Jazz, blues and Nostalgia.
Now the dark days before Christmas are getting closer and closer, we have an hour full of cheerful music, which was played abundantly in the forties and fifties on the radio, at movie soundtracks and newsreels. Mostly very light-footed, but usually made by people with a thorough classical study like Charles Shadwell (who was the head of the BBC Variety Orchestra for three decades), the master of light-footed music(but with a classical education) Leroy Anderson, de Catalan violinist, bandleader and cartoonist Xavier Cugat, who led the private orchestra of Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Les Baxter (used to be one of the Mel Tormé’s famous Mel-Tones), former music student Henri Rene, Wapiti’s from the Netherlands, Skitch Henderson (who got his name through his fortune ‘to re-sketch a song in a different key’, Percy Faith, Frank Chacksfield, Robert Sharples, André Popp, and, all right then, some real ‘airplane music’ from Helmut Zacharias.
