Puttin on the Ritz

Harry Richman | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (April 23, 2002)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Asv Living Era
• ASIN: B00006357J
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #400,871 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars PUTTING ON THE RITZ, June 6, 2004

By 

james w gerard (Palm Springs, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Puttin on the Ritz (Audio CD)

Simply marvelous. It's amazing to me that music recorded 70 or 80 years ago can have the clarity as exhibited in this alblum. Let's hope additional recordings of Harry Richman's music will surface in the future. This recordings selections are outstanding.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Those Top Hat & Tails '20's Refrains at Their Best, October 30, 2010

By 

R. Schultz (Chicago) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Puttin on the Ritz (Audio CD)

The distinctive singing style of the 1920's and 1930's has always had a special appeal for me. The way the popular singers of that period cupped their mouths and produced a slightly nasal, muted clarinet sound from their voice-boxes - was instant longing, instant repine even through the sunnier songs. It threw a gentle cloud even over "Blue Skies" - a shading that lent the music greater depth and complexity, and made every song a sentimental refrain.

Harry Richman captures that mood of romantic longing wonderfully on this CD. His tone occasionally reminds us of Al Jolson, but over the course of these songs, he carves out his own identity.

The lead-in to every song is included. These narrative preludes (and occasional insets) to the catchy song choruses we all remember, might sound a little schmaltzy to the modern ear. They are the vocal equivalent of the exaggerated gestural style of silent films. They are half-sung, half-recited with that distinctive 20's skipping stone inflection - each phrase an arc of melodrama, with the emphasis on the downward slide of the intoned arc. With this predictable alteration of stylized lead-in, followed by familiar melody, followed by another emoted lead-in - the CD can begin to get a bit repetitious if you listen to all twenty-five tunes on it straight through. So I recommend you ration yourself to only six or seven tunes at a time. That way, each song can better work its particular magic.

One other facet of this CD that might grate against modern sensibility is its occasional lapse into minstrel style. In the song "Hallelujah," Richman sings an interlude in the persona of a black performer from the Delta. But this poses only a brief and minor setback to one's enjoyment of the music.

Actually, there is something about these songs that is strikingly modern. That's their frequent emphasis on tricky, unexpected rhymes. In that sense, some of these songs read almost like rap music. In Richman's signature celebration, "Puttin on the Ritz," we find the rhymes of "swell beaux, rubbing elbows." In "King for a Day," we get the run of rhymes: Mephisto; remember this though; Monte Cristo. Beat THAT Ice Tea!

There's also even a slightly risqué (for the times) rhyme at the end of "Thank Your Father." This song thanks all the elements that brought his girlfriend's parents together to create her. He thanks the moonlight, and the carriage ride, and the fact that they were a little tipsy. He concludes with the salvo, "Even though his name was Stanley, thank goodness he was manly - or else I'd have no one to love."

When it comes to that most heartbreakingly triumphant/tragic onomatopoeia of a song, Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" - Richman's rendering perhaps pushes the song a little too obviously into the tragic. The slow tempo at which he sings it emphasizes the song's undertow of contradiction to the singer's blithe assurance that it's "Blue skies, from now on..." But Richman's interpretation is a hundred times better than Jolson's hyperactive jostling of the song in his attack on it in the first talkie movie "The Jazz Singer."

My only real disappointment with this CD is that it didn't include Richman's rendition of the beautifully melodic "It All Depends on You." I became a Richman fan the first time I heard him sail that song out on a wing and prayer on a 78rpm record. I hope another Richman CD collection comes out some time that includes that song.

The program notes for this CD collection introduce us to Harry Richman as a multi-talented man with unsuspected accomplishments. He collaborated on writing many of the songs he sang on the vaudeville circuits and on Broadway. But surprisingly, he was also a pioneering aviator.

His biggest contribution though, the gift that comes through on this CD, remains the way in which he captured the romantic sensibility of the 1920's in song. If Jolson conveyed the sheer motor energy of that era, Richman conveyed its top hat elegance and romantic hopefulness. For all its gangster glare, that period still harbored an innocent belief in a romantic ideal. There was still a glow of trust in the idea that all you needed was love - not the impersonal, all-encompassing love of the hippie era, but the very intimate and pining moonlit love between a man and a woman. Richman sings that sentiment from the heart of the Twenties.

Then if you find you like this singing style, I suggest you check out some of the Ted Lewis albums available, such as "The Pied Piper of Happiness." Ted Lewis talks more of his songs than he sings them. He didn't have Richman's or Jolson's voice, but he also leaves you with the uplift of a wistful and blue belief that love will triumph after all.