Boulevard are proud to present an album by Ian Raymond, his chorus and orchestra in a tribute to the instantly identifiable sound of Ray Conniff, the tracks on this record are ideal for background music or dancing, and include the well known number Sweet Sue and a new Conniff style treatment of such favourites as Pennies From Heaven, Londonderry Air, On Top Of Old Smokey and One, Two, Button My Shoe. When you hear this album we are sure you will be delighted at the arrangements and will be looking forward to the next album.
“Romance in Hawaii” is a more than appropriate title for an album that concentrates on conjuring up just the right mood for relaxation and romance. To do so it uses the soft and delicate songs of the islands that possess a very special charm and magic. Hawaiian music lovers know this only too well and as their ranks increase with every new Hawaiian LP it’s only fair to assume that what was once a minority music has become something special for thousands of people. Certainly the catalogue of Hawaiian songs is on the increase and those who know the music well will find, in addition to some old and loved favourites, new compositions that rightly find their way onto this LP. To perform the eighteen songs we’ve selected the Dimensions in Sound Orchestra, a group of musicians who play every note with perfection and who give each song a really professional gloss.
This Golden Hour album then is something that everyone can enjoy simply because whether or not you’ve visited the islands of Hawaii the music is capable of bringing out the romantic in all of us.
St Joseph’s Maori Girls College is one of the oldest of the Maori church boarding schools in the country. It was established on Bluff Hill in Napier in 1867, at the request of Father Reignier S.M., who worked amongst the Hawkes Bay Maori at the time. The original building was damaged during the Napier earthquake, and the school was moved to its present site at Green-meadows in 1935. Today it is a thriving, busy school unable to cope with more than a fraction of the girls who apply each year.
The school has long had a tradition of fine singing, and this, together with the natural rhythm and tunefulness of the girls, has led to the high regard in which the concert party is held by lovers of Maori entertainment, and the world-wide reputation it has gained. Much of the credit for this success must go to Miss Georgina Kingi, herself a past-pupil of the College, who is responsible for,the training the girls receive.
St Joseph’s Concert Party and Choir are heard in combined performances with Hato Paora Maori Boys College in the following records: SONGS AND DANCES OF THE MAORI Widely-used instructional record (with handbook “Games and Dances of the Maori”, Govt, Printer) for poi, stick game, action song, and haka. SLC-65 SONGS OF MAORI YOUTH Action songs, sacred songs, and a small bracket of Sixteenth Century sacred. polyphony sung in Latin. SLC-002
The sounds of the whole South Pacific are on KIWI and HIBISCUS records and tape cassettes. Music of New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga, Niue, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Tahiti, Fiji, Indonesia, Aboriginal Australia, and Papua New Guinea – each with its own special charm and character available in a wide range of stereo (compatible also for replaying as mono) recordings. Free catalogue on request from the publishers.
Label: Reed Pacific Records SLC-122 Cover Artwork: Robert Neilson Photography: Russell Orr Studios
Tahiti – never before has an island captured the hearts of so many persons both young and old an island that lives for ever in the memories of those who have been fortunate enough to visit it. This album has been produced to capture the moods of the Tahitian people who live between the clear mountain streams, the vivid green palms and the blue Pacific.
Many people visit these islands knowing that the Polynesians who live in this paradise are well suited to this group of islands for without the charm of these people, Tahiti would not be Tahiti, as we know it.
As a fortunate being, who has visited Tahiti many times, this album was produced with pleasure, for it returned to my mind many fond memories of Tahiti and its Polynesian people.
Charles J. Harley.
Label: Viking Records VP 289 Cover Photo by H. Sieben
Together on this album – the super soul sounds that have topped the charts around the world! The great hits of Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, Billy Paul, and other great soul artists are represented on this L.P. that pays tribute to their great talent. If you’ve got soul, then this is the record for you!
UP UNTIL NOW there have been two Pearl Baileys. A Pearl Bailey of the night clubs and a Pearl Bailey of recordings. It has been a schizophrenic performing existence.
The reason for the dual personality is Pearl’s attitude toward life. Within the confines of an intimate night club she was able to fashion in song a portrait of a girl who knew the facts of life but who inevitably got her facts all mixed up. In sketching this girl, Pearly Mae (as she is known to friends) threw in asides and bits of business to the delight of night club goers who don’t to have pictures drawn for them about the facts of life. It was in this respect that the night club Pearl Bailey and the recording Pearl Bailey had to part company.
The recording companies preferred to play their Pearl Bailey straight. That was the only way to get her recordings played on the air. “Stick to the script” was the order of the day so Pearl had to shelve the innuendo and double entendre that made her so popular with the night club crowds.
Now, for the first time, the night club performer and the recording performer have become one and the same person. This album is Pearl Bailey’s night club performance come to life on a record. That’s why it is labeled “For Adults Only” and that’s why it is restricted from air play. It’s a precaution that Roulette has taken to protect the innocent from her earthy wisdom.
Pearly Mae has been around and knows what life is all about and she’s completely uninhibited about letting every-one in on what she’s learned. That’s why the innocent and/or uninitiated must be kept away. There’s no telling what disastrous effect she could have on them.
There’s a certain disenchantment about the way she faces life that can only be appreciated by those who have been through a mill or two themselves. But despite this disenchantment she faces life with a sardonic humor and a hunger for more. She creates more than just a warm-hearted girl who has been done wrong. She’s a girl who doesn’t want to do right. There seems to be no fun in that; for her, anyway. She knows about the pitfalls of romance but makes no pretense of avoiding that road to destruction. She knows that it will probably end in disaster, and it usually does. But she’s not surprised, in fact she wonders why it took so long. And before she’s in the last chorus, you know she’s ready for another encounter with the opposite sex.
In someone else’s hands this woman would be a pitiful soap-opera creation. As etched by Pearl Bailey, the character is wise, winning and full of good humor. And the innocent must be kept away from those who find humor in living.
There have been songwriters, too, who’ve written about life to suit Pearly Mae’s wry indignation. The blending here of songs and stylist is perfect. Legalize My Name, of course is a Bailey natural, but so is I Wanna Get Married, Let’s Do It, She Had To Go And Lose It At The Astor and Flings. And for those who worship at the shrine of the late Lorenz ( Larry) Hart (& Richard Rodgers), she’s included the memorable Zip from “Pal Joey” and To Keep My Love Alive from “A Connecticut Yankee.” These and the others in the set are done in her inimitable night club manner. As evidenced here, as in the clubs, she is the complete mistress of timing and when a throwaway line comes to her mind, it is thrown in with no holds barred.
Although the night clubs give her the most freedom of expression, Pearl has made excursions into Broadway and Hollywood. In the theatre she’s appeared in “House of Flowers,” “St. Louis Woman,” “Arms and the Girl” and “Bless You All,” while her screen credits include “Carmen Jones” and “That Certain Feeling.”
This album, however, is the Pearl Bailey of the night club – with no minimum and no cover charge.
Label: Roulette R-25016 Cover Photo: Chuck Stewart
Here is your musical passport to a land of gentle breezes and swaying palm trees. The romance and magic of a turntable trip to the Pacific isles – home of Don Hilo and his Sounds of the Islands.
We have always admired Della Reese’s singing and were enormously pleased when the opportunity came fur as to bring her to RCA. We began her RCA history with a single recording, Don’t You Know, that underlined her warm, lyrical quality in ballads. In preparing her first album for as we felt that new Della’s considerable capacities for swinging should be given freedom.
We decided on Neal Hefti as the arranger and conductor for these sessions because he has the range of experience and insight as well as the technical skills to provide exactly the right complement to Della’s style.
Our role as A&R men is to arrange marriages – between a song and an artist, between an artist and an arranger. We wanted to take special can with Della’s first RCA album, and accordingly we bad at least half a dozen conferences with Neal before he even began to write.
Della was on the West Coast during some of the preparatory sessions. We’d arrange for her to be in a studio with a piano, call her, discuss the tunes and arrangements, and she in turn would send us tapes of her ideas.
What resulted, therefore, was an album in which the framework for each song has a distinctive character – the best possible that we felt could be devised both for the song and for Della’s musical personality.
We want to make clear how much respect we have for Della’s talent. She’s young, has already accomplished so much, and has years to grow even more. We believe she will be one of the greats of show business, not just an artist with a few hits. In fact, we’ll go on record as saying that Della Reese will be among the top ten popular entertainers in the next decade.
Della’s career has been remarkably diversified. She was a member of the gospel group of the nonpareil Mahalia Jackson by the time she was thirteen and during her college years. Wayne University in Detroit, she formed her own gospel unit,”The Meditation Singers”.
Della began to branch out into blues and pop music at the Flame Club in Detroit. She gathered more experience with Erskine Hawkins, and, more recently, as an increasingly successful headline performer in clubs, theatres, and on radio and TV. She’s also been in films (Columbia’s Les Reek) and her reputation has become international.
We feel that now on RCA, Della Reese’s career will reach even more impressive levels. And we fully intend to select those songs and arrangers that will make it possible for the public to know all of Della Reese. She is unique in the popular field in that she can do so many things well. In this album you’ll hear how warm she can be and how fully she can swing.
We suggest you pay special note to the way she uses words. It’s very much like the way a musician uses an instrument. She bends, bites and projects the lyrics of a song in a way that no artist we know can do. We are delighted to have helped bring this album into being.
Through a succession of wonderful albums, Nancy Wilson has established herself as one of the finest singers of our day. So it has become natural that when good new songs come along, or old favorites become newly popular, people want to hear Nancy sing them in her own fresh, lilting, wonderful Wilson way.
This album contains some of the best and most beautiful of those songs: I Left My Heart in San Francisco, What Kind of Fool Am I?, and many more. Their tempos range from easy to bright to Latin, and Nancy sings them all without artifice, with deft and disarming simplicity, and makes them immediately her own – so much so that the listener gains a feeling of hearing them for the very first time.
And listen to Nancy’s Go Away Little Boy. She makes each word so meaningful that it’s almost as if she were speaking the lyric, To I Can’t Stop Loving You she brings a smoldering passion. And in every song, passionate or sweet, regardless of tempo, there is always the lilting freshness that is Nancy’s special and very wonderful trademark.
The backgrounds are tasteful scores that never get in the way of the singer, and they are played by a smaller group than Nancy has recently performed with on record. They are conducted by the gifted Kenny Dennis, whose wife, should you not already know, is Nancy Wilson. These are backgrounds that could be listened to separately for their own delightful qualities, were it possible to devote one’s full attention to any other sound with the sensational Miss Nancy Wilson front and center.
Actually the only person competent enough to write these program notes for Eartha Kitt would appear to he Mr. Roget – he of Roget’s Thesaurus – or perhaps Mr. Noah Webster. But even having all the words in the English language at one’s disposal is hardly a guarantee that the Kitt Story can be adequately told. She started out life on a desperately poor share-cropper’s farm in South Carolina and grew up in a miserable Harlem tenement house, helping to support herself and her aunt by working long hours as a seamstress in a uniform factory. In her early teens she discovered that she was endowed with an unusual talent for singing and dancing; and although, superficially, she seemed no different from the countless other poverty-stricken children in Harlem, she dreamed in the good old American tradition that she, Eartha Kitt, the unknown waif, would shoes them – that some day she would be a dazzling entertainer and the toast of continents.
And show them she did, to a degree which can be described with understatement as fantastic. At the age of sixteen she met, more or less by accident, the famous dancer Katherine Dunham, who tools one look at Eartha’s inspired, self-trained dancing, gave her a scholarship, and signed her for the next tour. In 1948, she performed in Mexico fort, then London, Paris and the continent. Finally, with typical Kitt initiative, she decided to go it alone in Paris, where her success was overwhelming.
Thus began the Eartha Kitt legend, and no press agent could have written such madly enthusiastic notices about any client as the effusions of praise which broke forth from her bedazzled audiences in Paris and subsequently Turkey, Egypt and Greece. A staid member of the Rouse of Lords shook his head and remarked in a dazed voice that she was “an arrangement designed to unhinge men’s minds”. Porfirio Rubirosa, renowned connoisseur of such matters, sighed and muttered that she was “fire in ice”, whatever that may mean exactly. Orson Welles made her Helen of Troy in his production of Faust and loudly proclaimed that she was “the most exciting woman in the world”! And the Maharajah of Cooch Behar summed up the Eartha-rized feelings of most mots when he “bayed” (in the words of a bemused writer) that he was “utterly destroyed” by this seething young enchantress!
This album gives some indication of Eartha’s vocal talents her dancing and acting, of course, would require special descriptions elsewhere. Here she offers interpretations, complete with the tantalizing and characteristic Kitt vibrato, of a dozen songs, each one different in mood from the others, and including selections in English, French, Spanish, Turkish and believe it or not in Swahili, one of the leading languages of East Africa! Whether it’s in the rhythmic malevolence of I Wool to Be Evil or in the reflective Lilac Wine, in the irresistibly scheming C’est si bon or in the tender African Lullaby, Eartha reveals that she is an interpreter of songs almost any kind of sang who can only lee called unique.
Notes by Duncan McDonald.
