Doopy-doop, doopy-doop

Continuing my trip back through the 1961 album charts.

30/07/61 : The Ray Conniff Hi-fi Companion - Ray Conniff 

This album has been floating around the lower reaches of the chart for a couple of months and I'm absolutely intrigued by the title and the artist because I've never heard of him.  So I've no idea what we're going to get here - and it's not like the album title gives me any clues.

Hmmm - it's an interesting one.  It's a recognisable but hard to describe sound - they're all easy-listening-ish arrangements of vintage tracks (well, the one's I recognised anyway) but that feels like a harsh description.  You can tell there's been a reasonable amount of skill gone into it - they're very much the sort of thing that ambient artists used to sample in the 00s.  All of which doesn't really go anyway to describing it to you - let's just say I imagine you won't have listened to an album like this before.  I'd be lying if I said I loved it or thought you needed in your life, but it was an interesting album and I'll be interested to learn more about Ray from Wikipedia.  It's a fantastically 60s album cover though - completely unnecessary whilst also being comparatively tame.

We're at #15 in the chart this week on his sixth week of a twelve week run, which sounds pretty impressive until you hear this was his second run and the first one was thirty weeks, peaking at #3 for a couple of weeks.  Bizarre.  The top five this week were  George Mitchell, South Pacific, Elvis, Cliff and Barber/Bilk and there are no new entries in the chart this week.  And we're down to only one album on the chart which we've not met before - and in my opinion it's the best album we've seen this year (I listen to it reasonably regularly) so I'm hoping we get to visit it soon so I can share the love (I bet you're intrigued now!).

Interestingly, Wikipedia doesn't even mention the album despite having quite the chunky entry on the man - but when you dive into his entry, things become somewhat clearer because the man was a machine!  Wikipedia isn't entirely sure how many albums he produced, merely describing it as "over 90" in a career that lasted from '56 to '90 and includes such classics as Great Contemporary Instrumental Hits, Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song, Fantastico, Supersonico, Latinismo and I Love Movies.  I also need to mention His Orchestra, His Chorus, His Singers, His Sound which was his only #1 album over here, so we'll be listening to that when we get to 1969.  And apparently in the 80s and 90s, he was doing arena sized venue tours of Brazil and Chile, despite being over 70 - he's one of the oldest people we've seen this year, but he seems to have had an absolute blast over the years

"Customers also listened to", somewhat unsurprisingly, other Ray Conniff albums - Amazon listed 25 of them!  And that's because we've really not met anything like this - not this year and not ever.  As I said, I didn't love it, but I loved meeting it - it's a real time capsule of an album, but I think I'd have struggled to place it if I hadn't known it was from '61 (and I suspect his album from '90 doesn't sound massively different).  I also loved reading about him - the man sounds like he was a total dude!

23/07/61 - A very fine album indeed
06/08/61 - Nicely diverting