Tag: dance band
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Do it Again… and again… and again… and again
The 23-year-old George Gershwin was already a prolific composer by the time The French Doll opened on Broadway in February 1922. The musical comedy ran for 120 performances, but its lasting legacy was the single song that Gershwin wrote for the show: Do it Again, with racy lyrics by Buddy de Silva. The song already…
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“At night when you’re asleep, into your tent I’ll creep,” sang The Beatles
A Jewish Russian-Hungarian band leader (Dajos Béla) and his Berlin-based salon orchestra (Künstler-Kapelle) playing an Arabian shimmy (“Arabischer Shimmy”) by an American composer (Ted Snyder) written in response to a book by an English author (Edith Maud Hull), and made popular by a hit silent film (The Sheik), starring an Italian actor (Rudolph Valentino). What…
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Schubert’s Unfinished Dance Band
A friendly collision in 1922 between a horse-drawn carriage from 1820s Vienna and an open-topped automobile in 1920s New York. The old world meets the new for a tipsy foxtrot in prohibition era America. A pre-echo of Kurt Weill who will soon bring his classical sensibilities to the sound-world of American dance bands and then…
Listening Back 