Another star of another time, now pretty much forgotten. Carmen Cavallaro. “The Poet of the Piano”, they called him. American born, of Italian heritage, Cavallaro was classically trained but in the 1930s he shifted to playing jazz and swing in ballrooms and nightclubs. He used his classical expertise to adorn popular tunes with what the […]
Category: LP
There are some artists who are hard to take seriously, not because they are obscure but because they were once enormously popular. If you love to hunt for old records in op-shops and thrift-stores, as I do, you see these guys so often that you flick straight past them. James Last. Nana Mouskouri. Kamahl. Harry […]
It is easily 25 years since I read J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but I still remember the pivotal scene vividly. Holden Caulfield is speaking to his sister Phoebe, who is pretty much the only person he trusts. “You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’? … […]
Like quite a few great Australians, including Pharlap, Tex Morton was actually a New Zealander. Born in Nelson in 1916, he started performing at 14, and enjoyed success with travelling bands, playing and recording country songs. In the early 1930s he did what all ambitious New Zealand musicians do: crossed “The Ditch” (the Tasman Sea) […]
When I was a teenager, I sort-of-learned to play the flute. I never got very good at it, because I rarely practiced. My feeling after each lesson, as I packed the flute into its brown plastic case, and the case into my school bag, and began the long journey home (two buses and over an […]
We are an extremely visual culture, and becoming more so. As images and video becomes easier and easier to create and manipulate, and as screens become better and lighter and more portable, our ability to just read, or just listen, gradually erodes. I teach at a university, and it is a constant battle to keep […]
The vinyl microgroove LP was launched in 1949. So when this record was released, late in 1952, the technology was still new, exciting and expensive. One of the many superior features of the vinyl record is hard to appreciate, unless you have handled a shellac gramophone disc. Or, more to the point dropped one. Think […]
A few years ago, I had a book published called Disasters That Changed Australia. As the title suggests it has nothing to do with music or recorded sound, but one chapter discusses fire disasters, something Australians have to live with. Eucalyptus trees dominate the vegetation of Australia to an extent unmatched by any genus of […]
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