The hip hooray and ballyhoo

Continuing my trip back through the 1956 album charts.

02/09/56 : Mel Tormé With The Marty Paich Dek-Tette - Mel Tormé (With Marty Paich)

Well that title is certainly something, isn't it?  I'm really looking forward to finding out what the Marty Paich Dek-Tette might possibly be...

Well I'm no nearer knowing but I didn't mind this at all.  It's a bit like Frank's album but looking back rather than looking forwards - it's definitely more 40s than 60s.  It also contains a version of "The Lady Is A Tramp" - it's interesting to compare it with Frank's.  The album surprised me by being a bit long, but I had a special deluxe edition which, rather than the original 33, was 84 minutes long - which absolutely nobody needed.  But apart from that, it swung along nicely - no complaints from me.  It's a quite bizarre album cover though.

We're at #5 in the charts this week on their last week of a four week run, having peaked at #3 in its second week (which is exactly the same as Carmen Cavallero managed) and the rest of the top five were Carousel, Frank Sinatra, Bill Haley and the aforementioned Carmen.

Wikipedia has one sentence on the album which is incredibly useful - "Mel Tormé with the Marty Paich Dek-Tette is a 1956 album by Mel Tormé, with Marty Paich and his Dek-Tette".  No shit, Sherlock.  I had a trawl round the internet to find out what a Dek-Tette was and things were surprisingly unclear, but the most believable option is that it's a word that Mel and Marty made up to mean "a band of ten people or less".  Which is fine I guess, but I'm not sure why they bothered.

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" - I'm not sure I quite believe that, but I can imagine that listening figures are lower than the threshold required to make any such decisions.  This was a perfectly fine album with some decent tunes and skills on it, but I struggle to imagine any reason I'd ever go back to it.

12/08/56 - Dated but perfectly fine
23/09/56 - A most peculiar beast

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