'Sweet Be Bop' What was that supposed to be?

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

My first encounter with the Lionel Hampton big band was getting - I think from my aunt's collection that she'd left with my Grandma when she went to the USA - a Brunswick 78 issue of Midnight sun/Ridin' on the L & N'.

As was common in those days, the label bore a categorisation. Midnight sun was 'Be Bop'. Not a categorisation I'd quarrel with at all.

 

Listening to the CD earlier, I wondered if that was something thought up by UK Decca and what was on the US Decca originals. So I looked on the web.

'Sweet Be Bop' is something I've never heard of before. If that record's supposed to be a bop equivalent of 'Sweet Jazz' that everyone says was the US equivalent of what in the UK were called 'Strict tempo' bands, then I've gotta say that Victor Sylvester was never like that so I've been barking up the wrong end of the stick for years.

But it's not REALLY a categorisation; it's a label US Decca stuck on the record to help sales. Well, that means the phrase, even newly minted, must have meant something to the contemporary public.

Anyone like to hazard a guess at what US Decca THOUGHT it meant?

MG

[JSngry]

At least they didn't call it "fox trot". Decca loved that term.

Hell, Decca was really anal about that labeling system, it carried over into the LP era well into the 1960s. I think it's on the first one or two Who US albums, "vocal with instrumental accompaniment". Somebody somewhere had a real hardon for that.

I guess if it was supposed to mean anything it was a jazz-ballad tune that wasn't a "standard".

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

And that sold records?

Amazing!

Thanks.

MG

[duaneiac]

My guess is that the label is showing that this record could be sold by the record store clerk under three different categories:  Instrumental, Sweet or Be Bop.  Nowadays, the label might be printed in such a way as this:  "Instrumental / Sweet / Be Bop".

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Ah, that sounds rational.

MG

[mjzee]

3 minutes ago, duaneiac said:

My guess is that the label is showing that this record could be sold by the record store clerk under three different categories:  Instrumental, Sweet or Be Bop.  Nowadays, the label might be printed in such a way as this:  "Instrumental / Sweet / Be Bop".

Tags!

[JSngry]

Vocal with Instrumental Accompaniment.

Just so you knew.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

58 minutes ago, JSngry said:

 

Vocal with Instrumental Accompaniment.

Just so you knew.

MG

[JSngry]

[felser]

 

[Big Beat Steve]

Was "Vocal with instrumental accompaniment" really a specialty of Decca? From what I've seen elsewhere I doubt it. At least in the 78 era.

Checking a few of my 78s, I found another one like that on Roost to start with. And Capitol went one better: "Vocal with piano and instrumental accompaniment"! So piano does not rank among the "instruments"? Or is it just because the piano is more to the fore in places?

Edited August 16, 2018 by Big Beat Steve

[JSngry]

Decca stayed with it long after it was long gone everywhere else, long into the 1960s. It just seemed weird.

[Teasing the Korean]

On August 16, 2018 at 11:36 AM, JSngry said:

At least they didn't call it "fox trot". Decca loved that term.

I think they were still using it well into the 1960s.  They may have even used it on the Who's My Generation LP. 

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

4 hours ago, Teasing the Korean said:

I think they were still using it well into the 1960s.  They may have even used it on the Who's My Generation LP. 

MG

[Teasing the Korean]

Mildly off-topic, but considering that Decca was a major, major label during the 78 era, how was it that they ended up being left in the dust by Capitol, Columbia and RCA in the LP era?  It is like Decca completely lost touch with pop music trends.  When they accidentally released something good, like Sammy Davis or Dave Pike or Gene Rains, the albums were impossible to find.  I guess they did well with country music, but not much else. 

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

BIll Haley? Brenda Lee? The Coral and Brunswick subsidiaries did pretty well with Buddy Holly, Jackie Wilson, Young/Holt, and a great many of Decca's country records were big pop hits.

I think Decca was still in touch. However, it seems that Decca, rather than RCA Victor and Capitol, both of which were also very big in the country market, was the victim of the post-war indies growth period; Imperial, Specialty, Chess and Atlantic were probably the villains, as far as Decca was concerned.

RCA Victor was really only four big artists, as I remember; Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, Neil Sedaka and Perry Como, who seems to have done well because his show seems to have been on TV every week (even over here). Capitol seem to have been able to make money out of pretty well anything.

It's noticeable that, apart from Jackie Wilson, none of Decca's artists went on and on for years, whereas Presley, Cooke and Como all had very long periods as top sellers. As did Nat Cole, Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Wilson and Peggy Lee. Capitol also knew how to make best selling albums, too, and I don't think Decca did. Nor did Decca get much in the way of big original cast/soundtrack albums.

Well, you're probably right; they lost some people like Peggy Lee, but apart from her, I can't think anyone BIG went elsewhere. But maybe they were continually being outbid for really promising people by the other majors.

MG

[JSngry]

Decca became part of MCA before impulse! did, in 1962! With them came Coral & Brunswick. They didn't form Uni until 1966, and didn't buy Kapp until 1967. None of these labels continued real relevancy into the 70s, but MCA sure did.

They were still selling Pete Fountain & Brenda Lee & Burt Kaempfret & Earl Grant records to that particular niche market right up until the end of the 1960s. After that, they were the American label for The Who for up to and including Quadrophenia, after which they were released on MCA.

MCA seemed to leverage the Deccaback-catalog into always available collections of one kind or another. And Big at Christmas - ALWAYS available. None were particularly "comprehensive", but who amongst us of a certain age doesn't have a Duke Ellington record on Decca?

Decca also had the original cast album for Jesus Christ Superstar. They made them the money, Decca did.

As for RCA, they moved into the post-50s rock/pop era pretty well, with Jefferson Airplane/Starship, John Denver, Henry Mancini. who else? The Guess Who, David Bowie. They also had the OC of Hair, which was a really good seller.

Sinatra spent less than a decade at Capitol. It was an amazing less-than-a-decade to be sure, but that's all it was. The Beach Boys were gone by 1969.

 

[Teasing the Korean]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Sinatra spent less than a decade at Capitol. It was an amazing less-than-a-decade to be sure, but that's all it was. The Beach Boys were gone by 1969.

Capitol had the best roster of any of those labels in the 1950s.  Sinatra, Nat, Duke, Stan Kenton, Peggy Lee, June Christy, and of course THEE GREAT LES BAXTER.

[Teasing the Korean]

2 hours ago, The Magnificent Goldberg said:

BIll Haley? Brenda Lee? The Coral and Brunswick subsidiaries did pretty well with Buddy Holly, Jackie Wilson, Young/Holt, and a great many of Decca's country records were big pop hits.

I think Decca was still in touch. However, it seems that Decca, rather than RCA Victor and Capitol, both of which were also very big in the country market, was the victim of the post-war indies growth period; Imperial, Specialty, Chess and Atlantic were probably the villains, as far as Decca was concerned.

RCA Victor was really only four big artists, as I remember; Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, Neil Sedaka and Perry Como, who seems to have done well because his show seems to have been on TV every week (even over here). Capitol seem to have been able to make money out of pretty well anything.

It's noticeable that, apart from Jackie Wilson, none of Decca's artists went on and on for years, whereas Presley, Cooke and Como all had very long periods as top sellers. As did Nat Cole, Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Wilson and Peggy Lee. Capitol also knew how to make best selling albums, too, and I don't think Decca did. Nor did Decca get much in the way of big original cast/soundtrack albums.

Well, you're probably right; they lost some people like Peggy Lee, but apart from her, I can't think anyone BIG went elsewhere. But maybe they were continually being outbid for really promising people by the other majors.

MG

Thanks.  Most (not all) of what you are referencing is stuff that kids listened to.  I was talking primarily about moderne, hi-fi, space-age jazz that suave, sophisticated adults listened to in their moderne homes.  In that regard, Decca was light years behind the other three labels.  And, their LPs were pressed on styrene, even worse.

Decca had occasionally cool albums, like the three amazing albums by Gene Rains, Manhattan Latin by Dave Pike, The Man with the Golden Arm and Sweet Smell of Success by Elmer Bernstein, but these were few and far between compared to the other three major labels.   They had no idea what they were doing.  

[JSngry]

I think MCA had a fine idea of what Decca was doing - draining the last remaining dollars out of a few particular niches. And once in a while, they got lucky from that.

But at some point they just figured, correctly, that nobody cared about those labels any more and that "MCA" sounded more like the times.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

8 hours ago, JSngry said:

Decca became part of MCA before impulse! did, in 1962! With them came Coral & Brunswick. They didn't form Uni until 1966, and didn't buy Kapp until 1967. None of these labels continued real relevancy into the 70s, but MCA sure did.

They were still selling Pete Fountain & Brenda Lee & Burt Kaempfret & Earl Grant records to that particular niche market right up until the end of the 1960s. After that, they were the American label for The Who for up to and including Quadrophenia, after which they were released on MCA.

MCA seemed to leverage the Deccaback-catalog into always available collections of one kind or another. And Big at Christmas - ALWAYS available. None were particularly "comprehensive", but who amongst us of a certain age doesn't have a Duke Ellington record on Decca?

Decca also had the original cast album for Jesus Christ Superstar. They made them the money, Decca did.

As for RCA, they moved into the post-50s rock/pop era pretty well, with Jefferson Airplane/Starship, John Denver, Henry Mancini. who else? The Guess Who, David Bowie. They also had the OC of Hair, which was a really good seller.

Sinatra spent less than a decade at Capitol. It was an amazing less-than-a-decade to be sure, but that's all it was. The Beach Boys were gone by 1969.

 

I didn't know it was as early as 1962  Well, well. 

I also never had any Duke Ellington records on Decca. Never even KNEW Ellington ever recorded for Decca. Were those records reissues from the days when Brunswick was part of ARC? A lot of the Brunswick catalogue went to Decca, as Jack Kapp had signed artists like Crosby, Andrews sisters and several others to him personally, rather than to Brunswick and, when he started up the US subsidiary of UK Decca in 1934, took those people to US Decca with him. I've only got one LP on Decca; Earl Grant's 'Gently swingin'', which is from 1968.

It seems to me that Decca, some time in the late fifties, had stopped behaving like a major. But I'm not sure they ever HAD behaved like a major. Got to remember, the record industry was in a continuous state of crisis from 1921 to 1949, when sales finally and permanently passed their 1921 level. Each time sales began to recover, another crisis would hit.

1921 Florida Land Boom collapses with big recession/depression

1925 Radio Christmas

1929-34 Stock Market crash; the great depression

1942 Shellac rationing

1942 First Musicians Union strike

1948 Second Musicians Union strike

In a continuous crisis like this, a firm can only survive by concentrating on its most profitable work. Crisis management the whole way through. Even Columbia went bust and was purchased by its erstwhile UK subsidiary, then sold to ARC who closed it down and focused on Brunswick/Vocalion for sales rather than Columbia/Okeh. CBS bought it in 1938 and revived it.

Plans for US Decca must have been made a long time before 1934, or Kapp wouldn't have been ready with those artists. But Kapp immediately started by undercutting the other two companies' prices and really focusing on the most popular material or artists with that potential. But that's NOT behaving like a major; it's behaving like an indie, finding a niche that you can fill well and working at it. And it's not how the other companies were behaving. A major record company has to do all things very well and quite a lot, not just make a token effort:

Pop

Classical

Jazz

R&B

C&W

Latin

Original casts/soundtracks

Was Decca making classical records in the thirties and forties? Latin? original casts? I think not. Great in pop and big in jazz, of course, good in the burgeoning R&B sector. Don't know about C&W, but I think the label was probably well visible there.

During the forties, however, two things happened.

MGM started a record company and it had oceans of loot. And was into everything, I think, particularly soundtracks of course. And two indies with aspirations  - Capitol and Mercury - had started up.

And, by the early fifties, the indies had pretty well knocked all the majors (except for Capitol which at that period hadn't been acquired by EMI and WAS still an indie, albeit one that behaved like a major) out of the jazz and R&B markets. (Yeah, OK, Columbia had Miles and Brubeck and made shed-loads of money from them - but that was LATER; THEN, Miles was at Prestige, Brubeck at Fantasy.)

But LPs brought in new categories of music: easy listening/hi-fi (the latter of which Command seems to have sewn up); and what later became known as adult/contemporary. That period brought the start of TTK's preferred obsession.

And ABC Paramount and Warner Bros came in at the end of the fifties, and Sinatra joined WB with Reprise in 1960. Reprise HAD the world's greatest in adult/contemporary. And Warner Bros GOT a group one would really have expected Decca to have gone for in a big way - The Everly Brothers. That WB could have put more cash on the table than Decca isn't surprising. Decca might also have been expected to go for Ray Charles in 1960. What were they doing?

Not acting like a major. Perhaps they really weren't very good it that game. I think they DID pay big bucks for Ricky Nelson in 1963 and didn't make seven fortunes a week on THAT deal (though Nelson was always there - just not THERE).

As you said Jim, they COULD make the big bucks, but they couldn't keep a stream of it coming along as the others could. Or couldn't be arsed, because MCA wasn't demanding it, being busy getting their feet under the table. I dunno.

MG

[JSngry]

Decca sold a lot of records, and you yourself should have more than one Earl Grant, surely?

Bert Kaemfert, Pete Fountain for the easy-listeners, people bought those records.Brenda Lee and a lot of others in Country. Loretta Lynn for cryin' out loud!

These were in any record store that had a good jazz selection. Brunswick/Vocalion originally.

Look at these Decca Original Cast albums: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=decca%20records%20original%20cast%20&qs=n&form=QBIR&sp=-1&pq=decca%20records%20original%20cast%20&sc=0-28&sk=&cvid=825FFF7D05DF4BD3B2A156B9918154D5

OSTs, not so much. Although in the 1950s they had both the Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman OSTs.

More Duke on Decca (real Decca this time)

 Brubeck on Decca!

Decca sold plenty of records and still had hits, more than enough. However, the one thing that struck me about them as being, not just lagging, but actually perverse, was the their "art" department. Even if the front covers looked "ok", the back covers would so many times be, uh....under-developed.

Oh, yeah, Lenny Dee, they had buttloads of Lenny Dee records!

[JSngry]

Another way to look at Decca is that they didn't really get aggressive about post-British Invasion music. That was when they really began to get out of sync.

Although - they had the American Who albums (although in the UK, the Rolling Stones were on Decca, but in the US they were on London, still not sure how that all fir together), the Jesus Christ Superstar album, which was HUGE, and Loretta Lynn, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, female country act of the day. So they had their big players in some pretty big markets, they just didn't go deep into any of them except Country. And they always had their easy-listeners to ride to the end. Plus the back catalogue.

I think Milt Gabler held some ongoing position at the company, so maybe that explains the lack of interest in post-1964 rock. But I he got this one over the transom:

[mikeweil]

"Sweer Bebop" - oh, that's a nice melody without that hectic dee-doodle-de-be-bap stuff, right?"

[JSngry]

Another thing about Decca, albeit through Brunswick - DAKAR records ended up under that umbrella in time for them to catch the Tyrone Davis & Hamilton Bohannon wave.

Ok, here's something I didn't know - Brunswick got out from under Decca as early as 1960. There were legal actions that didn't get resolved until 1969. But all those Brunswick soul and jazz records from 1960 on had nothing to do with Decca. That would definitely include Dakar then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunswick_Records

I'm a little surprised because the two labels both had "art" departments that sort of functioned the same way, especially on the back covers. Go figure.