Happy Feet + Ragamuffin Romeo (1930) Jack Hylton with Pat O'Malley and two others

HAPPY FEET { 0:00 } - vocalists Pat O'Malley plus two others
RAGAMUFFIN ROMEO { 2:57 } - vocalist Pat O'Malley
Jack Hylton and his Orchestra
HMV B5843 (10 May 1930)

This is Jack Hylton as he did not often sound on HMV records. The acoustic is that of the Beethovensaal concert hall in Berlin, home of the Berlin Philharmonic. Sans audience, and with a distant microphone, it had the sort of over-reverberant acoustic that Columbia so loved at London's Wigmore Hall. The German record company Electrola Gesellschaft m.b.H. was founded by the Gramophone Co Ltd of Hayes on 8 May 1925; and it is they who recorded Hylton on his several visits to Berlin.

Hylton's usual HMV studio in Britain was the more intimate Small Queen's Hall on Langham Place in London (HMV's C-studio). The Beethovensaal was a lofty ornately-finished shoe-box-shaped concert hall. It and the Queen's Hall building were victims of bombing in WW2.

These two tunes are from the talkie-musical-review-film 'King of Jazz' which was a spectacular showcase vehicle for Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. It used the two-strip Technicolor system and was released in April 1930 in the USA. Sad man that I am, I know it was the film chosen to open the Plaza cinema in Swansea on 14 February 1931: the largest cinema in Wales.

HAPPY FEET was sung in the film by The Three Rhythm Boys, one of whom was Bing Crosby. On the record, listen carefully at 0:55 - the sound of the band goes even more distant as Pat O'Malley and his two others gather at the microphone and block the latter's direct 'line-of-sight' of the instruments, eliminating what little direct sound the microphone had been receiving.

August 1930's The Gramophone awarded Hylton's HAPPY FEET two stars. Whiteman's version, which HMV had issued in October 1927, received three. Hylton's RAGAMUFFIN ROMEO got two, which no-one bettered: not that there was much competition; Rust lists 19 British recordings of HAPPY FEET but only 6 of RAGAMUFFIN ROMEO.

RAGAMUFFIN ROMEO is one of the less notable tunes from the film, though Hylton recorded several of the others (Rhapsody in Blue, Piccolo Pete, Song of the Dawn, It Happened in Monterey, etc). To me, Pat O'Malley was poor substitute for Sam Browne. However, Hylton was too hard-nosed (tungsten-carbide-tipped) a business man to be merely supportive of a fellow Lancastrian; he must have liked something about O'Malley's delivery.

Видео Happy Feet + Ragamuffin Romeo (1930) Jack Hylton with Pat O'Malley and two others канала 6dBperOctave