Unsung Vocalists of the Past 8: Chester Gaylord

Unless you are an avid collector of old 78s from the 1920s and '30s, chances are you have never heard of Chester Gaylord. And yet he was an extremely busy recording artist in those years, a contemporary of Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Russ Columbo, and Gene Austin, and an overlooked figure if there ever was one among the fraternity of early crooners. Though Gaylord distinguished himself primarily as a vocalist, he also played piano and saxophone, and in fact, his earliest known recordings are Edison diamond discs made toward the beginning of the '20s that feature him as a saxophonist. As a singer, his sound lay somewhere between those of Vallee and Crosby—while not as purely jazzy as Bing, his baritone voice sounds more powerful and fuller than Rudy's. Gaylord enjoyed a successful career on radio as a vocalist, pianist, and announcer, and many of the phonograph records he made for major labels like Columbia and Brunswick included notable jazz musicians such as Red Nichols, Glenn Miller, Manny Klein, Gene Krupa, and Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, among others. But despite all these credentials, the name of Chester Gaylord remains largely obscure and all but forgotten today.

Born in Worcester, MA, in 1899, Gaylord showed an early interest in music, and during the First World War he joined the US Navy and put his saxophone-playing skills to work. Upon his return to civilian life, Gaylord briefly moved to New York, but the opportunity to work as an announcer on local radio prompted him to return to his hometown. It was then that he began his broadcasting career, jumping at any chance he had to play piano and sing over the airwaves. His frequent appearances were consistently well received by the radio audience, which must have played some part in his signing a recording contract with Columbia as a vocalist in 1923. After this stint on Columbia, Gaylord signed with Brunswick, another one of the major labels at the time, and subsequently made some of the best records of his career, accompanied by some of the jazz greats that we have already mentioned. Many of the tunes Gaylord recorded in these jazzy settings at these New York sessions, like "Mean to Me," "Memories of You," or "Glad Rag Doll" would in time become standards, and it is interesting to note that he would often sing the verses, some of which are now rarely heard.

During these busy years, Gaylord also found time to provide vocal refrains on dance band records by the likes of Jacques Renard, Jack Denny, and Red Nichols, while he also maintained a hectic scheduled on the radio, appearing on popular shows such as the Top Notchers Cola Cola Program. As a matter of fact, when Brunswick decided not to renew his recording contract sometime in 1930-31, the future of Gaylord's career lay on the airwaves, singing with excellent bands like those led by Ben Selvin, Ted Fio Rito, and Ben Pollack and eventually accepting a job on Boston's WBZ in the late 1940s. By the mid-'60s, Gaylord had quit doing radio work, though he kept performing occasionally as a singing pianist until his passing in 1984. To the best of my knowledge, no CD is available documenting Gaylord's career at the time of this writing, but fortunately, an extensive collection of his recordings and even some radio cuts can be found on the Internet Archive here, with fairly good sound. Hopefully one day a reissue label will decide to bring Gaylord out of obscurity, something that his outstanding recordings definitely deserve.

Acknowledgments

Very little has been written about Chester Gaylord, so I am indebted to a very interesting article that Mr. Chet Williamson published in 2015 in his blog, Jazz Riffing on a Lost Worcester, and that you may access here.

Ernst Van 't Hoff and His Hot Wartime Dance Band

Dutch pianist and trumpeter Ernst Van 't Hoff (the last name is also sometimes spelled Van't Hoff and Van t'Hoff) led one of the most exciting and swinging German dance bands (Tanzorchester, in German) of the 1940s, which would ultimately cause him quite a bit of trouble during the years of WWII. Born in Zandvoort, Holland, in 1908, Van 't Hoff had been playing professionally since the 1920s, mostly in the Netherlands and Belgium, working with popular bandleaders such as Robert de Kers, among others. In the mid-1930s, Van 't Hoff decided it was time to lead his own band, but success eluded his organization in these initial years, and he was forced to work as a sideman off and on with de Kers's Cabaret Kings and various radio orchestras.

By the time the war broke out, Van 't Hoff was leading his own band again, and in 1940 he even signed a recording contract with the prestigious German label Deutsche Grammophon. At that point, Holland was occupied by Nazi forces, who sent Van 't Hoff to Dresden and then to Berlin, where the band appeared at the Delphi Filmpalast, and its music was soon met with public acclaim. Though the Nazis often used jazz and swing as a vehicle for propaganda (the infamous recordings by Charlie & His Orchestra included in the Proper Records box set Swing Tanzen Verboten are prime examples of this), they considered the style as "undesirable music" (unerwünschte Musik, in German) and as such, it was banned in all Nazi-occupied territories. The sound of Van 't Hoff's band, with its rousing versions of American tunes (Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" and "Pennsylvania 6-5000," for example) and its swinging original compositions, was strongly influenced by jazz, and this would eventually bring the bandleader to the attention of the Gestapo. This in turn led to Van 't Hoff's being sent back to the Netherlands in 1943, where he would keep working with radio orchestras until 1944, when he relocated to Belgium.

After the war, Van 't Hoff restricted his musical activity to Belgium and Holland, leading orchestras with varying degrees of success. By the early '50s he was living in Brussels, where his band had an engagement at the celebrated Ancienne Belgique concert hall, and where he would die from a heart attack in 1955, aged only 46. Though some of Van 't Hoff's recordings are available on YouTube and elsewhere on the internet, they are not easy to find on CD. Though the Nederlands Jazz Archief offers two compilations of his '40s sides, the most affordable collection of Van 't Hoff's music currently on the U.S. market is a volume of the series Die Grossen Deutschen Tanzorchester (Membran, 2005), which is woefully short at only thirteen tracks, all of them recorded in 1941-42. This was the heyday of Van 't Hoff's orchestra, a tightly-knit unit that played excellent arrangements full of hot passages and some very exciting solos. There are a couple of covers of American tunes ("Ciribiribin" and the Johnny Mercer-Hoagy Carmichael collaboration "Oh, What You Said") but also some fine original compositions credited to the bandleader, such as "Fünfuhrtee bei Rüthli" and "Tanz im Carlton." The band sounds powerful and swinging on these sides, which pleased dancers greatly at the time, and two of the songs spotlight Van 't Hoff's most talented vocalist, Jan de Vries, who sings "Day by Day" and "I Never Dream" in very good English. All but forgotten nowadays, Ernst Van 't Hoff remains one of the most interesting of all Tanzorchester leaders, and as these recordings clearly show, his lively, jazzy music should appeal to the most demanding of big band swing aficionados.

Julie London in Her Living Room, 1959

After a hiatus of about a year, during which I have been working on my other jazz blog, Jazz Flashes, I return to The Vintage Bandstand with a brief article about Julie... at Home, an album by Julie London that sounds so intimate, among other things, because it was recorded in her own living room!

The first time I ever saw and heard Julie London was in the 1956 movie The Girl Can't Help It, in which she appears as herself and sings her massive hit "Cry Me a River." As much as I liked the early rock'n'roll stars that are also featured in that rather inane film, I must admit that it was London that immediately caught my ear and my eye, to such an extent that I actually had to go out and find as many records by her as I could. And there were plenty of them to be had. From her first one, Julie Is Her Name (1955), many of them have at least a couple of things in common: though she has also recorded with lush string orchestras, London's voice is usually set against a sparse musical background, and the covers take advantage of her very attractive looks. But that is not all—her albums are invariably satisfying musically, and I always find myself playing them over and over again. This concept of intimacy was taken as far as possible on Julie... at Home (1959), not really because of the accompaniment (on earlier albums she was backed by guitar and bass only, and there are more instruments here) but because the album was taped in Julie's own living room. She was, then, truly at home.

Before her appearance in The Girl Can't Help It, London, who was born in 1926 in Santa Rosa, California, had worked in movies as early as the mid-1940s. But after the collapse of her first marriage (to actor Jack Webb) she met and later married singer-songwriter Bobby Troup and began concentrating on her singing career, aided by a recognizable, smoky voice and a very personal, wee-small-hours approach to the vocal art that was at once intimate, jazzy, and sexy. Besides the aforementioned mega-hit "Cry Me a River," London never enjoyed too much success as a singles artist. Her type of singing was better suited to the then-new medium of the LP, and virtually every album she cut in the 1950s and early '60s (Calendar Girl, Julie, About the Blues, London by Night) is a prime example of the jazz-inflected adult-oriented pop of the era.

Guitarist Al Viola

For 1959's Julie... at Home, with its cover picture of London lounging in the comfort of her own home, someone at Liberty came up with the idea of bringing some equipment into her living room and recording the sessions right there. London appears here in a small-group jazz setting, in a quintet that includes Al Viola on guitar, Don Bagley on bass, Emil Richards on vibraphone, and Earl Palmer on drums. It is Viola and Richards that provide most of the brief solos heard throughout, with a couple of appearances by trombonist Bob Flanagan, who, according to the liner notes written by pianist Jimmy Rowles, simply "dropped by to pay a social call." Rowles himself, who was collaborating occasionally with London in this particular period of her career, is responsible for the arrangements, creating a sound that inevitably reminds us of George Shearing. But of course, London is the star here, and she sounds decidedly at ease and relaxed in this company. As one would expect, the set list is comprised of twelve well-known standards and is as heavy on the ballads ("You've Changed," "Goodbye," "Everything Happens to Me") as it is on the more uptempo numbers ("Give Me the Simple Life," "Let There Be Love," "By Myself"). In both cases, however, London's approach is as easy-going as ever; she makes it all sound cool and easy with the help of a combo that blends in perfectly with her idiosyncratic singing. Bearing in mind the album's concept, Cole Porter's "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home to" is the right choice as an opener. "The Thrill Is Gone," highlighted by Viola's excellent work on guitar, is simply lovely, and London even prefaces it with the verse. Overall, Julie... at Home is one of London's most memorable outings, yet another example of the singer at her best in an intimate, jazzy atmosphere.