Those old recordings in my collection....

Now that I'm rediscovering my old record collection which has been quietly gathering dust in the stereo rack for years, it's almost like finding old friends. Looking through that couple of shelves of LPs is like looking back at my life and the music that was being played as the years went by. As a kid, I remember popular music being mostly 'big bands' like Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Wayne King, Benny Goodman, Les brown, and Frankie Carle, and they usually featured a great piano player (like Count Basie, who later got his own orchestra, and ended up in a movie called 'Blazing Saddles' from the ever-radiant Mel Brooks!) along with various combos of brass, woodwinds, and rhythm sections. And back then, people actually held onto each other as they danced - unless it was the Jitterbug. Speaking of that, I've seen recent demonstrations of it on TV, and I'm here to tell you these kids today have no idea what the real thing was all about at all. You had to be there, Kids. You had to feel that beat right in your bones, and move with it wherever it took you, and we didn't rehearse for a week beforehand - we just hauled off and made it up as we went along. Sometimes, the furniture got in the way, but usually no lives were lost.


And who could forget Disco? Valiantly though we tried... Goofy clothes, goofy music, and it being played by the most unlikely music-makers. I'm thinking now of The Armada Orchestra, and a hit from one of their LPs - maybe their only LP - called 'The Hustle'. The Armada Orchestra were actually 30 musicians from the London Symphony Orchestra, and they toured Europe as a dance band during those heady Disco days. The Hustle was a snappy tune, though, and a lot of us liked it. Some of us even liked it enough to buy the record. There's just no accounting for taste!