Could the ocean leave the shore?

Continuing my trip back through the 1961 album charts.

16/04/61 : Beauty And The Beat! - Peggy Lee & George Shearing

WHAT?!?  ANOTHER woman?!? Won't someone please think of the poor men? I'm really pleased to meet up with Peggy because she's been mentioned a few times and it looked like she might miss out. She was actually lucky though because she only got her chance because I was unable to find the soundtrack to World Without End (which was a Liszt biopic, so I can't say I'm overly disappointed).

Yeah, I'm pleased I got to listen to this - it's not really my sort of thing being light cabaret jazz, but it glided past pretty smoothly. Peggy's got a nice voice and George is obviously talented on the piano. It's also got a very decent sound quality to it - it's just a million miles away from Nina & Frederik. All in all, I found this surprisingly enjoyable and a pleasant change from the all-male fodder we've been served up for most of the year.

We're at #18 with a re-entry on the chart this week on the fourth of five runs they had, the longest of which was two weeks and the highest it got to was #16. The top five this week were Elvis, South Pacific, George, The Everly Brothers and Frank and there's one new entry for Cliff at the dizzy heights of #6.

Wikipedia tells us this is a live recording (recorded at the Disc Jockey Convention in Florida) and it was the first time they'd played together.  It makes a big thing about it being a stereo recording and I'd have to say that it really came through whilst listening. It also tells us it was remastered in '03, so that might explain the decent sound quality but the original tapes must have still been pretty decent to enable the remastering to go ahead.  I had a quick look at Peggy and George's entries and they both had quite the lives. Peggy had quite the career spanning seven decades including writing all the songs for Lady And The Tramp and singing quite a few of them too - when Disney weren't going to pay her for the VHS release, she sued them for a shedload of cash. And George was British, was born blind (the youngest of nine), had a similarly lengthy career and is probably best known for "Lullaby Of Birdland".

"Customers also listened to" albums by - go on, guess. I won't be rushing back to this, but it was all very pleasant with a load of skill involved and we've had far worse albums this year from men with considerably less talent.

09/04/61 - A most peculiar album
23/04/61 - Skilful but dated

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