4 Big Days and Nights of the Sweetest Music from the 20’s,’30s,’40s and ‘50s,
America’s Golden Age of Popular Music

Come with us now to those thrilling days of Yesteryear…. The days of bobbed hair, rouged knees and bathtub gin… step into the red hot Hotcha days with Crazy Rhythm Hot Society with the Fabulous Crooner, Jeff Gilbert. College days with Sheiks and shebas, raccoon coats, baggy flannels and wild dance steps, words like “sure” and “So’s your old Man” creep into conversations… We are going to Hell on a Jazz riff.

The next decade ushers in a wealth of innovation-composers are breaking new ground so we can swing out with the newest and grooviest… it’s Boogie, it’s jive and it’s hep. Marcelled hair and permanent waves, wacky comedies in the movie theaters, art deco flourishes, then suddenly there’s the great depression Jonathan Stout Orchestra will take us truckin’ through the ‘30s.

Johnny Vana’s Big Band Alumni is a bugle call to the USO, the stage Door Canteen and “Uncle Sam Wants You!. Get ready to eyeline the stocking seam, smooth your hair over a rat and tie it up in a snood, guys zip up your Eisenhower jackets and put your uniforms in mothballs, we are jiving’ to the music of the ‘40s.

Now it is the ‘50s - ducktails and a white tee-shirt with a pack of smokes rolled up in the sleeve, it’s jeans and engineer boots, poodle skirts and bobby sox- Louis Thomas’s Pieces of Eight is the jump blues that heralds a change. The war is ended and times are good, women’s skirts are longer, there is both optimism and despair as America listens to the Bandstand beat.

Through it all the Blues kept time, from early call and response to the heart pounding, rebellious ‘50s. Always just outside of the mainstream the blues came of age in smoky dens with a finger-snapping gutsy reality that overrides all the more civil musical forms. The blues formed the jazz of the ages it is the porkpie hat, black turtleneck and the shimmer of glitz The Hues Corporation opens up the great American Songbook for this bedtime story.

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Photo by Christine Collins