Memories of Hal Kemp

This carefully, skillfully concocted tribute to dance band leader Hal Kemp was a Roulette release in 1957, then surfaced once again on the Forum budget line. The simple cover illustration shows a conductor's baton lying in between two sheet music scores, which look like somebody erased all the notation and then took bites out of the charts themselves. This could be interpreted as a symbolic image of musical deconstruction, although that is hardly what goes on here. Perhaps the artist was trying to indicate that bandleader Henry Jerome, the man behind this project, felt that Kemp's music was good enough to eat. In that case the listener, or rather eater, should be prepared for short snacks, since only a couple of these dozen tracks is more than three minutes long. Jerome's band was something of a feature at the Edison Hotel in New York City, holding forth for dancers in the establishment's Green Room for more than a decade beginning in the early '50s. While none of the instrumentalists are credited, this is a totally polished outfit, precise and devoid of excessive glitz. In Kemp's musical ballroom, dancers were held aloft on cloud-like puffs of sound. A team of arrangers that Jerome describes as working overtime has come up with a significantly appropriate tribute, the performances flowing so effortlessly that these arrangers' pens seems to have been full of invisible ink. A pair of male vocalists pop up on a few songs, sometimes in tandem with a background singing group credited as a "glee club." These tracks, such as "Got a Date with an Angel," have garnered greater glory due to the aging process. Vocalists able to hold forth in front of a big band in such a relaxed, carefree manner have become increasingly rare, vocal groups even more so, glee clubs nonexistent. These vocal tracks can be experienced as something close to surreal if the ears and mind get past the notion that they are just dated or cheesy-sounding.