Customer Reviews

The Broadway Years, Vol. 2

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One of the points I made straight off in my review of the companion CD to this one, "The Collegiate Years (Vol. 1)" is that the Fred Waring with whom many of us grew up gave us the impression that his style was lush and bland, whereas the reality of the situation is that his early style was rollicking and, most of all, fun! Oh, there are the Waring trademarks: superb musicianship and precise ensemble. This may sound like a sterile environment in which to have "fun", but don't believe that for a minute!
The other review in this space details a lot of the features on this CD, so I won't repeat them. What hasn't been said is that, as with the companion CD, the sound processing is superb. Sources are apparently released shellac disks, but the only noise you hear is a constant shellac hiss -- no clicks and pops. Equalization is about as natural as one could hope for.
The final item on this CD marks the beginning of a 9-year recording hiatus for the Pennsylvanians, due to Waring's then-ongoing battle for royalties owed him by broadcasters who would play his records without attribution. It's a real pity, because he continued to make music like this during these years. Since a lot of it was broadcast on radio, we can only hope that someone may, in the future, publish some of the transcriptions which, no doubt, exist.
An artifact of the aforementioned era has found its way occasionally into the MP3 world: Raymond Scott's parody of Waring entitled, in Scott's typical cumbersome style, "The Reaction of the Musicians to Meeting Waring's Pennsylvanians." I'm not at all familiar with the song they are singing (it was never recorded on 78s), but the humor is brilliant: Waring's trademark precise unison vocal ensemble is a total shambles in this version -- that is, every voice enters about a millisecond off from every other voice! The singing is exceptionally overwrought, and "hey nonny nonny" and "ha cha cha" are thrown into the lyrics. There are musical quotations from "Collegiate" at the beginning and end of the piece, too, just to give it that authentic feel. I hope that the next Scott compilation (soon to be released, they say) will include this piece. On first hearing it, I thought that Scott was ridiculing Waring; however, it now seems to me to be a tribute to Waring and his contribution to the world of pop music -- and a fitting one, at that!