Bob Crosby In Hi Fi

 

Louise Louise

Bob Crosby and His Orchestra

In Hi Fi

Coral Records CRL 57062

1956

Trumpets - Conrad Gozzo, Frank Beach, Charlie Teagarden, John Best, 

Trombones - Elmer Schneider, Abe Lincoln, Joe Howard

Alto Sax - Jack Dumont

Tenor Sax - Eddie Miller, Jack Chaney

Baritone Sax - Den Eckels

Clarinet - Matty Matlock

Piano - Al Pelegrini

Guitar - Al Hendrickson

Bass - Morty Corb

Drums - Jack Sperling

From the back cover: Of all the great bands that made the Swing Era swing, none was as completely individual as Bob Crosby's band. It was a band with a genuine ensemble personality, a style that was immediately identifiable and a unique flair for musical cross-breeding.

At the root of its style was something which would be dismissed as a contradiction in terms if the Crosby band hadn't actually proved it could happen – orchestrated Dixieland. It takes a lot of light, bright energy and sparkle to make a 14-piece band bounce and skip along like a little six or seven-piece two-beat group, and it is one of the miracles of big band jazz that the Corsbyites managed to do it. The band played many of the old Dixieland standards, of course, but it also went forging in all kinds of musical fields to find material to adapt to its own swinging purposes. And at the same time, new – or shined up – works kept pouring out of the band, the majority of them by Crosby's brilliant bassist, Bob Haggart.

An amazing number of these adaptations and originals are now looked on as jazz classics. Significantly, most of them have not been taken up by other bands but have maintained their fame simply on the basis of the way they were performed by the Crosby band, a band which was scattered to four winds in 1942 by the demands of World War II.

Twelve of these Crosby classics are given their first high fidelity recording in this album. To make them, Bob brought together a band that mixes a couple of the most distinctive stars of his original band with some of the best musicians-in residence on the West Coast. Matty Matlock's cream-toned clarinet and Eddie Miller's urgent tenor saxophone are in their accustomed places. The trumpet solos are the work of Charlie Teagarden, who might be called a premature Crosbyite: he as not actually in the original Crosby band but he was an important cog in the Ben Pollack band from which the nucleus of the Crosby band came. The big-voiced trombone, an essential element of the Crosby formula, is played here by Abe Lincoln who has been one of the lustier buffers and puffers for the past quarter of a century.

That the Crosby band was much more than an over-sized Dixie outfit can be seen from the range of this group of selections. They emphasize, among other things, the important role the Bob Haggart played in the band's success: Five of these pieces list the indefatigable Haggart as either composer of co-composer.

Ray Baud, the old Crosby drummer, and Matty Matlock helped Haggart write the flamboyant Smokey Mary, an uptempo framework for solos – on this occasion – by Matlock, Teagarden, Miller, Lincoln, pianist Al Pellegrini and drummer Jack Sperling. On Haggart's lazy Dogtown Blues, the familiar redd voicing of the Crosby band sneaks in between Charlie Teagarden's two solos and the piece winds up with a typical rich-hued Crosby ride-out ensemble.

What's New is best known now as a ballad but Haggart originally conceived it as an instrumental showcase for Billy Butterfield's trumpet. In those days, before Johnny Burke had turned out lyrics for it, it was called I'm Free. Charlie Teagarden takes over Billy Butterfield's solo role in this hi-fi version.

Haggart was involved as both performer and composer on The Big Noise From Winnetka. This was an odd duet for string bass and drums, cooked up by Haggart and Bauduc during the Crosby band's long stand at the Blackhawk Restaurant in Chicago, in which each man plumed some of the depths of his instrument until Baud turned to Haggart's bass and started whacking the strings with his drum sticks while Haggart nonchalantly handled the fingering. It got its title from a boisterous enthusiast from Winnetka, Ill., who always requested it when he visited the Blackhawk. This new 1956 arrangement brings the whole band into the picture, with Morty Corb and Jack Sperling taking over the bass and drum assignments.

Probably the greatest of Haggart's collaborative contributions to the band – and certainly the number which is most readily associated with the Crosby band – is the joyous South Rampart Street Parade, conceived in 1937. It is one of the few numbers in the Crosby Book which has proved transferable to other bands.

Of course, the Crosby band had other sources of inspiration besides the fertile Mr. Haggart. It paid close attention to the work of some of the relatively neglected buy nonetheless great jazz pianists. Two of the band's treatments of piano solos – Honky Tonk Train and Gin Mill Blues – are included in this collection. The lat Bob Burke used both of them to build his meteoric reputation while he was the Crosby pianist. Honky Tonk Train, one of the showpieces of the fabulous boogie-woogieist, Meade (Lux) Lewis, is played here by Marvin Ash with his customary light touch. Gin Mill Blues was – and still is – a Joe Sullivan specialty which came into the Crosby book while he was playing piano in the band. It is given a full-band arrangement here with some solo piano by Al Pellegrini and a couple of Matty Matlock's mellow clarinet solos.

One of the charming quirks of the Crosby band was its habit of taking tired, light classical warhorses and electrifying them with a rambunctious two-beat. The Old Spinning Wheel and Skater's Waltz were two of the most successful ventures in this vein and the 1956 Crosbyites tangle with them with that full-bodies zest that has always typified the band's approach to these tunes. In the same spirit, the band picked up a novelty number from overseas that Rudy Valle had been crooning, Vieni, Vieri, and battered the croon out of it, leaving a jumping musical skeleton which is decorated by solos by each of the four featured horn men.

Besides all this, there was always the blues, of course. The Crosby band had a fine collection of lowdown blues but somehow, in their nimble hands even the lowest and downest blues came out with a wry cheerfulness. Louise, Louise and Milk Cow Blues are prized samples of this special talent, augmented here by the singing of Eddie Miller and Nappy Lamar respectively.

Considering the passage of years and changes they have brought in musical tastes, these are amazingly faithful reproductions of a style and feeling in big band jazz that seemed to have disappeared from the scene when the original Crosby band broke up. But here it is back again, large as life and more brilliantly recorded than it has ever been before. – John S. Wilson

Smokey Mary

Dogtown Blues

Honky Tonk Train

Louise, Louise

What's New

The Old Spinning Wheel

Skater's Waltz

Big Noise From Winnetka

Milk Cow Blues

Vieni Vieni

Gin Mill Blues

South Rampart Street Parade