Bongos Bongos Bongs - Los Amiradors

Unchained Melody

Bongos Bongos Bongos
Performances By Los Admiradores
Produced and Directed by Enoch Light
Associate Producer Julie Klages
Recording Chief: Robert Fine
Mastering: George Piros
Art Directions and Cover Art by Charles E. Murphy
Command Records RS 809 SD
1959 Grand Awards Record Co. Inc.

From the inside cover: To start with, there are two very essential men for an album in which bongos are featured – a pair of the greatest masters of this instrument, Willie Rodriguez and Don Lamond. Rodriquez is celebrated as the greatest living virtuoso on Latin American and Afro-Cuban drums, a field in which he has long been the top teacher in this country. Lamond, one of the greatest jazz drummers (he was the driving force behind Woody Herman's classic First Herd), shifted part of his attention to the bongos when the Afro-Cuban influence entered jazz late in the 1940s and has since developed a skill on them that has all but overshadowed his great career in jazz. The unusually strong percussion section also includes Ted Sommer, another graduate of big band jazz, who works over the customary band drummer's assembly, and the versatile Artie Marotti who plays vibraharp, xylophone, tympani and anything else that needs an authoritative whack.

The guitarist of the group is the inimitable Tony Mottola, master technician and an outstanding influence in shaping the present-day use of the guitar. For years and years he has been Perry Como's accompanist and a mainstay on the Como TV show. The rhythm section is rounded out by the brilliant piano of Moe Wechsler, a musician of startlingly polished precision, and bassist Bob Haggart, famed as one of the most creative members of the Bob Crosby band twenty years ago and since then an incredibly busy New York studio man because, as one conductor recently said, "No one else plays so clean and so right."

The brass make up a section in microcosm. On trumpet is the enormously talented Pee Wee Erwin, onetime Tommy Dorsey star and more recently leader of his own authoritative jazz group. The trombonist is another musician whose name is tied with Tommy Dorsey – Bobby Byrne, who took Tommy's place in the Dorsey Brothers orchestra and later led a tremendously successful band of his own. To give the section a strong floor, there is a bass trombone played by Tommy Mitchell, a brilliant specialist on this unusual instrument. The reed section is headed by Stanley Webb who is revered among his fellow musicians as a perfectionist. As you will hear in this album, he spreads his perfection around for he plays baritone saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet, tenor and alto flute, piccolo and English horn in these selections. The section is filled out by a pair of reed men whose playing is noted for the finish, exactness and fullness that meet Stanley Webb's ideas of perfection – Milt Yaner on alto saxophone and Ezelle Watson on tenor saxophone.

Tenderly
Bidin' My Time
Sylvie
All Of Me
Greensleeves
Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea
Blue Moon
Unchained Melody
Don't Blame Me
Londonderry Air
The Very Thought Of You
You And The Night And The Music