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Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Fiddle On Fire - Joe Venuti

I Want To Be Happy
Fiddle On Fire
Joe Venuti
Accompanied by Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra
Grand Award
G.A. 33-351
1957

Billed on this Enoch Light Grand Award release as "The World's Greatest Jazz Violinist".

This is a fine album with a sound that seems ahead of it's time on a number of tracks. I'm not sure who was working with Whiteman at this time or if there were a few New York session men sitting in with his people. But the piano work and the guitar work are as "on fire" as Venuti's Fiddle.

Curiously, Whiteman's list of "major" recordings ends on his wiki page with a 1956 release.

Venuti's wiki page places him in "relative obscurity in the 1940s and 1950s." He was playing with Jack Statham at the Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas during this period.

3 comments:

  1. Hmmm. There's more interesting stuff on Joe and Paul at the Bixography Forum. Seen it? Joe recorded into the 1970s with some big names. Also there's some myster/discrepency about when he appear with Paul Whiteman. Here's a main link and follow the threads a the bottom to see some of his work in mid-1970s:
    http://www.network54.com/Forum/27140/message/1225652564/A+weird+story+about+Bea-Bee+Palmer+,Joe+Venuti+and+Paul+Whiteman+from+Milt+Hinton

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  2. Thanks Nancy. This album, apparently recorded is so much later, is curious. I would expect information to be incorrect on budget labels, but not on Light projects. He was very concerned with giving credit to just about everyone involved on his projects, including the album cover artist on this release.

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  3. Just magical! I love anyone that can make a violin speak!

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