Sixties Instrumental Au-Go-Go: Les & Larry Elgart, and Orchestra on Vocalion

Sixties Instrumental Au-Go-Go: Les & Larry Elgart, and Orchestra

Here are some unexpected gems from 2013’s releases by Dutton Vocalion. If you’ve wanted instrumental albums that covered the hip, danceable grooves from the mid to late 1960s, you are recommended to acquire this pair! The brothers Elgart produced two sequenced LPs in the first set from 1965 and 1966 in Phase 4 like Stereo even though they weren’t signed by DECCA.  As their cover art implies, this takes the beat to the dance clubs and more – right into the living rooms with phono quality analogue vibes. Think of saxes, trumpets, percussion, drums and the occasional Latin rhythm and you’ve sized up the flavours. The Elgarts can kick up a beat anytime and transform the pop hits of their day into shakers and movers. Their playing is mostly lush and never grating on the ears – and there is always a touch of opulence in their arrangements. What you hear is the amplification of a medium sized brass orchestra sounding many times bigger because of the arrangements. Some hits from the first set include the moody intonation of ‘Meditation’ (an exceptionally slow number) and the sparklingly cherrful ‘Downtown’, ‘King of the Road’, ‘Thunder Shake’, ‘Michelle’, ‘Batman’, ‘Sloop John B’ and ‘California Dreamin’. The second set from 1967 is surprisingly a lot more laid back even though there are plenty of fast movers. It seemed the Elgarts had staged a decisive retreat to the well appointed bar and ordered a couple of Martinis and cocktails after the rounds on the dancefloor, thereafter gently winding up a memorable night out on the town…music that makes the Sixties moment. J

Les & Larry Elgart
Elgart au Go-Go & Sound of the Times (More au Go-Go) CDLK4501

Elgart au Go-Go
The original LP CS 9155 (1965) STEREO

1.Thunder Shake (Abreu)
2.Downtown (Hatch)
3.Meditation (Jobim; Mendonça; Gimbel)  [Larry Elgart (soprano sax)]
4.Come Rain or Come Shine (Arlen; Mercer)
5.King of the Road (Miller)
6.Jerkin’ Around (Abreu)   
7.St James’ Infirmary (Primrose)
8.La Bostella (Pilar) [Viens Danser la Bostella]
9.Willow Weep for Me (Ronell)
10.G’won Train (Bown)
11. I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues (Arlen; Koehler)
12.The First Man’s Theme (Neumann; Manes)

Sound of the Times (More au Go-Go)
The original LP SS 62401 (1966) STEREO

13.I’m Comin’ Home, Cindy (Lopez; Zeller arr Dick Behrke)
14.A Sign of the Times (Hatch arr Bobby Scott)
15.Spanish Flea (J & C Wechter arr Lewis Gluckin)
16.A Taste of Honey (Scott; Marlow arr Bobby Scott)
17.Michelle (Lennon; McCartney arr Bobby Scott)
18. Batman (Hefti arr Bobby Scott) theme from the TV series
19. Going to Grandma’s House (Levine; Gwangwa arr Stewart Levine)
20. Sloop John B (Wilson arr George Williams)
21.California Dreamin’ (J & M Phillips arr Stewart Levine)   
22.Nowhere Man (Lennon; McCartney arr Bobby Scott)   
23. Why Not? (Layne arr Lewis Gluckin)

Les & Larry Elgart & Their Orchestra
Girl Watchers & The Wonderful World of Today's Hits CDLK4488

Girl Watchers
The original LP CS 9433 (1967) STEREO

1.Music to Watch Girls By (Ramin; Velona)
2.Shine On, Harvest Moon (Bayes; Norworth)
3.That's Life (Kay; Gordon)
4.The Spy with a Cold Nose (Ortolani) from the film
5.Night Walk (Macero)
6.Out of Nowhere (Green; Heyman)
7.Girl Watchers (Macero)
8.Look for the Silver Lining (Kern; De Sylva)
9.Girl Talk (Hefti; Troup)
10.Miss You (C & H Tobias)
11.Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella (On a Rainy Day) (Fain; Kahal; Wheeler)

The Wonderful World of Today's Hits
The original LP CS 9580 (1967) STEREO

12.Torino (Garisto)
13. Tara's Theme (Steiner) from Gone With the Wind
14.Camelot (Loewe; Lerner) from the film
15.When I Look in Your Eyes (Bricusse) from Dr Dolittle
16.The Bobo (Lai; Cahn) from the film
17.Ode to Billie Joe (Gentry)
18.Lady (Kaempfert; Rehbein; Kusik; Singleton)
19.To Sir with Love (Black; London) from the film
20.Live for Life (Lai; Gimbel) Vivre pour Vivre from the film
21.What a Wonderful World (Weiss; Douglas)
22.Spanish Eyes (Kaempfert; Singleton; Snyder)

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SOUNDBOXES III: BEL CANTO CD2 – Cool 70s, Retro Wonder!

Officially, Bel Canto’s most radical redesign of its initial CD players is touted as ‘CD2 CD player 24/96 Transport/DAC with Level Control’, but to me, the true beauty of this product can only be appreciated by comparing it with photos of 1970s vintage portable turntable decks. Just GOOGLE ‘70s Record Decks’ or ‘Portable Record Players’ and you will see what I mean!

According to Bel Canto USA’s website (belcantodesign.com), the player weighs 8.2 kilogrammes, and most importantly, for my tight home spaces, this wonderful disc spinner occupies little more than the footprint of the traditional CYRUS CD player/Amplifier/Tuner. At the showroom, the salesperson trumpeted the CD2’s strengths to be its highly accurate Ultra-Clock improving significantly on the precision of reproducing music from the digital bytes, and its 192 kHz/24 Bit digital to analogue conversion rate. Other technical details are appended at the bottom of this review. These technical details will mean little to the serious music fan, unless s/he happens to be a science techie as well! My verdict: a stunning analogue sound that throws a convincing soundstage one might expect of a high-end player. There are no rough edges to the reproduction, only honestly what the original recording meant! As is my habit, I avoided pairing the CD2 with a separate DAC as far as possible to minimize clutter in my modest sized listening room. As with all top loading CD spinners, this one requires placing a magnetic puck on the spindle to clamp the CD down during operation. This stabilizes the disc as well as allowing it maximum freedom of movement without too much direct contact with the rest of the stationary parts. The magnetic clamp is heavy – as heavy as the sort of souvenir paperweights one might purchase on an overseas holiday. The manual also cautions that when pairing the CD2 with non-Bel Canto equipment, the internal volume control ought to be turned up via the remote control to ‘100’, then locked in place by pressing a small button on the back panel of the player. It is recommended that the player be kept ‘on’ permanently so that this volume setting does not revert to the factory setting of ‘50’ when the electricity is first turned on. Of course, if the CD2 is used in tandem with Bel Canto equipment, I understand that a central remote can engage the player’s volume settings directly. This is a small issue that does not detract from the player’s overall brilliant sound.

Bel Canto has opted for a minimalist design – there is no casing to enclose the disc playing compartment and protect it from dust, mites or worse accidental human interventions! The design is 70s retro and definitely not meant to be child-friendly. As the pictures show, the thrill lies in watching the disc spin and reproduce its own kaleidoscopic colour(s) as you listen to your favourite sounds. The orange and black disc is incidentally PAUL MAURIAT’s ‘Blooming Hits’ 1968 album reproduced on PHILIPS/Mercury Japan’s CD reissue series in 1997. When the disc spins, it absolutely looks like a miniature vinyl record in operation. Switch the disc to something with black and reflective steel text like Johnny Pearson’s Japanese edition ‘Super Best’ CD from 1988, and you get a ‘shimmering’ steel grey vinyl like colour. I have captured this on camera below, where you can see a framed photo on a nearby wall reflected off the spinning disc. This feature certainly delivers meaning to that familiar phrase – ‘spinning out the good old memories’. This artistic dimension never occurred to me until the Bel Canto came to be regularly played in my Hi Fi set up. The manual that comes with the player recommends keeping a blank or unwanted disc permanently in place when the player is on standby, or not in use, to keep the dust from accumulating on the exposed laser head hidden partially by the decorative steel arm guiding the positioning of the magnetic puck. The player never really gets fully hot – only warm – probably because the exposed disc spinning motion acts as an incidental cooling fan for the player. This is not in the manual – just my guess!

Now the sound: everything to match its looks! It is a highly involving, fatigue-less, analogue sound that rarely gets bright even on studio recordings from the 1990s and later. I would even say it is Tube-like – smooth in the mid-range and full bodied at the upper registers, and never sounding harsh, unless the recording was sub-optimally done in the original session. Playing back Paul Mauriat’s ‘Blooming Hits’ from 1968, one hears an almost live studio recording: noticeably, he used a distinctly smaller string section than I had previously “heard” on NAD, Roksan and Shanling players, with the rest of the orchestra clearly made up of trumpets, trombones, percussion and harpsichord. ‘A Kind of Hush’, ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Love is Blue’ particularly boasted the airiness of trumpets and harpsichord while ‘Something Stupid’ revealed layers to the background chorus Mauriat employed to ‘sing’ the main melody in harmony with his strings. The Johnny Pearson disc remastered on Japan’s JVC label instantly demonstrated near perfect sound stage placing the strings in near perfect flanks to the left and right of Pearson’s piano in the centre. Abetted by good room acoustics (no padding or buffering in my room), Johnny Pearson was ‘in concert’. Testing more technically demanding material such as Bela Fleck and the Fleckstones’ ‘Tales from the Acoustic Planet’, and the exclusive Audiophile ‘His and Hers’ compilation from THAT CD Shop in Singapore, the Bel Canto acquitted itself equally admirably. The Fleckstones’ music exhibited masterly switches from classical hues to folk rock grooves to gypsy jazz. The ‘His and Hers’ compilation showcased powerhouse pop-opera crossover vocals of the likes of the tenor duo Pharos (‘Yesterday When I Was Young’) and Patrizio Buanne’s ‘You’re My World’, as well as the torchlike remake of the Iglesias-Nelson duet ‘To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before’ by Russell Watson and Alexander O’Neal. Each voice sounded distinct, present in the room, and the sound decay was uncannily concert quality.

Then again, I have to declare that perhaps the CRYSTAL CABLE Standard interconnects worked some of the magic, or the much vaunted SONUS FABER Musica integrated amplifier employing CRYSTAL CABLE Power Micro ramped up the airiness factor. That said, the Bel Canto CD2 was employing an external power source i.e. the run of the mill laptop-like power pack shown below without insulated cables extending for about a metre in length before I could connect a good, custom made in Hong Kong, shielded power cord for the rest of the electricity’s path from a power distributor. Alternatively, one could also have the built in option of operating the CD2 as a Transport – but that is provided you are willing to put up a separate DAC, or one of those new DAC-equipped integrated amplifiers appearing in the past few years. But I’m happy with my set-up: ‘new classic’ Bel Canto player meeting a vintage amplifier from Italy. Now how much better can this get, with glamourous surfaces to match?

Looking forward to hearing from other users and admirers of the Bel Canto CD2!

Alan

November 2013     

SONUS Faber Musica - Classic Italian Integrated Amplifier