Patrick Bade
Swing: The Soundtrack of WWII
Patrick Bade - Swing The Soundtrack of World War II
- So hi, William. Hi, Judi. So Patrick, you were asking about the drawings behind me.
Mm.
This is actually, I’ll show you here. Can you see?
Yes. Yes, I can. They look really interesting.
Visuals are displayed and audio is played throughout this lecture.
Yeah, so they’re all William Kentridge drawings. So my study in New York is full of African artefact. Well, the walls all have William Kentridge, and then in my study I have African sculptures and William’s work as well. So yeah, you would find he is a fabulous artist. He’s a brilliant artist, actually. South African. I can send you information. And these drawings are all from his videos from his phones. So yeah, I was at school with Anne, his wife, and actually we were all at school together and we were all young together. We used to go to parties together, so I’ve known William forever. And in fact I bought my very first artwork was William’s in 1980, I think it was in 1986 ‘cause I wanted to support my friend. So we go back a long, long time. Such a miserable day here in New York.
It’s pretty bad here too.
I’m going to pop into Frieze today, so which is Frieze New York. They’re restricting people. I have to just go and view some works for the Guggenheim.
[Judi] Wendy, I’ve had two comments, one from Barbara, “I agree, Wendy, William’s art is phenomenal.” And then we’ve got one from Peter, “Kentridge does opera sets as well. "We saw 'The Nose’ at the New York Met.”
William is a contemporary Picasso, you know, a modern day Picasso. He does everything. He is absolutely brilliant. Absolutely incredible, actually. So “Nose” was wonderful. “Magic Flute.” He’s done a number of operas. Yeah, I think, yeah. So Patrick, there’s something for us to do together.
Yeah, I’m definitely interested. I’ll look him up.
Very good. So whenever you’re ready, Patrick, I’m going to hand over to you.
Right, thank you, Wendy.
Thank you.
Now you can see a picture on the left that actually comes from a propaganda magazine from the Second World War, a German controlled one, but you can see it’s in French, and it’s got the ironic comment, “Americans learning how to dance.” Obviously neither the Nazis nor the Vichy regime approved of this kind of dancing. But the one thing that everybody of military age wanted to do in every nation, every competent nation, in the Second World War was to dance. And the one kind of music that they really wanted to dance to was swing. So this, of course, presented problems to the Nazis. They had already before the war at the time of the Entartete Kunst show, the degenerate art show, they’d had a degenerate music show, and the two chief targets of Nazi hostility as far as music was concerned was atonal music, which they regarded as a Jewish creation, Schoenberg, of course, and jazz and jazz-influenced popular music.
Jazz was their biggest nightmare, as you can probably see from the poster on the left-hand side, because it represented a fusion of the two cultures that the Nazis most hated and despised, African and Jewish. So jazz was born, I’m sure you know this, in the brothels of the Storyville district of New Orleans. This is Jelly Roll Morton who claimed to have invented jazz. I think that’s a bit simplistic, but he was certainly one of the very, very first important jazz musicians. And then during the First World War, the brothels of Storyville were all closed down, so all these Black jazz musicians were unemployed and they mostly moved north, and a great many of them went to Chicago in the 1920s. This is the prohibition period, so they moved from brothels to speakeasies. And so the lower picture here is a jazz band in Chicago in the 1920s. Now, Europeans had had their first very watered down taste, you could say, of jazz music in Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” which swept Europe just before the First World War.
So jazz was initially, I suppose, a very minority thing, but the intermediaries who brought jazz or versions of jazz to a much wider public, to a mainstream public, were almost exclusively of Russian Jewish origin. And I just show you here the two most important. There’s Gershwin, George Gershwin, who it was said had made a lady out of jazz by, you know, fusing it with classical music famously in 1925 with “Rhapsody in Blue.” And on the left we have Benny Goodman, so-called king of swing, and he introduced a kind of jazz for big bands that was suaver, it was slicker, and it was good to dance to. And this became swing, this was in the mid ‘30s. The apotheosis of swing was in 1938 when he put a big concert on with his band in Carnegie Hall. So that was, you know, considered to be a really momentous occasion. And in the late '30s, swing really swept the entire globe.
Now this was possible, and indeed the fact that American popular culture in various forms swept the globe in the late '30s due to various social, economic, and technical developments. Technical developments was the invention of the microphone in the mid 1920s, really from 1925 onwards. This enabled an entirely new type of singer. Singers didn’t need to project anymore. They could just croon into the microphone. This went hand in hand, of course, with radio. The radio stations, BBC, one of the first in the world, that’s 1922, and then very quickly you have radio stations all over the world. And radio was a very cheap form of entertainment and even very poor households could afford a radio. So millions and millions of people. There was a wider audience than there had ever been before for this kind of popular culture through the radio. And also in the 1920s, you have the consolidation of the great Hollywood studios. This is a great theme for Judi to talk about. I know she will probably do at some point I think a joint course on this. You can see Warner Brothers on the left-hand side.
Now these studios, they were producing films very slick, technically amazing, and these films in the silent period had already swept the world. So Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin had completely conquered the world. Then Warner Brothers, 1927, “The Jazz Singer,” they introduce sound. I mean, it’s interesting. Of course, again, you can imagine what the Nazis thought of this film about a nice Jewish boy whose father wants him to be a cantor, and instead he becomes a jazz singer. Now, there was a moment of wobble, of course, when sound was introduced into Hollywood for all sorts of reasons. I mean, you’ve all seen “Singin’ in the Rain,” so you know about the technical problems of introducing sound to films. But also there was a big worry because Hollywood had this world market producing silent films. People thought, “Oh, well, are we going to lose this now "because people aren’t going to understand the languages?”
And for a short time around by 1930, into the early 1930s, Hollywood was doing, you know, multilingual versions of their films. They’d shoot the film in English, Spanish, Italian, French, and German, but they soon realised they didn’t need this. They had really already conquered the world. And you can say that from a popular culture point of view, popular music point of view, of course America had won the Second World War even before it began. Now when war broke out, of course most of the musicians in the jazz bands they were almost exclusively men. Women were only really admitted usually as vocal artists. And the men were all of military age, so they were all conscripted. They all joined up. But the various armies around the world, America and Britain in particular, decided to harness the power of swing and they set up military bands. I’d like to again reemphasize this difference between Germany, Italy, and Vichy France on the one side who were very, very concerned with high culture, serious culture, and the Allies, particularly the British and the Americans in as far as their interest in culture at all, are probably more interested in promoting popular culture.
So the the best jazz band in Britain during the Second World War, the best big band, was a group called Squadronaires, and they were part of the Royal Air Force, and they made it known they were interested in recruiting jazz musicians. So all the best jazz musicians in London, eight different members of Ambrose’s band, which is one of the most popular bands, they all join up with the RAF and become part of The Squadronaires. And my first sound excerpt is a recording of 1942. It’s called “The Jersey Bounce,” and this is The Squadronaires. France was probably the country in Europe that was most immediately receptive to jazz. And it was certainly the first country that produced its own really innovative and exciting jazz musicians. You could say the first two great European jazz musicians were the violinist Stephane Grappelli and the guitarist Django Reinhardt. And they were part of a group in the late 1930s called the Quintette of the Hot Club of France, the Hot Club de France. The Hot Club of France was set up in 1931 in France to promote jazz. They arranged concerts and so on, and they also promoted the quintet. My next excerpt is, this is very rare, very rare recording. This is actually a transcript of a French radio, a broadcast, of the very beginning of 1940, so just before the fall of France. And in this we will hear the great Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli playing together.
Audio plays.
[Musician] Yes!
So they were very different characters. Stephane Grappelli was very French bourgeois. Django Reinhardt was a gypsy. I know these days you’re supposed to say Roma and/or Sinti, but I don’t know which he was, so I’m going to use the non-PC term of gypsy for him. When the war broke out, they were actually both on a tour in Britain, and Stephane Grappelli decided to stay. In fact, he stayed for the entire war in Britain. And Django Reinhardt returned to France, and one would’ve thought suicidally actually, because, as I’m sure you know, the gipsies like the Jews were destined for extermination in the new Europe of the Nazis. He was actually very, very lucky to survive the war. He apparently had the protection of a very high up jazz-loving Nazi, but he still had some pretty close shaves. He was very traditional. He lived the life of a traditional gypsy.
His favourite dish, by the way, was roast hedgehog. And I’m going to play you perhaps his… He was a composer as well as a wonderful, wonderful musician, and I’m going to play you perhaps his most famous composition “Nuages” that dates from 1940, and this is the recording from 1940. So he was the greatest jazz virtuoso guitarist ever, I suppose, despite the fact that he’d lost the use of one finger in an accident. So here’s Grappelli who stayed behind in Britain, and he formed his own jazz quartet. And this is a recording that they made on this side of the Channel during Second World War.
Audio plays
So the Nazis were helpless in face of the power of popular demand for swing dance music. Goebbels realised this. I mean, he discussed it in print and he discussed it in his diaries. I mean, there were very fanatical Nazis who wanted to ban jazz altogether, and there were moments where just before the war where it was banned. But Goebbels was enough of a realist to know that he had to allow it. They tried to regulate it. They issued a series of regulations and guidelines. They just got them into a hopeless mess. They were about as clear as the guidelines that we’ve had for protection against COVID. They just got themselves tied in knots. See, Belgium was one of the chief centres, Brussels, for jazz. There were a number of very successful Belgian jazz bands in this period. And my next recording is the Belgian band of Gus Viseur, and this is a recording made in Brussels in 1942.
Audio plays.
One of the most successful big bands in continental Europe during Second World War was the band of Fud Candrix, and he was considered acceptable to the Nazis and his band visited Berlin in 1942 and had huge success there. And I’m going to play you a recording made in Berlin in 1942. So you have to imagine the audience here is going to be full of Wehrmacht. It’s going to be full of uniformed German soldiers. And it’s a very convincing American big band style. Now once America had joined the war, of course the flow of American records stopped. The only way that European jazz musicians could follow developments in America was to get hold of recordings via neutral countries.
So there was a slow trickle of recordings coming in from Sweden, for instance, or by listening to clandestine radio sets. And I think a lot of this went on. Of course it was a criminal offence to listen to radio broadcasts from Britain or America, but I think this is the only way that they could sort of keep up to date with developments in big band playing. As I said, this sounds pretty convincing American style as long as the band is playing, but they had to use a local singer in Berlin who sang in German and there is the most jarring mismatch between the style of the band and the style of the singer who sounds like he’s wandered out of a Viennese operetta.
Audio plays.
The craze, the jazz in France just grew exponentially during the occupation, and the Hot Club of France continued to organise jazz festivals, although these diminished in the latter part of the war ‘cause it became very… You know, obviously these jazz festivals were attracting young people, and actually after about 1942, after the full occupation of France at the end of 1942, it became very dangerous for young people to gather together because they were picked up and press-ganged to go and work in German factories. The man who organised these festivals was Charles Delaunay, who you see on the left-hand side. He was the son of Robert and Sarah Delaunay, the great abstract artist. And it mystifies me actually that he was able to play such a prominent role in German-occupied France, that he obviously didn’t feel that he was in danger because obviously he was half-Jewish.
And it’s interesting that for the Germans, it seems to have been more important that your Aryan half was your father. His father obviously came from a French Catholic background, and it was his mother who was Jewish. Well, obviously in the Jewish tradition it’s the mother that counts for your Jewishness or not. But he was also playing actually very dangerously a considerable role in the organisations of the French resistance once that did get going in 1943 and 1944. The drawing on the right hand side is by him, so he clearly inherited his parents’ artistic talent. He made wonderful portraits of jazz musicians. And this is a recording made at the Hot Club of France Jazz Festival in 1942, and we hear the voice of Charles Delaunay introducing the various musicians.
Audio plays.
[Charles] Jean Jeanson.
[Charles] Guy Paquinet.
[Charles] Max Blanc.
[Charles] Christian Bellest.
[Charles] Christian Wagner.
[Charles] Pierre Allier.
[Charles] Noel Chiboust.
[Charles] Pierre Fouad.
In the latter part of the war, a grouped of youth, rebellious youth group developed called the zazous. Of course, we’re used to this in post-war periods, mods, rockers, punk rock, all that sort of thing, rebellious youth adopting a lifestyle, a way of dressing, a way of doing their hair, and so on, a way of behaving themselves as a gesture of defiance. But many people regard the zazou in France in the later stages of the war as one of the first examples of this phenomenon. And they grew their hair long by the period. The men allowed their hair down to the collar. They wore very baggy clothes. The men wore jackets that went right down to the knees. And another sign of being a zazou was to walk around in all weather carrying an umbrella. And so this, as I said, this was a gesture of defiance and it was actually quite a dangerous one because they were, obviously the German authorities and the Vichy authorities took this as defiance, and if you walked around dressed as a zazou you risked being arrested or beaten up in the street.
But this is a song from 1944 which is actually celebrating the eccentricities of the zazous. By the way, I just had a little senior moment there, or maybe a Freudian one, I don’t know. I managed to rename Sonia Delaunay Sarah Delaunay. Of course it’s Sonia Delaunay who was the mother of Charles Delaunay. Now we come to one of the weirdest stories of the Second World War. This is Charlie and his Band. On both sides, radio stations were broadcasting to the enemy to try and destabilise them to try and demoralise them. My guess is that on neither side did these attempts prove very effective. But in Germany, they put together probably the best jazz band in occupied Europe. In the later stage of the war was a band called Charlie and his Band, Charlie Templin, who you see on the left-hand side. And the band itself was made up of musicians who were quite literally playing for their lives. I’m quite sure none of the musicians were very pro-Nazi or very keen on the sentiments of the songs that they were accompanying. They were mostly people who, if they did not take part in this band, would have been in prisons or concentration camps.
They were what the Germans would’ve called Halbjude, half-Jews. They were Slavs. They were a very, very motley bunch. What they were not, of course, were Aryans of military age. They were everything else. But you’ll hear that they’re actually excellent musicians. Really, really, this was some of the best quality jazz playing that you could hear in continental Europe during the Second World War. The songs were all very familiar, popular American songs that had won worldwide fame in the years leading up to the Second World War, but they’re given Nazi propaganda and often very antisemitic lyrics. There’s something really bizarre about them. It is possible to get ahold of them. I have a couple of CDs. I’ve never managed to listen to more than two or three tracks at a time. They have a bizarre fascination, but there is something so disturbing and creepy about these songs. So this is what they did with the popular song “You’re Driving Me Crazy.” First of all, it’s sung in a straightforward version and then we get the Nazi version.
Audio plays.
♪ Yes, you ♪ ♪ You’re driving me crazy ♪ ♪ What did I do ♪ ♪ What did I do ♪ ♪ My tears for you ♪ ♪ Make everything hazy ♪ ♪ Clouding the skies of blue ♪ ♪ How true were the friends who were near me to cheer me ♪ ♪ Believe me, they knew ♪ ♪ But you were the kind who would hurt me ♪ ♪ Desert me when I needed you ♪ ♪ Yes, you ♪ ♪ You’re driving me crazy ♪ ♪ What did I do to you ♪
[Singer] Here is Winston Churchill’s latest tearjerker. “Yes, the Germans are driving me crazy. I thought I had brains, but they’ve shattered my planes. They’ve built up a front against me. It’s quite amazing, clouding the skies with their planes. The Jews are the friends who are near me to cheer me. Believe me, they do. But Jews are the kind that do hurt me, desert me, and laugh at me too. Yes, the Germans are driving me crazy. My last chance I’ll pray to get in this model the USA. This new pact also is driving me crazy. Germany, Italy, Japan, it gives me a pain. I’m losing my nerves. I’m getting lazy. A prisoner forced to remain in England to reign. The Jews are the friends who are near me. They still cheer me. Believe me, they do. But Jews are not the kind of heroes who would fight for me. Now they’re leaving me too. Yes, the Germans are driving me crazy. By Job I pray, come in, USA.”
The subtitle of this talk, of course, is “Swing: The Soundtrack of the Second World War,” and “In the Mood,” Glenn Miller, of course, immediately evokes memories of this period for people, I think, all over the world. It became a huge international hit. So I’m going to play it to you in two very different versions. This is a version, in fact, it’s not the version of Ray Ventura you can see on the screen. It’s by another group called Alix Combelle. So this is a French wartime recording of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” Now you may remember from my talk about the ladies who crossed sides the importance of the transmitters from Radio Belgrade which were sending programmes to the entire Mediterranean theatre of war. And it was through Radio Belgrade, of course, that the song “Lili Marlene” reached the entire world. And so to the troops, the German troops in North Africa and Italy, ‘cause they wanted jazz, they wanted swing as well, and I’m going to play you a German military band attempting to play “In the Mood,” and all I can say is these poor sods ain’t got rhythm. This is a pretty disastrous version of Glenn Miller.
Audio plays.
You listen to that and you think no wonder the Germans lost the war. Now we’re going to end with the great man himself, Glenn Miller, who joined the American Armed Forces, but they realised, of course, his value was a morale, a proper gander one. Sadly, and I’m sure you know this, he died in a mysterious accident. His plane was lost over the Channel in December 1944. But in the last two months of his life there were a series of broadcast programmes specifically aimed at the German Wehrmacht. By this point, of course, it’s clear that the war is lost, so this is really a charm offensive. There’s none of that facetiousness, none of that provocativeness that you get in the earlier broadcast from both sides to each other’s armed forces. What they want to do, of course, is convince the members of the German Wehrmacht that they actually have nothing to fear from the Americans and to encourage them that actually it might be a good idea to surrender to the Americans rather than to wait for the Russians to come and get them. So in this broadcast we have a young German woman called Ilsa who introduces Glenn Miller and he speaks in, apparently his German was quite good, so I think he’s kind of putting on a bit here the clumsiness of his German, which becomes a little kind of a joke between him and Ilsa.
Audio plays.
[Glenn] Thank you, Ilsa. You speak German very well.
[Glenn] Good evening. I mean . Have I said that right?
[Glenn] Oh, yes. Ilsa, you better announce our first number in German. It’s “In the Mood.”
[Ilsa] “In the Mood.”
Well, that shows you how, of course, it should actually sound. I see there are an awful lot of questions, so I’m going to go into the Q and A.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: “Judy Gold, my colleague and dear friend, "yesterday suggested that we might ask for your opinion "on the true reasons and personalities "that caused World War I.”
A: Oh my God, well, that’s a… What a question. What a question. It’s so complicated, isn’t it? I don’t think it’s… I mean, Second World War is pretty clear cut. First World War is not clear cut at all. That would need a whole session in itself to even scratch the surface. And I don’t feel that, I mean, although that Kaiser Wilhelm was a complete loose cannon and an appalling character, I don’t feel that the blame assigned to Germany and Austria at the end of the First World War was entirely justified. I think everybody was to blame. So I think it’s actually imperialism and on all sides and nationalism that is to blame for the First World War.
Q: Am I going to cover Chagall?
A: Well, I have a lecture on Chagall that I’d like to do for you, but I think that will wait 'til I go back to doing art history lectures. I’m going to go back to them next month and continue 19th and early 20th century, and we will eventually get to Chagall.
This question for Wendy about Albert Adams. I’ll leave that for her to answer a little bit later. Somebody’s saying, “My dad was serving in the army "in an air base near Sussex during World War II. "He spent his leaves in London going to dance halls, "including, of course, the Royal Opera House, "which became a mecca dance hall in London.”
Somebody saying jazz did not start in the brothels of New Orleans. They only had a pianist apart from one where the madame played the cornet. The first jazz band was led by Buddy Bolden in the first years of the 20th century. Well, I’m not going to disagree with you 'cause I don’t know enough about it.
Somebody’s saying they love jazz. Yes, it is nostalgic, isn’t it? It’s funny when you think of what we’re looking back on, we’re looking back on a very terrible period.
“My very special friend,” Jerry tells us, “the late, great Edmundo Ros was exceptionally popular "in these years and played with the most fabulous names.” Right.
“Reinhardt wrote this,” in inverted commas. “It’s famous.” I’m not sure what that refers to, Reinhardt.
Somebody is amazed that I’ve completely ignored the contribution of scores of great Black musicians. I don’t think I did. I think I said very, very clearly that jazz is a fusion. It was originally a creation of Black musicians. I think I said that if you listen carefully, perhaps you missed the beginning of my lecture, but that swing was a modification of jazz that was largely a Jewish thing, although, of course, many Black musicians were playing swing as well.
“Wind disc illustration of Django "somewhat shows him with four complete fingers.” Yes.
“The European jazz you played "has a totally different character from the American.” That is true. I don’t really know the music of Norrie Paramor, so I can’t comment on that. Django, the name of the piece that he wrote is, I wouldn’t really call it swing actually, it’s jazz, is “Nuages,” which means clouds.
Reinhardt and Grappelli, right, yes. Somebody’s recommending a book called “Half-Blood Blues” about jazz musicians in Paris shortly after the war. I haven’t read that. I would love to read it. Interests me very much.
Zarah Leaner, Riga, 1930s. Ooh, somebody’s really anticipating. “Bei Mir Bistu Shein” I’m going to play that on Sunday, but not with Zarah Leander. I’m going to play it in the French version. Right, Zarah Leander, and also I’m going to talk about her when I get to talk about musical movies. She was, of course, the biggest star. Very ironic though, because Zarah Leander who was, you know, very unpopular in Sweden after the war. As you say, she was completely shunned because she, like, represented the shame of… I’m going to talk about this in a week’s time about retribution at the end of the war and how women were often very unfairly blamed. You know, the Swedes had a lot to feel guilty about. They didn’t need to put all their guilt onto Zarah Leander. But in Germany in the 1970s, Zarah Leander became a huge gay icon. She was absolutely adored by gays of both sexes in Germany.
Fud Candrix was from Belgium. Yes, there’s a movie “Swing Kids.” 'Cause what I didn’t really touch on but is actually a very interesting topic is these swing kids in Germany who were really a kind of underground resistance movement, and some of them actually did land up in concentration camps.
“Was this guy a pariah when he returned to the U.S. "after playing in Nazi Germany?” Are you talking… I’m not sure who you’re talking about. Maybe Charlie and his Band. He was never American. He was Germany. He never went back to America. He never went to America, as far as I know.
Jazz festivals still a big deal in France and somebody’s, “Well, let’s hope we can do it soon, "make a pilgrimage from one festival to another "in the summer.”
“The zazou recording seemed to have "a kind of proto-rap vocal.” Yes. Yes, it does, doesn’t it?
Somebody else saying they can hear it as precursor to rap.
“Beatles learned their trade in Hamburg in 1961.” That’s true.
“'Swing Kids’ is a lovely film about young people "who love jazz in Germany and defied the Nazis "and paid a heavy price as it was increasingly forbidden.” I haven’t seen the film. I must see it. I’ve heard about it and I know it’s very good.
Somebody saying, “I think the French zazou "had their counterparts in California "trend among young Blacks called zoot suiters.” Yes, I think they may have even got their idea from them. I think it’s the other way around.
Q: “What are the origins of European jazz?”
A: Well, it comes from America, of course. It’s an American thing. It was adopted and adapted in Europe, gets imported to Europe. Although I think you know, Django Reinhardt, he was such an important figure and he had an influence back again, I think, too.
Q: Somebody saying, “Did I miss why the Nazis were allowing "or even promoting jazz bands?”
A: Yes, I mean the point is that they couldn’t… I think Goebbels is the interesting, he’s the determining one who, for purely practical reasons, he realised it was going to be very damaging. It’s interesting that when there was sufficient popular disapproval, the Nazis could be stopped. You know, of course they were stopped with their euthanasia programme.
Q: That which brings up the question, why was the Shoah not stopped?
A: If there was a sufficient popular reaction against something or for something, even the Nazis had to bend.
Q: Oh, it’s Ron. He’s sending greetings from San Francisco. “Any thoughts on the unsubstantiated theories "that Glenn Miller, then with the U.S. Air Force, "was on a secret mission "when the RAF plane he was on mysteriously disappeared?”
A: I know there are quite a number of theories that it might have been friendly fire and all sorts of things, but I don’t have any personal knowledge of that.
Q: “What was Maurice Chevalier’s role?”
A: I’m going to talk about that. I’ll save that because I will talk about him when it comes to… It was an ambiguous one. He did not have a very glorious record in the Second World War. He got away with it because he had the support of the Communist Party at the end of the war.
Q: “Could I explain the technical differences "between swing and jazz?”
A: I’ll probably get into trouble if I try. I think really swing, it’s more about dance, isn’t it? And it’s certainly in a way a more popular, it’s a popularised version of jazz. I don’t think I’m going to attempt to give a very precise definition ‘cause I’m not sure I understand it myself.
“Glenn Miller also played the song written "by Pasquale Frustaci, the father of a survivor, ”'You, Fascinating You,’ also sung in German cabarets.
“Vocals remind me of Comedy Harmonists, "or Comedian Harmonists, in the original German version. "They became Comedy Harmonists, "the group that reformed in this country.”
Somebody saying happy birthday to Hannah in Toronto.
Oh, so what else? Thank you, I do appreciate all your very, very kind comments.
“No mention of the swing boys with German…” Yes, I know. I should have talked about them. It’s a very interesting subject.
“‘Jews and Jazz’ is a part two article, "is a two-part article on the importance of Jews "in developing jazz as art.” Right.
“Cliff Goldfarb wants to… "He and Doris met you at Lillian Pence.” Oh yes, of course. Absolutely. I remember that very well. Right. That’s a long time ago. It’s like 40 years ago. Oh, more. 45 years ago probably.
Somebody’s saying, “Listening to jazz ‘Voice of America’ "on shortwave radio 1950s.” Right. Goodness. I think I’m running out.
“Does Xavier Cugat come to mind?” Well, he’s around that time. Of course he was very popular. I think I probably need to finish ‘cause I know you’ve got another session and I think we’re running out of questions actually. So, right. I think I’ll come out of this. So Wendy, Judi, over to you.
[Judi] Thank you, Patrick. Wendy, are you still there? I think she’s having some trouble, but thank you, Patrick. I was dancing around in my kitchen listening to that talk today.
Good.
[Judi] So thank you, Patrick, and thank you to everybody who joined us today. And we’ll see everybody in an hour for our next talk.
Yep, very good.
Thanks so much.
Alright, bye-bye.
Bye-bye.