Buskin Spotlights Berlin

 

Bushkin Spotlights Berlin

Bushkin Spotlights Berlin

Joe Bushkin Plays Fifty Irving Berlin Hit Tunes

Arrangements: Joe Bushkin and Glenn Osser

Cover Photography: Derujinsky

Design and Typography: Bob Cato

Notes by Gilbert Millstein of The New York Times

Capitol Records T 911

1957

From the back cover: Joe Bushkin is a slender, exuberant man, a pianist, composer and arranger of superb talents and impeccable taste upon whom what may very likely be the ultimate cachet was bestowed a number of years ago by Frank Sinatra, a tall pillar of rectitude in artistic matters. "One of the things I hated to leave when I quit the Dorsey band," Sinatra said, "was the piano playing of Joe Bushkin." He had another, equally cogent reason for gratification: It was while playing with Tommy Dorsey's band that Joe wrote his first song, "Oh Look At Me Now," which became Sinatra's first hit. In the course of a career marked by an initial precocity and a steady maturation, Bushkin has served his muse outwardly with a sort of gay, effortless distinction and consideration extemporaneous wit; with what inward trepidation he moved and shook her is not apparent. He remains unmarked. Joe did tours of duty with Bunny Berigan, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong. During the war, he was swept up in the impressive array of talent that constituted the cast of the Army Air Force's production, "Winged Victory," and succeeded David Rose as its musical director. Later, he was sent to the Pacific and wound up in Tokyo, without his piano. After the war, he appeared in night clubs and theaters an on radio and television. In 1949, he became an actor (thus releasing a long-held, ill-suppressed desire), playing a musician in Garson Kanin's "The Rat Race," for which he also wrote the incidental music. The music of Irving Berlin has long been a preoccupation of Bushkin's. He has recorded some of it from time to time and he has even played it in Carnegie Hall. When it came to his attention that 1957 would signalize Berlin's fiftieth anniversary as a composer, Bushkin undertook the task of selecting fifty of the master's greatest songs (the choices were difficult ones) and recording them for Capitol. He could think of no more heartfelt tribute. His readings of the songs are proof enough of his sentiments.