The Roaring 20's!
Candace Scott | Lake Arrowhead, CA, USA | 08/02/2000
(4 out of 5 stars)
"Paul Whiteman is no Jelly Roll Morton but his orchestra was huge in the 1920's, playing every night at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles. Amazingly, Whiteman's music has held up beautifully through the years and the musicianship displayed here is excellent. Whiteman is best known today as the man who gave Bing Crosby (then with the Rhythm Boys) his first big break, but the songs on this album don't feature Bing, just joyous Whiteman orchestral music. This is a time warp if there ever was one. For those of us born forty years after Whiteman was a hit, this gives us a taste of the Roaring 20's."
"Concert" treasures by Paul Whiteman!
Lee Hartsfeld | Central Ohio, United States | 01/13/2001
(5 out of 5 stars)
"This outstanding Paul Whiteman collection consists mainly of "concert" pieces and arrangements from the 1920s and 1930s, all of them excellent and wholly deserving of reissue. Most noteworthy are Matty Malneck's wonderfully charming "Caprice Futuristic" from 1928, and Victor Herbert's "Suite of Serenades," originally written for Whiteman's 1924 "An Experiment in Modern Music," the famous concert that featured the premiere of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." Like "Rhapsody," these two pieces were orchestrated by "Grand Canyon Suite" composer Ferde Grofe.Future "Some Like It Hot" song supervisor Matty Malneck is also represented by "Park Avenue Fantasy," the concert piece that yielded the popular song "Stairway To the Stars." And there is Peter DeRose's pre-pop-song concert version of "Deep Purple," another Whiteman commission.The non-concert sides include "South Sea Isles," a very early George Gershwin tune in a very early Grofe arrangement, complete with musical quotes from Grieg and a great Dixieland-style ending, plus a joyous version of the DeSylva-Brown-Henderson classic, "It All Depends On You."The label is to be praised for retaining the dynamic range of the original recordings through conservative noise suppression. The trade-off is a moderate level of surface noise, but the result more than justifies the means. These recordings sound great.A "Volume II" is in order. Concert sides like "Soliloquy," "O Ya Ya," "Tchaikowskiana," and a host of others would make up a fine follow-up track list. Meanwhile, seriously consider this one!"