of his work, including a bunch of obscure Eastern Bloc releases on the Hungaroton, Supraphon, and Electrocord labels that I picked up when we were working at the U.S. Embassy in Romania back in the 1980s. 

Though I was never a serious classical music collector, I enjoyed learning more about the major composers and their music.  Over the years, however, I pretty much stopped listening to classical music and eventually moved the 500 or so classical LPs in my collection to overflow shelves in the garage to make room for more jazz.

When I got my recent thrift shop haul home, I couldn't resist cleaning a few and having a listen.  I hadn't bothered checking all the albums at the store, but I'm happy to report that nearly all of them are in like-new condition, with clean vinyl, original poly-lined inner sleeves, and nice sharp jackets.  As a bonus, I discovered that seven of the titles are works by Vivaldi.  I assumed that the LPs all came from the same collector, and my hunch was confirmed when I saw that nearly all of the jackets had the same small sticker on the front that says "Sound Guard," (above) together with a date from 1982.  Hmmm.

Sound Guard's space-age formula

According to a vintage ad for Sound Guard that I found online, the formula behind the product was originally developed by Ball Bros. of Denver as a space-age (literally) lubricant for use on NASA satellites.  Sound Guard was a consumer off-shoot which was said to put a microscopic coating on vinyl records to protect the surface from wear and reduce static buildup.  Though Sound Guard is now defunct, other similar products that claim to protect the vinyl surface are still around, including LAST and Gruv-Glide.  I have used both LAST and Gruv-Glide from time to time, but don't have strong feelings about them.  As far as I can hear, they don't degrade the sound, but whether or not they protect the record or decrease wear, I couldn't say.

Another common thread with the classical albums I found was that nearly all of the titles are recordings of small ensembles, including such things as Mozart's Clarinet Quintet, Rossini's String Sonatas, Vivaldi's Bassoon Concerti, String Concerti by Telemann, Schumann's Works For Cello And Piano, and Quartets by Mendelssohn.  Nary a symphony in the bunch, which is fine with me as I tend to prefer smaller ensembles as well.  Finally, about half the titles were released on the Musical Heritage Society label.

MHS's familiar green and silver label

The Musical Heritage Society (MHS) was a subscription record club founded in 1962 in New York.  I was a member of the club for several years in the 1970s.  Like the major-label record clubs, they would mail out a notice promoting the new monthly release, and if you didn't want the title you had to send back a post card telling them not to send it.  I suspect that they made most of their money from people who forgot to send in the card.  The difference between MHS and the major label record clubs like RCA or Columbia, was that MHS specialized in classical music (although they did release a few jazz titles in later years).  

A major draw for MHS releases was that they were popularly priced.  As I recall, they were a dollar or two less than major-label classical titles.  MHS was able to keep costs down because they didn't record their own content (at least initially).  They licensed recordings from small European classical labels -- particularly Erato of France.  Erato (and other similar classical labels) kept their costs down by recording works for smaller ensembles (much cheaper than hiring an entire orchestra), including first-rate groups such as the Chamber Orchestra of Lausanne, I Solisti Veneti, the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Munich, the Gulbenkian Orchestra of Lisbon, and the London Mozart Players.  

Despite the budget price, MHS releases were well made with quality masters from studios such as Masterdisk, and plating and pressing by high-end plants such as Europadisk.  At least to my ears, the sound quality is excellent, with flat, quiet surfaces, heavy-weight vinyl, and nice touches such as poly-lined dust sleeves.  The covers were simple -- generally black text on white cardboard stock with a period engraving or drawing as cover art (right).

Even though the European ensembles are not always household names, the performances are first-rate.  For example, one of my Vivaldi finds (Bassoon Concerti, right) was performed by the London Mozart Players (LMP).  I confess that I had never heard of the London Mozart Players.  But after a bit of research, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they have been around for more than 70 years.  The ensemble was founded in 1949 by director Harry Blech, and their debut performance that same year featured a young violinist named Neville Marriner (Sir Neville, CBE, CH to his friends).  The London Mozart Players are extremely active in musical education and outreach, and maintain a full calendar of UK and international concerts.

Regardless of the genre of the music, I always enjoy reading the liner notes and learning more about the composer or the musicians on a particularly recording.  One of the first LPs I listened to from my classical haul was a UK Decca release of Rossini's String Sonatas (top photo).  It was originally recorded in 1967 and performed by the celebrated Academy of St-Martin-in-the-Fields, conducted by Neville Marriner -- the same young whippersnapper, who, 18 years earlier, played violin in the London Mozart Players' debut concert.  Rossini is, of course, primarily known as a composer of operas, including The Barber of Seville and William Tell.  Since I'm not a big opera fan, I really didn't know much about his work.  So I was fascinated to read in the liner notes that Rossini composed the sonatas on the album in 1804, when he was twelve years old.  Yikes.

Enjoy the music!