DJ McSchmormac at his disks
I have started something called the “Hybrid Highbrow Network.” It is at this point mostly only a figment of my imagination, a matrix of people who don’t know they’re in the matrix but who mix classical, jazz, showtunes, world music and whatever into whatever comes out the other end, radio-wise. Undaunted by the fictional nature of my project (so far), I recently put out a call to various likeminded friends, eg., “what are you doing these days?” DJ McSchmormac, who does the Grammophoney Baloney show at KPOO-FM in San Francisco, replied with the following:
You’ll be sorry you asked – on Monday I only played three classical things – Stravinsky on piano with Samuel Dushkin on violin performing part of Duo Concertante – some Beethoven piano sonata by A. Schnabel, and because it was Martin Luther King Day – Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, done by a Japanese orchestra from the 1930s.
Did I tell you about this amazing feature that’s been part of the program for quite some while? It’s called “Three From Thirty Three at Three Thirty Three.” That’s where I play three recordings from the year 1933 when it’s 3:33 pm.
Anyway.
Here’s a recent development – I picked up a nice reissue of Billie Holiday the complete Commodore Masters – when she wanted to record Strange Fruit in 1939 – Columbia didn’t want her to record it on their label so they put her contract on temporary hiatus (the guy that wrote Strange Fruit adopted Julius & Ethel Rosenberg’s kids) she released 16 tracks on the Commodore label – those are the masters, one session has an unusually small accompanying ensemble of just piano, bass & drums.
Anyway – I was listening to these and thinking “this is all great top notch stuff” and decided the best approach would to play the whole thing in chronological order, but subject to the three-hourly limit on songs by the same artists and/or from the same release – which happens to be three or four in this case – but I went with three instead of four because that’s what KPOO thinks it is – so over the course of 6 weeks I played three different Billie Holiday tracks from the Commodore Masters each week – so I had people saying they were enjoying the serialized Billie Holiday, and when it was over they said they missed it, so I decided to take a serialized approach to more stuff, I want it to be stuff I’ve never played on the program before, and stuff that’s worth playing, I think it’s beneficial to the listener because they’re hearing me play something new, and I think it MIGHT be beneficial to me – insofar as maybe I don’t have to put as much mental energy into compiling a playlist – but it’s possible I might end up having to put MORE mental energy into the selections, to find stuff that’s compatible with the serialized selections.
I’m aiming to have up to 8 different releases in serial form all at the same time – this will constitute about half of the entire playlist, the other half of the playlist will be stuff to thread the serialized selections together. I don’t want to do more than 8 becuase then there’s no room left for my mixing skills, and I might as well just be Pandora or Spotify at that stage.
At the moment I’ve started serializing Sister Rosetta Tharpe starting from her 1944 session with the Sam Price Trio – these sessions in particular show why she’s a rock & roll pioneer and why her recent induction into the R&R Hall of Fame was so long overdue.
Also I’ve started serialzing some late 1929-1930 recordings of Henry Red Allen & His New York Orchestra – remastered by the legendary John R.T. Davies.
From now until the end of February I’m concentrating on African American artists, I’ll be adding Clifford Hayes, CHick Webb, John Kirby Sextet, James P. Johnson, I’m not sure what else.
After February, some of the classical serialized selections I’m planning include the complete Bartok Quartets by the Julliard Quartet from 1950, the 1930s solo piano recordings of Charles Ives, Emmanuel Feuermann, Manuel DeFalla, Igor & Soulima Stravinsky, Schubert Quartets, a whole lot of different things.
Enjoyed your Bartok podcast.
C
