Yolanda

Los Embajadores Criollos – Cofre de Recuerdos
I.E.M.P.S.A., Odeon del Peru, LD-1507

My wife is an avid collector of gems and jewelry. She's an authority if it comes to recognizing gems, stones, and minerals. So when I come across a record cover that features a treasure chest, or another collection of gems and jewelry, I'll take it along. This happens more often than you might think. Especially within Spanish language music records. For some reason the background in most of these records is red, the music often easy listening. But not always! Cofre de Recuerdos by the Peruvian trio Les Embajadores Criollos is a beautifully rendered album of Creole Peruvian songs. Half of the songs on the album have a woman's name as title. What's missing on the record is the customary Maria song. As you may have noticed by now I collect songs about and by Marias. Maria is my wife's name, and she has the most beautiful name in the world but this week we'll have to do with Yolanda (it's a nice name too, isn't it?) Los Embajadores Criollos aka "Los Ídolos del Pueblo" are Romulo Varillos, Alejandro Rodriguez, and Carlos Correa. They formed in 1949 and still perform to this day (even though leader Romulo Varillos died in 1998), the record presented here is probably from the late fifties. Enjoy!

Maria Toledo

Stan Getz & Luiz Bonfa – Jazz Samba Encore!
Verve V6-8523, MGM Records, USA, 1963

Musical Thrift Store Treasures is starting to look more and more like a Who's Who Named Maria. The newest addition in this category is the singer Maria Toledo (1937-2010), the first singer to record bossa nova with Stan Getz, and married to the composer (and Getz collaborator) Luiz Bonfa. Jazz Samba Encore! features besides Getz, Toledo, and Bonfa, also Antonio Carlos Jobim, another Brazilian composer (beside Bonfa) whose fame did in retrospect outshine Getz'. Jazz Samba Encore! was the follow up album to the hugely successful Jazz Samba (Stan Getz with Charlie Byrd) and the precursor to Getz/Gilberto, an even huger success than Jazz Samba. While Jazz Samba is a very familiar record (with the hit Desafinado) in numerous collections, and Getz/Gilberto (with its Girl from Ipanema) a requirement for any record collection, I had never seen or heard Jazz Samba Encore! A simple on-line inquiry to these three records show that there is a fourth one in the "Getz goes bossa nova series". Getz/Gilberto Volume 2 comes like the other three with a signature painting by Olga Albizu on the cover.

Listen to the song Menina Flor, written by Luiz Bonfa and Maria Toledo.

The Lotus Palace

The Alan Lorber Orchestra – The Lotus Parade
Verve Records, MGM, V6-8711, 1967
Made in the USA, Alan Lorber Productions, Inc.

This week's tune is by The Alan Lorber Orchestra. I had announced its coming last week by virtue of the nudity on the cover. In Wikipedia I read (I had never heard of Alan Lorber or that record) that Lorber was a leading arranger of pop music in the 1960s and that he created the so called "Bosstown Sound" (or "Boston Sound"), he had recorded over 2,000 records that earned well over $60 million. The Lotus Palace is one of the few records under Lorber's own name and his best known. The music on the record are played with electronic pop, and classical Indian musical instruments. The intention was to make a hybrid of pop, jazz, and Indian music, but the results are cheap and cheezy easy listening tunes, mostly soft versions of well known pop standards such as Up, Up and Away, and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Still, it's all well done—and for the sake of novelty—it resides in my collection's A-list. The pick of the litter is the tune Roopaka Dha Teri Dhin Dhin, the only song on the LP that is not a cover version but written for the occasion. The author is Collin Walcott, who plays the sitar on the record.

Hot Rhythm

Cal Tjader Mambo Quintet – Ritmo Caliente!
Fantasy Records, 3-216, 1957, San Francisco

The 1950s was the decade in which the 10" 78 rpm records were gradually replaced with the 12" 33 rpm ones. And cheesecake erotica covers appeared as soon as the LPs came along apparently to increase sale numbers. It probably worked too but I wouldn't know to what extend. I do know for a fact that there are record collectors out there that buy every depiction of nudity on a sleeve they can get their hands on. I'm not one of them but a cute nude picture doesn't deter my selections either. The naked women on the sleeves in the 50s and 60s were somewhat obscured as full nudity was taboo still. Three major categories can be distinguished: multiple exposures as on the Cal Tjader above, body paint (as on a famous Paul Mauriat cover), and slide projections. Next week's post will have an example of slide projections on women's bodies on an Alan Lorber jazz album. The Ritmo Caliente! vinyl is colored bright red and that's the last thing I'll mention about the appearance of the LP. 

The 1950s was also the decade that jazz music started to look at music from outside the US borders. The first focus was Cuba. Cuban jazz orchestras had already captured an audience in the big cities of the US before Dizzy Gillespie collaborated with Cuban musicians to make the first crossover Latin jazz recordings. It became a craze in the 1950s. Cal Tjader was one of the most important jazz musicians that hired Cuban musicians to play in his bands and his Mambo Quintet of the mid/late 50s is considered one of the outstanding Latin jazz combos of all time. Ritmo Caliente! consists of some of the earlier recordings by this band (and by Tjader as a bandleader). The recordings on this record were made in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1954, and a few additional tracks in New York in 1955. The biggest difference between the LA and SF recordings is the addition of a flute in San Francisco. The New York recordings had different personnel. Lamento de Hodi, the track below was recorded in 1955 in New York and features Jerome Richardson on flute, Al McKibbon-bass, Armando Perazas-conga and bongos, Manuel Duran on piano, and the vibraphones of Cal Tjader.

This is Rumania

This is Rumania
Parliament, PLP 119
New York, 1960

We've seen it all before; when the first word in the subtitle spells "authentic", it's most likely far from it. In the case of This is Rumania it's really not that far but yet far enough. The recordings were probably made in Romania (Rumania, as it used to be spelled) but were not made by the people of the land but by their stars and professionals. It is not folk music as the sleeve claims, but professional entertainment. In comparison with an authentic record (such as Folk Music of Rumania on Folkways, with recordings made by Bela Bartok) we hear some of the same melodies and rhythms but they are orchestrated and arranged. And unlike on the Bela Bartok one, the singers have of course perfect pitch here. As we've seen before too on so many records found in the thrift stores I've been writing about, two of the four solo vocal performers on This is Rumania have the first name Maria. I have quite a collection of singers named Maria, and it grows unproportionally fast. One of the Marias is the singer Maria Tanase, she is not new in my collection, but the other one, Maria Lataretu (1911-1972) I had never heard of before. That is not to say she wasn't a celebrity, she was, she has her own Wikipedia page if may use that as a criterion for famous. Maria Lataretu is the singer on the sample from the record I selected. The title La Vitai La Rasarit is translated on the sleeve as "I was looking eastwards..." and on the label as "I looked to the sunrise".

Boogie Woogie

Pete Johnson/Albert Ammons – 8 to the Bar
Two Piano Boogie Woogie for Dancing
Victor Records P-69, RCA Victor, 1941

Sixth Avenue is a street that probably exists in every city in every English speaking country, yet seeing the title Sixth Avenue Express on a jazz record you just know it's Sixth Avenue in New York City. I mentioned last week the purchase of this 78 rpm 4-record set by Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons. It contains eight sides with boogie woogie piano music, issued as a dance album. And danceable they are, from the slow moving walking-speed Walkin' the Boogie, to the fast pace subway train-speed of Sixth Avenue Express, all make your fingers snap and your toes tap. Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons are two of the three (with Meade Lux Lewis) great boogie woogie pianists, a craze that started in 1938 with a concert by Ammons and Johnson and lasted through the early 1940s. You can listen to Sixth Avenue Express below and download it here.

78 Discs

Wilmoth Houdini – Calypsos
Decca Album No. 78
Made in the U.S.A.
Recorded 9/11/1939 in New York 

Decca Album No. 78, inside

Decca Album No. 78, back

When I look for records at thrift stores I always check out the 78 discs but hardly ever do I come home with one. Hardly ever do I find a title I'm interested in and if I do it's usually in such a bad condition that I have to leave it behind. Often I don't even bother to look at those records without a protective sleeve. I am amazed how some (bloggers) still come up with so many treasures and baffled by the posts on (for example) Excavated Shellac. Where the heck do all those records come from? I've been looking for them discs for over a decade but gathered only about a 100 of them: an album with Latvian (classical) discs, some interesting C&W (Hank Williams, Lester Flatt, Roy Acuff, a/o), and I only found one blues disc ever (Tampa Red). Yesterday however I picked up some nice discs, one by Carmen Miranda, and a 4 disc album by Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons. I leave that for next week as I forward now the nicest album of my modest 78 collection: Decca Album No. 78.

The full title of it is Decca Presents A Special Collection of the World-Famous Music of Trinidad by Wilmoth Houdini and His Royal Calypso Orchestra. It's a beautifully packaged  three disc album. Half of the six songs on it deal with some current events of 1939, the year it was recorded. I love that about Calypso music, how their songs are so often narratives on topics that were talked about by the people in the streets. To share with you here I selected The Welcome of Their Majesties, which talks about the first ever visit of British Royalty to the U.S.