Percy Faith/Lambert, Hendricks & Ross -- Deck the Halls

 

Well, for the fourth year in a row, "Kayo Kyoku Plus" has managed to reach 1000 articles in a year. I'm pretty sure that we won't be breaking the 1,103-article record that we achieved last year but that's OK. There's no need to push things anymore. Anyways, this year's 1000th article will be dedicated to the weekly Reminiscings of Youth and also we'll be covering Christmas again as we approach December 25th. 

Let's take a look at a Yuletide classic that is literally centuries old. "Deck the Halls" goes all the way back to the 16th century to a Welsh melody when it was a winter carol known as "Nos Galan". The English lyrics were written by Thomas Oliphant back in 1862. My first time with "Deck the Halls" was back probably in kindergarten in the early 1970s when my teacher sang it and then taught it to us moppets.

Then, not too long after, my family got that Ronco album which was making the rounds on TV commercials, "A Christmas Gift", with one of the tracks being "Deck the Halls" as performed by Percy Faith and his orchestra. Faith already has representation on the blog for being the original provider of "Theme from a Summer Place" which was covered by AOR duo The Milky Way in 1979. However, Faith tackles his rendition of "Deck the Halls" with gusto as it sounds like something from a King Arthur movie soundtrack as he and his Knights of the Round Table go forth to celebrate Christmas. Apparently, this version first appeared in 1954.

Of course, there have been tons of renditions of "Deck the Halls" over the years, but one of the most unusual covers was by the jazz vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross in 1962. Now, I've heard of Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross as the pioneers of vocalese which involves placing nimbly-delivered words and phrases within the usual improvised arrangement of jazz instruments, replacing those instruments. The Manhattan Transfer also picked up on the hip lingo, even coming up with their 1985 album "Vocalese".

Lambert, Hendricks & Ross' version was something that I found in a Xmas jazz compilation while I was living in Japan, and it was actually titled "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie". Before you could say Weird Al Yankovic, I could tell from the title and the intro that this was going to be a wacky parody of the original "Deck the Halls". I had assumed all these years that Boston Charlie was some near-lethal form of hooch that boozehounds could get in the various dives and saloons in the not-so-nice areas of town but it was actually just a play on the title. However, that fade-in intro where the three start shrieking the chorus in improbable harmony has always had me imagining the sots stumbling around at night trying to get into that hole in the wall.

Then, everything gets set right with a snappy drum and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross plow into the song with some major scatting while a piano player nimbly skates over the keys like a Gold Medal-winning figure skater. But just before the three end up taking us listeners to something far more respectable, we get thrown back into the back alley as Boston Charlie does its thing and the trio shriek their way off into the darkness. So, "Deck Us All" is more scat than vocalese but below you can see them handle the latter.

So, what were some of the big Japanese hits coming out in 1962? I've got three right here.

Jerry Fujio -- Tooku e Ikitai （遠くへ行きたい）

Dark Ducks -- Yama Otoko no Uta（山男の歌）

Yoshio Tabata -- Shima Sodachi (島育ち)

Duke Ellington & His Orchestra -- Jingle Bells

 

Songwriter James Lord Pierpont (1822–1893) would probably be marveling right now at how ubiquitous and representative of Christmas his ultimate creation, "Jingle Bells" (1857) has become. Perhaps it may not be everyone's favourite Xmas song but it's most likely the most famous and one of the oldest Yuletide tunes on Earth.

I'm sure that "Jingle Bells" was already insinuating itself into my baby system a couple of months following my entry into the world via radio and TV, but one of the first times that I can remember Pierpont's magnum opus is through the piano scene featuring wunderkind Schroeder and crabby Lucy Van Pelt in "A Charlie Brown Christmas" (in the reruns). It was truly a technological marvel how Schroeder could change his instrument from grand piano to organ to toy piano. Maybe this was the inspiration for instruments like the synclavier.😉

From Ebay

To sidetrack slightly, it looks like a whole bunch of families fell under the sway of the television commercial for Ronco's "A Christmas Gift" in 1973 since I've been reading on YouTube how they ended up buying the compilation of Xmas classics. Our family was no exception and I still play it on the TEAC. It's just too bad that I can't find the original ad on YouTube.

And yep, my album can still open up to reveal that Christmas scene. In any case, I've already included one of the tracks from "A Christmas Gift" onto the blog, and that is Tony Bennett's scintillating take on "Santa Claus is Coming to Town". I only noticed a few hours ago that though I wrote it last year at the beginning of KKP's Xmas season, I'd forgotten to include Bennett's name in the Labels. Gave myself a Gibbs slap for that.

Track 2 of Side B is today's special Christmas ROY song. I'll be honest with you, though, and say that when I first heard jazz legend Duke Ellington & His Orchestra's version of "Jingle Bells", I wasn't sure what to make of it. Being less than ten years old at the time, I couldn't be expected to understand the call-and-response that often occurred within a swing jazz orchestra back in the day or the fact that improvisation was an obligation in jazz when handling an established song. But at the time, my thought was that it was "Jingle Bells" and it wasn't "Jingle Bells".

Fortunately, I did get into jazz deeply enough so that I even read into the history and mechanics behind one of America's great innovations, and understood what Ellington and his band were doing here. Now, it's very much a swinging delight which has become my favourite version of "Jingle Bells", thanks to the arrangement of the Duke's son, Mercer Ellington. It was originally recorded for the compilation "Jingle Bell Jazz" album from October 1962.

Thinking it is too difficult to track down which songs from Japan were coming out in that particular month, I'm going back to the Japan Record Awards for 1962. I've already picked some songs from that group when I did a ROY on Norman & Barry's James Bond theme, but there are a few more choices.

Best New Artist: Saburo Kitajima -- Namidabune (なみだ船)

Best Composer: Hachidai Nakamura for Jerry Fujio -- Tooku e Ikitai （遠くへ行きたい）

Special Award: Hideo Murata -- Osho (王将)

Jerry (Jelly) Fujio -- Tooku e Ikitai （遠くへ行きたい）

According to the information for this YouTube video, this is the lone concert recording of Hollywood's famous Rat Pack with Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. along with Johnny Carson as the host. I was born a few months after this performance in St. Louis so my first now-fuzzy memories of pop culture back then consisted of the last spurt of those big guns from the Golden Age of Hollywood as they often appeared on television in either finely tailored suits or tuxes singing those swingy jazz standards. Folks nowadays usually can't catch such a thing anymore unless they are Michael Buble fans or watch certain episodes of "Family Guy" since star and creator Seth MacFarlane is an ardent fan of the old tunes.

I've always equated Yujiro Ishihara's（石原裕次郎）Ishihara Gundan（石原軍団...the Ishihara Army） with Ol' Blue Eyes' Rat Pack. The Big Man was the Chairman of the Board for that Gundan with members including Masaki Kanda, (ex-husband No. 1 of Seiko Matsuda, father of Sayaka), Hiroshi Tachi and Tetsuya Watari as the cool tough guys in their own fine threads. They even starred in their own cop shows from the 1970s onwards.

However, singer-actor Jerry Fujio（ジェリー藤尾）actually looked like he could have joined Dean, Frank and Sammy on stage in Las Vegas. I haven't seen him too much in the last several years but when we could get access to a VCR (either through showings at the Buddhist Church or when we finally purchased our own), I was able to see footage of the dapper fellow in his tux singing old chestnuts such as "Danny Boy". And that's how I've always seen Fujio.

From what I've read of Fujio, he had a pretty tough upbringing. According to his J-Wiki bio, the singer was born Shigeki Fujio（藤尾薫紀）, the son of an NHK announcer, Shigehiro Fujio（藤尾薫宏）, and his English wife, Olivia Heath Gonzales in 1940 in Shanghai, China. When the family returned to Japan after World War II, Olivia and young Shigeki were discriminated for a number of reasons including the language barrier. The anxiety was too much for Olivia as she descended into alcoholism and died when Shigeki was in his first year of junior high school. After jobs as a bouncer and a roadie, in 1957, Fujio was scouted by someone working for Manase Productions when he spotted Fujio suddenly jumping onto to the stage to sing Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" at a jazz lounge. Thus, his career in showbiz began.

In 1962, on the NHK music-variety program, "Yume de Aimasho"（夢であいましょう...Let's Meet In Our Dreams）, Fujio sang "Tooku e Ikitai" (I Want To Go Far Away), one of the most melancholy-sounding kayo that I have ever heard. The power duo of songwriting at the time, Hachidai Nakamura and Rokusuke Ei（中村八大・永六輔）, created this ballad of wanting to travel somewhere unknown and as far away as possible. There's no mention about the reason behind the urge to make that trek all alone but I can only wonder if it were some kind of romantic breakup. Perhaps the pair even made it specifically for Fujio. The song became his breakthrough hit and it has become his signature tune.

I've heard Fujio sing the number but when I re-acquainted myself with "Tooku e Ikitai", there was a voice inside me stating that I've heard this cry-in-your-beer sort of tune even beyond his contributions. And as it turned out, the song was adopted as the theme for an NTV travel show with the same title that has been continuing since 1970...a good 46 years!

And it was here that many singers over the decades have covered "Tooku e Ikitai". Everyone from Duke Aces（デューク・エイセス）to Yo Hitoto（一青窈）have given their own version of the evergreen song.

Here are the Duke Aces with their own version.

And this is the late Keiko Fuji（藤圭子）with her haunting and more introspective cover of "Tooku e Ikitai".

Finally, this is the performance of a much older Fujio singing his signature song. As for the name of Jerry, there was no mention in the J-Wiki article about how he got it. Was he given an English name by his mother or was it placed onto him by the folks at Manase Productions because of his Eurasian appearance? However, for some reason, Wikipedia and even his own webpage have written his nom de guerre as "Jelly" and not "Jerry" although the covers on his records have it listed as the latter. I'm still not clear on this so I have placed the two names at the top. Frankly, if there is anyone who should have earned the name "Jelly", it would be me due to considerations of my own girth.