Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Recently I got in the mail from CD Universe (which has sent me so many e-mails promoting not only their music and movie releases but so many cannabis products I think any day now they’ll change their name to C B D Universe) an intriguing CD I’d ordered on the Retrieval Records label: Unissued on 78’s: 1927-1934 . Producer Nick Dellow (who’s also a contributor to the Bixography Forum) began with a note in his liner booklet which said, “‘Unissued on 78’ means just that and no more. Certainly some of the recordings here have appeared on LP’s and even CD’s, but long enough ago for those issues to have become collectible in their own right.” I guess Nick put that in there to forestall people trying to nit-pick his selections to death and write him letters saying, “What do you mean, ‘unissued’? I’ve had some of these songs for years!” I did catch Dellow out on one odd mistake at the very beginning of hi...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last Monday I received a Frank “Tram” Trumbauer collection from CD Universe that seems to have come from a company with three different imprints: Fabulous, Acrobat ahd their parent company, Trapeze. I was a bit disappointed that it contained only one of Tram’s last three studio recordings for Capitol in 1946, “You Took Advantage of Me” – though the other two are available on YouTube. These were the sessions Tram didn’t want released because the other musicians had shown up drunk – the man who’d put up with Bix Beiderbecke for five years probably thought, “Here we go again … ” – and they didn’t come out until Capitol used one of them in 1952 to fill out a compilation album of great jazz saxophonists called Sax Stylists , but they’re quite remarkable and if I’d heard them “blind” I probably would have guessed Paul Desmond. They sound an awful lot like him even though Desmond hadn’t recorded yet when...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved This morning I listened to Prokofieff’s opera The Fiery Angel in its initial recording, a French-language performance from 1957 apparently recorded for Paris Radio and featuring members of the original cast from the 1954 world premiere. Prokofieff wrote the piece (based on a Russian writer’s novel but set in medieval Germany) in the 1920’s but never got it performed in his lifetime, though the score was published. Later he based his Third Symphony on music he’d composed for the opera just to get it heard somewhere , in some form. The plot is the story of a young woman, Renata, who’s convinced that she’s in love with an angel, who turns her down but promises he will return some day in human form. A lecherous Count convinces her that he is her angel, and he gets her to have sex with him, but then he abandons her. Another man, the knight Ruprecht, falls in love with her but all she wants from him is t...