Good Sunday morning, Zeldar.
I have quite of few of the albums listed on that site in my collection. and a search or two over the years have netted some of the songs in MP3 format for my current listing pleasure.
Herb, Henry, Les, F&T, 101 Strings, etc … all have a place in both my memories (as a very young child) and in my collection (I got all of Dad’s albums when he passed).
[ot]Hey NoClueBoy, long time no see – how’s it hanging?[/ot]
Do you think I should attribute my adult fondness for world music to my exposure to Getz/Gilberto and Herb Alpert as a child?
Been missing you, Bro! Glad you’re back.
One of the tunes of Mancini’s that I have yet to find on the web is from the original Music From Peter Gunn that I wore the grooves off of in high school and beyond. It’s The Brothers Go To Mothers and if I had to select one Mancini tune at the expense of all others, that would be it.
When you say “Les” at least two of them spring to my mind. Elgart and Baxter. I don’t own any Elgart records but I did love their sound and their covers. As for Baxter, his African Jazz and Jungle Jazz were two albums that I would put on the stack with the Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky albums and just flip the stack when it was done playing. There were a couple of David Carroll “Percussion in Hi-Fi” things that also went on the stack. I imagine there may have been another few I’m having trouble recalling at the moment.
As for still having possession of parents’ records, I got the ones in our family, even though my brother probably liked them as much as I did. One of Mama’s favorites from that era was Roger Williams and she had several of his things. His version of Autumn Leaves was a chart topper for quite a spell.
NCB, what’s going on in your world these days?
I read an Urban Legend once that had it Glenn Miller actually died in a Paris brothel, and the military made up the plane-crash story to cover that up. I don’t believe it myself of course. Not mentioned in Snopes. Only saw it the once, years ago.
I would give that influence at least a nod. The whole Bossa Nova thing in the 60’s was about the only real competition that Rock was getting in what could be lumped togather as “Popular” music. This other “Geezer Music” (my term for the sake of this thread) was niche music for the most part, and even if people owned a fair amount of the sorts of things at that website, there was probably a sense of “iconoclasm” in that indulgence.
It’s probably way too much of a simplification of the currents in music in those days to say that Rock took over Pop music and Pop just fizzled away. Jazz, Folk, Middle-of-the-Road (MOR), Easy Listening, and this whole category of “Space Age Pop” were still the kinds of music that young adults – who hadn’t been born into Elvis and Buddy Holly and Little Richard blasting from the radio, but had parents whose tastes still held onto Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, the Big Bands, and the “semi-classical” fare of some radio stations of the era – found more pleasant to listen to. It’s just that the teen market was too big to ignore by Top 40 radio and TV. Even FM began turning its back on “that other music” in favor of appealing to kids.
It’s my conviction that the failure of TV shows like Ed Sullivan to spotlight the older music with the same fervor as they did for The Beatles and the British Invasion, is what led to the rise of Rock and the decline of “Old Fogey Music.”
There are still a few (borderline successful) radio stations that try to make a go of playing this older music, but they lose market share to Country, Rock, Rap, and all the other genres that appeal to kids.
World Music is an area that has a chance to recover some of the popularity lost by the “old music” but until kids really sour on Rock and Rap it will have to work hard to compete.
At least that’s how it seems to me.
Yeah, that’s not an uncommon “legend.” I have no idea of the truth of it.
I have the Herb Alpert covered, my dad has pretty much every Herb Alpert record ever made I’d guess. Herb was used quite a bit in the soundtrack for the documentary “Dogtown and the Z-Boys”, I had to re-visit some of it after watching that.
How can we talk about Mancini without mentioning the Pink Panther theme? That was, and is, the epitome of cool. Even after watching the cartoons back in the 70’s and hearing it over and over.
Let’s not forget the Mike Flowers Pops Orchestra, with their groundbreaking “Wonderwall”, later covered by Oasis.