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Three albums in one:
1-8: Transferred from 10" LP Capitol L344, date-stamped 6/52 9-16: Django Reinhardt (guitar); Eliane de Creus, vocal (9, 10); Germaine Sablon, vocal (14); Michel Warlop, violin (11); Stéphane Grappelli*, violin (15, 16); André Ekyan, clarinet (12, 13); Alec Siniavine, piano (12-14); Louis Volá, bass (14-16) 17-24: Orchestra arranged and conducted by Wal-Berg *Despite Grapelli being credited on these tracks there is no audible violin playing - and nobody is credited with the piano parts which are key to the arrangements!
Notes on this release
I later tracked down a large number of Sablon discs, including the rare 1952 LP "Songs of a Boulevardier", an American release which seems to have been ignored by the many compilations of Sablon's material since (a possible sighting of the final track, Ave Maria No Morro, on a nicely presented but poor-sounding Universal double-CD, The French Troubadour, is both mis-labelled and mis-credited). The songs on this LP form the first part of this issue. We then head back to the 1930's and Sablon's pre-war heyday. Rather than pull together the usual mish-mash of hits I wanted to concentrate on two very important parts of Sablon's work. First we have the small ensemble material with Django Reinhardt, who Sablon had helped to get his first Paris booking, and the earliest recordings of which pre-date the formation of Reinhardt's famous and influential Quintette du Hot Club de France. In the tracks selected here we hear Reinhardt both as soloist and accompanist as the arrangements demand, his distinctive style always clearly evident. The other key player in the Sablon success story was Wal-Berg, an immigrant of Russian-Jewish descent, born in Constantinople, and one of the foremost arranger-conductors of the era. A musician as equally at home with Jazz and Swing music as he was with the Classical canon, his employment with Sablon's record company in the mid-late 1930's ensured absolutely top-rate arrangements, as heard to great effect on our sample recording Paris Tu N'as Pas Changé, which brilliantly evokes in music and scoring the train journey into the city for the 40 seconds of the song's introduction. For the first time, these 1930's selections can be heard in sound quality that does them real justice - so many of the re-issues currently available of Sablon's material from this era are characterised by a thick, heavy and dull sound which entirely misrepresents the actual recordings. Thanks to the use of XR remastering we can finally hear the songs as they should have sounded!
Jean Sablon Jean Sablon (Nogent-sur-Marne March 25, 1906 – February 24, 1994 at Cannes-La-Bocca) was a popular French singer and actor.
The son of a composer, with brothers and sisters who had successful careers of their own in musical entertainment, Jean Sablon studied piano at the Lyceé Charlemagne in Paris. He left before graduating to enroll at the Paris Conservatoire in order to concentrate on a vocal career. He started in the cabarets of Paris at the age of 17, and was subsequently accompanied on his first album by the pianist/composer Mireille, whose song Couchés dans le foin became a great success. Later, he partnered the wildly popular Mistinguett at the Casino de Paris and boosted his career considerably. He was the first cabaret singer to use a microphone in his stage act. In the 1920s he spent time in Brazil where his recordings remain extremely popular today. In 1937 he won the Grand Prix du Disque for the song "Vous qui passez sans me voir," written for him by Charles Trenet and Johnny Hess. That same year, he went to the United States, where he sang on live radio broadcasts for CBS and made several records in the English language. On Broadway, he worked with luminaries such as Cole Porter and George Gershwin. He returned to Paris but with the German occupation of France in World War II, he went back to America for the duration. Jean Sablon became one of the most widely acclaimed male French singers, considered second only in overall lifetime popularity to Maurice Chevalier. His records sold in the millions around the world and he is frequently referred to as the French equivalent of America's Bing Crosby. During his career, he recorded with some of the world's top musicians, including Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. Sablon is credited with arranging Reinhardt's debut in a fashionable cabaret in 1933. He is also recognized for his talents as a lyricist and a composer. Sablon appeared in a number of motion pictures and television films performing as a vocalist or pianist, his last coming in 1984 when he sang "April in Paris" in Mistral's Daughter, the popular American TV mini-series filmed in France. Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Sablon
Django Reinhardt
Jean Baptiste "Django" Reinhardt (January 23, 1910 – May 16, 1953) was a Belgian Sinto Gypsy jazz guitarist. He was one of the first prominent jazz musicians to be born in Europe, and one of the most renowned jazz guitarists of all time. In 1934, Louis Vola formed the "Quintette du Hot Club de France" with Reinhardt, violinist Stéphane Grappelli, Reinhardt's brother Joseph and Roger Chaput on guitar, and himself on bass. Occasionally Chaput was replaced by Pierre "Baro" Ferret. The vocalist Freddie Taylor participated in a few songs, such as "Georgia On My Mind" and "Nagasaki". The concept of "lead guitar" (Django) and backing "rhythm guitar" (Joseph Reinhardt/Roger Chaput or Pierre Ferret) was born with that band. They also used their guitars for percussive sounds, as they had no true percussion section. The Quintet du Hot Club de France was one of the few well-known jazz bands to have no drums or percussion section. Reinhardt later formed bands with more conventional instrumentations as with clarinet or saxophone, piano, bass and drums. He produced numerous recordings at this time with the quintet. But he played and recorded also with many American Jazz legends such as Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Rex Stewart (who later stayed in Paris), and a jam-session with jazz legend Louis Armstrong. Reinhardt could neither read nor write music, and was barely literate. Stéphane took the band's downtime to teach him... (excerpt from Wikipedia entry on Reinhardt)
Wal Berg Waldemar Rosenberg "Wal-Berg" (November 13 1910 - July 12 1994) was born in Constantinople from Russian descent. He won first prize for piano at the Berlin Conservetoire and went on to study harmony, composition and conducting at the Paris Conservetoire. As a conductor and arranger his career saw him working with the great singers and soloists of the age in both classical and jazz/popular music - he had no hesitation in programming Gerswhin alongside Ravel or Debussy with Cole Porter. He was house arranger/conductor at Pathé-Marconi when working on the arrangements heard on this recording. A.R.
Skitch Henderson
Lyle Russell Cedric “Skitch” Henderson (January 27, 1918 – November 1, 2005), was a pianist, conductor, and composer. His nickname ("Skitch") reportedly derived from his ability to quickly "re-sketch" a song in a different key. Skitch was born on a farm near Halstad, Minnesota, to parents Joseph and Josephine Henderson, both of Norwegian descent. His mother died shortly after his birth, and he was then sent to live with his Aunt Hattie, who raised him. She taught him piano, starting at the age of four. Though he did not receive formal conservatory education in music, Henderson received classical training under Fritz Reiner, Albert Coates, Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Toch and Arturo Toscanini, who invited him to conduct the NBC Symphony Orchestra. He would also his recount his learning the ropes by playing in 'Taverns' with many popular singers of the day. He started his professional career in the 1930s playing piano in the roadhouses of the American Midwest, his major break being as an accompanist on a 1937 MGM promotional tour featuring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. Henderson later said that as a member of MGM’s music department, he worked with Garland to learn "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" during rehearsals for "The Wizard of Oz" and played piano for her first public performance of the song at a local nightclub before the film was finished. However this account is at odds with the memoirs of the tune's composer, Harold Arlen, who said he first performed the song for the 14-year-old Garland. After the war, he worked for NBC Radio, where he was the musical director for Frank Sinatra's Lucky Strike Show and The Philco Hour with Bing Crosby. Henderson also played on Bob Hope’s Pepsodent Show. The origin of his nickname is often traced to this period, with Henderson crediting the invention to Bing Crosby who said he (Henderson) should have a nickname. Crosby settled on the name 'Skitch', which came from 'The Sketch Kid', referring to Henderson's ability to quickly transcribe music to a written score. Other reports, however, claim that the name came from something that a young Skitch and his buddies would say to act cool and hip, "skitchadudawawa," long before Crosby entered his life. Biography from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skitch_Henderson
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