Since Ms. Dardanella is the only thing keeping this blog alive just now, let’s go with it.
Wikipedia tells us that Sascha Jacobsen lived from 1895 to “1971 or 1972.” He was a violinist, and he played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the 1950s. And, it seems, he was a musician of sufficient skill to command a Stradivarius. An interesting story of Mr. Jacobsen and his Strad - lost in a rain storm and swept out to sea, fortunately to be recovered and restored (the violin, not Mr. Jacobsen) can be read here.
Not much else seems available for my cursory Internet researches. Perhaps someone will blunder onto this site and enlighten us. Meanwhile, his Dardanella is an interesting addition to our collection.
Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. The single biggest recording act of the 1920s. In movies, when they want to evoke the sound of the era, this is who they play. I won’t say he was bigger than the Beatles — he was a chubby, balding, middle-aged man, so his appeal was on quite a different level — but his sound was the standard of the age, and many great names worked with him over the years, including Bix Beiderbecke and Bing Crosby.
Whiteman’s version of the song was not the biggest seller — that honor goes to Ben Selvin and His Orchestra, which made the song famous in 1920. (In those days, everyone had an orchestra. It was mandatory, like getting a Social Security Number.) Read the label on this video, and you’ll note that the song is designated as a Foxtrot. Which it was, after all. Not that anyone cares about such things these days.
Frankly, the Ben Selvin version of the song is better, and I’ll get around to posting that one one of these months. But you can hear the standard Whiteman approach, with competence oozing from every element, as the musicians swap solos in the usual jazzband style of the day.
April’s Dardanella is from a group called The Jazz 4, and was posted on YouTube only weeks ago. Where they are playing, I cannot tell. The video had just 21 views on YouTube when I first looked at it today. Let’s give a listen:
Amazing how… perfunctory it all is. These gentlemen were evidently hired to provide background noise at some upscale gig. The musicians make no effort toward flash or stage presence at all, as if they were being paid to fade into the scenery. It would seem that some hotel manager instructed them, in all seriousness, to avoid arousing the notice of the patrons of the venue at all costs. Our entertainers hit the notes in a competent and able fashion while the audience murmurs away, oblivious.
We never see the crowd in our static camera viewpoint. From the evidence presented, they give no indication that they are aware of this performance of one of the great songs of the last one hundred years.
This month’s Dardanella is one of the earliest recorded, and at last we have a version that includes a full vocal performance: a duet, circa 1920, by Gladys Rice and Vernon Dalhart. Click to play, my venerable dummies:
Given that we finally have a performance that includes all the lyrics, it makes sense to post them, at last. Here you go:
Down, beside the Dardanella Bay,
Where Oriental breezes play, there lives a lonely maid, Armenian.
By, the Dardanelles with glowing eyes,
She looks across the sea and sighs, and weaves her love spell so sirenian.
Soon I shall return to Turkestan,
I will ask for her heart and hand.
Oh sweet Dardanella, I love your harem eyes.
Oh, a lucky fellow, to capture such a prize,
Allah knows my love for you, and he tells you to be true,
Dardanella, oh hear my sigh, my Oriental.
Oh sweet Dardanella, prepare the wedding wine.
There’ll be one girl in my harem when you’re mine.
We’ll build a tent, Just like the children of the Orient.
Oh sweet Dardanella, my star of love divine.
When, the Sultan saw her lovely eyes,
Oh he was taken by surprise, he said, I’ll buy her for my Harem.
I, just told the Sultan to be nice,
She can’t be bought for any price, she said to me she couldn’t bear him.
So beneath the Oriental moon,
I’ll be wooing my love real soon.
Oh sweet Dardanella, I love your harem eyes.
Oh, a lucky fellow, to capture such a prize,
Allah knows my love for you, and he tells you to be true,
Dardanella, oh hear my sigh, my Oriental.
Oh sweet Dardanella, prepare the wedding wine,
There’ll be one girl in my harem when you’re mine.
We’ll build a tent, just like the children of the Orient.
Oh sweet Dardanella, my star of love divine.
My reference books say little about Gladys Rice, but they do note one odd fact: Her father was John C. Rice, the amorous fellow in the famous 1896 silent film, “The Kiss,” which we may show in its entirety here:
Of Vernon Dalhart, more is known, especially since his “Prisoner’s Song,” recorded in 1925, was probably the most popular recording of its decade:
A rather maudlin song, that. If you register at imeem.com, you can hear the whole dreary thing. My guidebook (Joel Whitburn’s “Pop Memories, 1890-1954″) says that Dalhart began his recording career in 1916, and that it was his transformation from a light opera tenor to a singer of “mournful hillbilly ballads” that “enabled Dalhart to make music history with monumental sales on some thirty record labels under dozens of pseudonyms.” Perhaps the two songs we review today gives us an idea of the range of that transformation.
I first encountered the Rice/Dalhart Dardanella at Archive.org — a tremendous resource that is a vast online warehouse of sound recordings, videos, and other items. I encourage you to click on that link and explore. But be warned before you do: You’ll likely lose hours clicking from one fascinating artifact to another.
My obsession with “Dardanella” continues, but today, in a local thrift store, my attention was momentarily arrested by a pristine 78-RPM disc of the Mills Brothers’ singing, “Paper Moon.” In retrospect, I suppose it was not all that big a deal — given that “Paper Moon” was the biggest hit the Mills Brothers had in their sixty-year career, there’s gotta be a lot of these discs floating around. But I did find myself enjoying a fleeting rush of serendipity. I’ll explain the connection to “Dardanella” in a moment, but first, hark! Let’s listen to the song…
Yes, that was an odd clip, one more to add to the endless collection of oddities you’ll find on YouTube. But it fits, because “Paper Doll” is an odd song - one of those tunes that sound nice enough when you listen to it casually, but then when you really listen to it, all kinds of oogie implications creep into your head. Think about it: “I’d rather have a paper doll to call my own,” sings the crooner, “than have a fickle-minded real live girl.”
Really?
Back to “Dardanella.” The authorship of “Dardanella” was attributed, after some dispute and at least one lawsuit, to three writers. One of them, Johnny S. Black, died in 1936 after getting knocked in the head, or so the story goes, in a night club altercation over a matter of twenty-five cents. And so it was that one of the authors of the biggest hit of 1920 never lived to see the success of his other greatest song, “Paper Doll” — the biggest hit of 1943.
“Dardanella” leads everywhere, to all things. Trust me on this, the more you look, the more you find in it.
As for the disc in the thrift store, it’s still there. I don’t own a turntable, so I didn’t buy it. Alas.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but YouTube’s tiff with Warner Music has resulted in a lot of viddies being removed from the one place where somebody might actually stand a chance of seeing them. I’m not about to weigh in on the proze and conz of the various copyright issues involved, except to say that when giant corporations battle, wee tiny widdle bloggers get stomped on, meaning that some of the Dardanellas I’ve posted here are now Officially Dead Links. No great loss in the scheme of things, and I’ll find replacements for them if I can, and for whatever else might be missing, eventually, when I get around to it, and so forth. The worst of it all is that we’ve lost Judy Garland. Somebody will have to break the news to Liza, but not me, as I’m a bit preoccupied at the moment, mainly with the arrangement of my sock drawer.
In the meantime, let’s have our monthly musical interlude, as follows:
And here we see that our venerable Dardanella survives even the vicious assault of a gang of harmonicaters. And who are we to complain, as long as these fellas look like they’re having fun?
The group is called Troupe de Gaita, and they have a website, composed in a language I can’t read, but which I take to be Portuguese, and which would perhaps make them Brazilian.
Gotta love how our favorite song translates to so many places around the globe, yes?
December’s Dardanella is something of a curiosity — Judy Garland sings, apparently for a live broadcast. I don’t know anything of the backstory that would account for this recording — it is simply yet another of those YouTube non sequiturs that are the objects of my endless fascination. The present video is a simple static shot of Judy; the recording is scratchy and quite low-fi. Nevertheless, for Dardanella fans (and maybe I’m the only one), it is an interesting document. Dig this, Chester:
Groovy, yes? And quite singular, in that Judy actually sings this Dardanella. Yes, friends, the song actually has lyrics. “Dardanella” is a song which is almost always, even in its earliest recordings, played as an instrumental, but in this version, Judy sings the actual lyric, or some of it, anyway. She skips the verse in favor of the chorus, to wit:
Oh sweet Dardanella, I love your harem eyes
I’m a lucky fella to capture such a prize
Oh Allah knows my love for you, and he tells you to be true
Dardanella, Oh hear my sigh, my Oriental
Oh sweet Dardanella, prepare the wedding wine
There’ll be one girl in my harem when you’re mine
We’ll build a tent, Just like the children of the Orient
Oh sweet Dardanella, my star of love divine
And with this, a bit of the Dardanella mystery unravels. “Dardanella,” you discover, is a girl’s name, and you learn that that girl is beautiful, and “Oriental,” and the song contains references to Allah, and harems, and the romance of places a long ways off from here. Go back to the popular music of the early part of the 20th century, and you’ll find it rife with exotic maidens of various types — hula girls, Indian princesses, sleepy-eyed ladies in opium dens, and so on. “Dardanella” is a song of a type. But that chorus is the only glimpse we get of it, for now.
In this video, the song is essentially rewritten from this point Judy finishes that chorus. This new version then becomes an occasion for playing an old popular song in the newly popular manner, and by that, we mean Swing, baby! This Dardanella is not as an ode to an alluring princess, but an object of nostalgia recast for a new era. If Judy had two turntables and a microphone, she’d be sampling the original shellac 78s. By the time we return to the chorus, the lyrics are jazzed up, and the song is shifted to an uptempo swing rhythm. In the second chorus, we love Dardanella, not for her “harem eyes,” but for the way she “jives.” Whatever that means. And by that, I mean, like, far out, man.
Over the passage of years — and Judy’s version here is far closer in time to the original recordings than we are to Judy’s — this effort to “modernize” a song held as quaint and nostalgic has itself become such.
Nothing we can do about that. Time does its evil work, and we are all doomed to the same fate. Yes, in spite of all our striving to be hep, we will all, eventually, seem sweet and old-fashioned one day. And maybe the more so because of our striving.
This time our coveted Dardanella of the Month Award goes to Satchmo, i. e., Louis Armstrong and his All Stars, circa 1956. Curiously enough, Mr. Armstrong himself does not seem to appear on this recording, apparently stepping aside to let his highly accomplished ensemble step into the spotlight. And that spotlight focuses most strongly on clarinetist Mr. Edmond Hall, who, it seems from my twenty minutes of exhaustive research, had quite an impressive career, spanning many decades, even, for a time, fronting his own band. There is, alas, no video to accompany this recording, but we do have the imeem.com player for me to embed and for you to enjoy:
Unfortunately, it seems that imeem now requires registration to hear more than a thirty-second clip of the tune. But it’s free, and I think it’s worth the trip, if you’re interested in hearing more of it — just click the “Dardanella” link in the embedded player. It’s an impeccable performance of the song — but what else would you expect from a group with Louis Armstrong’s name on it?
Since we don’t have a video Dardanella this time, let me throw in an extra treat: A video featuring Louis with Bing Crosby cutting loose in a big way. It’s a chance to see the spotlight fall on quite a few of the Armstrong group, including the aforementioned Edmond Hall. It’s a fun clip, with charisma splattering all over the place. And, being that it’s YouTube, there’s no registration required.
As I’m almost certain I’ve mentioned before, I have an endless fascination for YouTube and the things people feel compelled to share there. I find it charming in a way that makes me glad I’m human — the little songs, the pratfalls, the cinematic experiments, the hokey amateurism, and the fun of it all.
This month’s Dardanella is from someone named Tom Smith, and it’s simply his hands on a keyboard bringing this ancient and venerable song to life. There are no frills here, just Tom and his electric piano. I don’t know who he is, but something in him has brought him to YouTube to share his music, and he has posted almost three dozens songs, some with other musicians, but most with just his own good self. I like that.
