Music Magg

br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched a “Snappy Video” Blu-Ray disc containing a compilation of “Soundies,” the three-minute music videos shot between 1941 and 1947 to be played on a “Panoram.” The Panoram was a sort if self-contained movie projector and screen, and if you put a dime into it (twice the going rate for an audio-only jukebox in the early- to mid-1940’s) you saw and heard a shirt filmclip of a big band, a country outfit, a vocal group or some other sort of audio-visual entertainment. The Snappy Video compilation featured 20 short films, though three weren’t Soundies; one was a band short with Ted Lewis and His Orchestra playing a 10-minute program. I suspect the folks at Universal (the opening logo said “Castle Films,” which in addition to being a logo used for educational films shown in schools was also an imprint Universal used to sell three-minute bits of their featu...

br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Since the Snappy Video “Soundies” collection ran only about an hour, I followed it up with a collection of music videos by Duke Ellington from an odd compilation called The Centennial Collection, released by RCA Victor in 1999. The company decided to commemorate its 100th anniversary in business by releasing a series of discs, each by one of their most famous artists, with a CD on one side of the dual cover and a DVD on the other. The Ellington DVD consisted of the 1935 Paramount short Symphony in Black, a 1937 short called Record Making with Duke Ellington, five Ellington Soundies shot in Los Angeles in 1941, and a 1945 band short featuring Ellington’s band as it existed then. On oen of the two nights during which Turner Classic Movies featured Soundies, co-host Susan Delson noted that Ellignton’s Soundies seemed more interesting visually than others’ did. I’ve long thought that about Elli...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Monday, September 5 was the eleventh and last concert in the 2022 Spreckels Organ Soeiety’s Summer Organ Festival at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. It was billed as a tribute to “Women in Rock,” though their definition of “rock” was pretty elastic – it included a Marvin Gaye-Tammi Terrell duet, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, and two songs from Aretha Franklin, who was generally considered soul rather than rock (though Aretha’s talent was so protean it transcended genres and became what Duke Ellington called “beyond category”). The program consisted of 19 songs, all performed in one 90-minute set with no intermission (which surprised me a bit because I started to worry about the strain the band members, particularly lead singers Lauren Leigh Martin and Chloe Lou, were putting on their voices without a chance to rest them), and the opener wsas “Highway to Hell,” originally performed by the all-m...