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Which Beautiful/Easy Listening Orchestras Were Better or Worse Than Others and Why

C

cc333

One of the side topics of the 1900 Yesterday thread involved Percy Faith, Lawrence Welk and Ray Conniff and discussed the good, the bad and the ugly of each, and it gave me an idea for a thread that discusses which orchestras were better or worse than others and why that is so.

I'll begin:

I don't really care much for Ray Conniff, as I find most of his material has a rather hokey sound which sticks out even relative to his almost as hokey contemporaries (some exceptions exist, of course).

Percy Faith is decent, especially when he sticks to standards and musicals (he didn't really do contemporary very well). "Theme to A Summer Place" is actually one of my favorites, an another is "Delicado" (an ancient copy of which I have from my grandparents or great grandparents on a 78 ROM record, with "Festival" as the B-side). I also like his treatment of the My Fair Lady soundtrack.

The various custom orchestras of the later era (mid 70s-early 90s) actually cover most of the then new stuff relatively well, especially the softer stuff.

Paul Mauriat is perhaps one of the more prolific orchestras of the period, and he really has a nice overall sound (like almost everyone, there's clunkers).

Bert Kaempfert is another one I like, although some of it gets a but hokey too (though nowhere near Ray Conniff; he's in a category of his own!).

So, feel free to agree or disagree, and tell what your likes and dislikes are.

c
 
I am partial to Kaempfert as well ... to the degree where I prefer his version of "Swingin' Safari" to the original charted version by Billy Vaughn. But that's somewhat expected, since Bert composed the tune in the first place. (He also wrote "Strangers In The Night", for those who didn't know.)

Back in the late 1960s/early 1970s, the Kaiser television stations used to play a loop of Kaempfert's "That Happy Feeling" during the test pattern transmissions prior to sign-on. (I'm guessing Henry J. Kaiser liked the song.)

Conniff was better with the Singers than without them. Faith had a better orchestra, and I agree about "Delicato" being a classic (that harpsichord really stood out nicely). Andre Kostelanetz was another prominent "cover version" orchestra who was reasonably good.

The only Welk songs I liked were the ones that diverted from the formula of the television show ... "Calcutta" and "Apples And Bananas". The covers he did on TV were too schmaltzy for my tastes.

During my brief employment at a station in the late 1970s that used TM's Beautiful Music format, I was favorably impressed by their house orchestra.
 
I've always enjoyed Bert Kaempfert.

I was introduced to him by a friend when I was young – 12 or 13 years old – and I've been hooked ever since.

And yes, he wrote "Strangers In The Night". In fact, he released a whole album by the same name. I have several copies, and it's probably one of my favorites; in particular, his cover of "The Mexican Shuffle" is quite good, too. Dare I say better than Herb Alpert's TJB version because it was recorded better.

There was also David Rose, who had a decent orchestra.


K.M. Richards said:
During my brief employment at a station in the late 1970s that used TM's Beautiful Music format, I was favorably impressed by their house orchestra.
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That's good to know. I'm finding that I like Bonneville's sound too.

I'm finding that many of the online BM-oriented streams (and most of the very few OTA stations airing a format resembling BM) don't have the carefully programmed sound that the top stations had during the format's heyday, and in my opinion it cheapens the sound somewhat.

My biggest pet peeve is segues.

There are some stations that just don't know what good segues are, and sloppy segues just don't sound good.

This is a subject for another thread, but I'm trying to program my Part 15 station as part time on weekends and classic soft AC much of the rest of the time, and I try to make it sound like the old stations, with thoughtful segues and decent sound quality.

I don't really have the means to hire anyone with proper programming expertise to consult with, so I've done it alone. I think I'm doing a decent job, but I really wish I could afford to hire someone I could share and collaborate with.

This forum, though, is quite an excellent alternative :)

OK, more of that in a new thread (or DM or whatever). In the meantime, I will now return us to my regularly scheduled thread, already in progress...

c
 
cc333 said:
One of the side topics of the 1900 Yesterday thread involved Percy Faith, Lawrence Welk and Ray Conniff and discussed the good, the bad and the ugly of each, and it gave me an idea for a thread that discusses which orchestras were better or worse than others and why that is so.

I'll begin:

I don't really care much for Ray Conniff, as I find most of his material has a rather hokey sound which sticks out even relative to his almost as hokey contemporaries (some exceptions exist, of course).

Percy Faith is decent, especially when he sticks to standards and musicals (he didn't really do contemporary very well). "Theme to A Summer Place" is actually one of my favorites, an another is "Delicado" (an ancient copy of which I have from my grandparents or great grandparents on a 78 ROM record, with "Festival" as the B-side). I also like his treatment of the My Fair Lady soundtrack.

The various custom orchestras of the later era (mid 70s-early 90s) actually cover most of the then new stuff relatively well, especially the softer stuff.

Paul Mauriat is perhaps one of the more prolific orchestras of the period, and he really has a nice overall sound (like almost everyone, there's clunkers).

Bert Kaempfert is another one I like, although some of it gets a but hokey too (though nowhere near Ray Conniff; he's in a category of his own!).

So, feel free to agree or disagree, and tell what your likes and dislikes are.

c
Click to expand...
As I have mentioned, in the 70's I owned and programmed a Beautiful Music syndicator, Música en Flor, which was on the air in about 16 or 17 countries in Latin America, including very large cities like Bogotá and Lima and Santiago.

Much of the music was the same as the U.S. formats like Bonneville and Shulke, but looked for a bit brighter tempo and included instrumentals of Latin American AC/Top 40 ballads and some Latin Folk music.

With that background, my favorites were not orchestras but soloists with full orchestras such as Richard Clayderman, Jean-Claude Borelly and Nicolas de Angelis, all from French label Delphine. Besides those, ones like Caravelli and Raymond Lefevre were very nice.

Of course, most of the songs I played had been European hits, with the originals in French, Italian and Spanish. I found that those European orchestras, particularly the French ones, did not "mate" well with American or even British hits.

Most of the orchestras like Kaempfert were too "big band" in sound and not romantic and smooth enough for me. I did not play covers of songs before the 60's for the most part, although full instrumentals of some tangos, rancheras and even Peruvian valse songs were a good fit if the arrangement was contemporary enough (in other words, no muted horns!).

​

 
cc333 said:
My biggest pet peeve is segues.

There are some stations that just don't know what good segues are, and sloppy segues just don't sound good.

This is a subject for another thread, but I'm trying to program my Part 15 station as part time on weekends and classic soft AC much of the rest of the time, and I try to make it sound like the old stations, with thoughtful segues and decent sound quality.
Click to expand...

In the 60s, 70s and 80s, Beautiful Music stations really didn't put that much thought into segues, either. Each set was largely a tempo progression, and built into the format was that one song did not touch the other.

There was always a pause---at least one second---in between the end of one record and the beginning of the next. Not a huge gap---more like what you'd hear between songs if you were playing an album, maybe a touch longer.
 
davideduardo said:
With that background, my favorites were not orchestras but soloists with full orchestras such as Richard Clayderman, Jean-Claude Borelly and Nicolas de Angelis, all from French label Delphine. Besides those, ones like Caravelli and Raymond Lefevre were very nice.
Click to expand...

David, mi amigo, you just reminded me of one of my all-time favorite instrumentals, which was Borelly's recording of "Dolannes Melodie", complete with pan pipes. Absolutely wonderful.
 
michael hagerty said:
In the 60s, 70s and 80s, Beautiful Music stations really didn't put that much thought into segues, either. Each set was largely a tempo progression, and built into the format was that one song did not touch the other.

There was always a pause---at least one second---in between the end of one record and the beginning of the next. Not a huge gap---more like what you'd hear between songs if you were playing an album, maybe a touch longer.
Click to expand...
Interesting. I guess the relative precision of the flow was a byproduct of the fact that the format was heavily automated.

That said, I find that I like the pauses, as it kind of allows for a sort of "reset" between songs, rather than having them fade into one another, where trainwrecks can happen when songs don't fade together smoothly.

If not BM, were there any other formats where really good segues were important and carefully crafted? Or is that something I'm making up?

c
 
cc333 said:
That said, I find that I like the pauses, as it kind of allows for a sort of "reset" between songs, rather than having them fade into one another, where trainwrecks can happen when songs don't fade together smoothly.
Click to expand...

I suspect that was the reason for inserting those pauses. If two songs didn't match well enough that a segue would have been jarring -- totally contrary to the intent of the format -- making it sound more like playing an album, as Mike suggested with his simile, would lessen the impact.

There were syndicators who put the reels together in full quarter-hour matched flow segments (Stereo Radio Productions, more commonly called "the Schulke format", after SRP founder Jim Schulke, comes to mind) but the potential negative to that was, as Joseph Gallant said in the second post of this 13-year-old thread, if someone was paying close attention, after a while the music segments were easily predictable.

Pretty much everyone else produced the format in categories of songs, differentiating by tempo and putting vocals in their own category, then not putting the 25Hz tone in until the song had completely faded to zero and then deadrolling for a second or two at the beginning. I remember TM also mandating the same tone placement/deadroll on the liners/continuos (yes, that's what they called the produced re-entries to music after a stopset) and commercials.

I discussed how TM had us mix categories in this post about a week ago.
 
Latin music also for a time had a place in BM/EL formats. Perez Prado had some instrumental hits, which included "Patricia" and his version of "Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White."
 
cc333 said:
If not BM, were there any other formats where really good segues were important and carefully crafted? Or is that something I'm making up?
Click to expand...

Absolutely album rock. Not all stations, not all jocks. But there were some artistes who did wonders---B. Mitchell Reed, Jimmy Rabbitt and Jim Ladd spring to mind immediately, who often built sets around a single thought or theme, and they flowed.

A lot of us in Top 40 and AC who ran our own boards would sweat the segues....and the board engineers at KFRC in San Francisco in the early 70s were wizards, capable of some layunders that are still remarkable. This one from 1973 will always be a standout...from Edgar Winter Group's "Frankenstein" into Black Sabbath's "Iron Man":

https://soundcloud.com/bill-cooper-6%2Fkfrc-two-monsters-in-a-row-seque

The jock was Jack Friday, and I just remembered another sample that has a couple of great segues---around the :30 second mark, Rare Earth into Dr. John's "Right Place, Wrong Time", yet another "Frankenstein" ending segue and a couple more goodies:

https://soundcloud.com/hoyt-smith-2%2Fjack-friday-kfrc
 
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This would have been near the end of the "Big and Bright" combination that ran from 1974 until around 1980 or so.

https://www.worldradiohistory.com/h...BC-IDX/74-OCR/1974-08-26-BC-OCR-Page-0019.pdf (bottom left corner of the page)

As noted in the above, AM 740 went more contemporary and FM 104.3 remained with essentially the same format as it had been running as KXTZ ("Ecstasy in Music", which I always found oddly suggestive for a company like Bonneville to use as a slogan).

740 has kept the KBRT calls for the rest of its existence to date.
 
K.M. Richards said:
This would have been near the end of the "Big and Bright" combination that ran from 1974 until around 1980 or so.

https://www.worldradiohistory.com/h...BC-IDX/74-OCR/1974-08-26-BC-OCR-Page-0019.pdf (bottom left corner of the page)

As noted in the above, AM 740 went more contemporary and FM 104.3 remained with essentially the same format as it had been running as KXTZ ("Ecstasy in Music", which I always found oddly suggestive for a company like Bonneville to use as a slogan).
Click to expand...

Even now, Merriam-Webster omits the sexual connection:

www.merriam-webster.com

Definition of ECSTASY

a state of overwhelming emotion; especially : rapturous delight; a synthetic amphetamine analog C11H15NO2 used illicitly for its mood-enhancing and hallucinogenic properties —called also MDMA; trance; especially : a mystic or prophetic trance… See the full definition
www.merriam-webster.com www.merriam-webster.com

And the Cambridge Dictionary's main definition is "a state of extreme happiness"

dictionary.cambridge.org

ecstasy

1. a state of extreme happiness, especially when feeling pleasure: 2. a…
dictionary.cambridge.org dictionary.cambridge.org

I think your typical 1971 LDS folks probably weren't thinking of the word in that context.

I would bet lunch, however, that by 1974, the culture had changed to the point that they absolutely knew the sexual context and that's why they went back to KBIG.
 
K.M. Richards said:
I suspect that was the reason for inserting those pauses. If two songs didn't match well enough that a segue would have been jarring -- totally contrary to the intent of the format -- making it sound more like playing an album, as Mike suggested with his simile, would lessen the impact.
Click to expand...

This was, by the way, something that developed in the format after automation became common, enabling precise and consistent pauses.

The earliest Beautiful Music airchecks from California that I'm aware of were all done with live announcers and/or board engineers, and the gaps aren't evident.

bayarearadio.org

Midday Masterpieces and Limelight: KABL 960, Oakland (1960) | Bay A

Bill Moen, who would become KABL's most popular voice, began his career at KFGO, Fargo, N.D., in 1954.
bayarearadio.org bayarearadio.org



The introduction of automation at KPOL in May of 1965 resulted in a long strike by AFTRA and IBEW:

 
michael hagerty said:
Absolutely album rock. Not all stations, not all jocks. But there were some artistes who did wonders---B. Mitchell Reed, Jimmy Rabbitt and Jim Ladd spring to mind immediately, who often built sets around a single thought or theme, and they flowed.

A lot of us in Top 40 and AC who ran our own boards would sweat the segues....and the board engineers at KFRC in San Francisco in the early 70s were wizards, capable of some layunders that are still remarkable. This one from 1973 will always be a standout...from Edgar Winter Group's "Frankenstein" into Black Sabbath's "Iron Man":

https://soundcloud.com/bill-cooper-6%2Fkfrc-two-monsters-in-a-row-seque

The jock was Jack Friday, and I just remembered another sample that has a couple of great segues---around the :30 second mark, Rare Earth into Dr. John's "Right Place, Wrong Time", yet another "Frankenstein" ending segue and a couple more goodies:

https://soundcloud.com/hoyt-smith-2%2Fjack-friday-kfrc
Click to expand...
Interesting. I'll have to take a listen!

michael hagerty said:
And look what you can find when you go digging around---half an hour unscoped of KBIG in 1979. I make the pauses as about a second and a half:

Click to expand...
Ah, a sample of (I assume) your work, preserved (apparently by chance) for your own reference 46 years later!

I've been aiming for a 2-ish second pause, but the automation software I'm using (the free version of PlayIt Live) doesn't do pauses unless I build them into the tracks, so they end up on average about 1 second or slightly less in practice. Good to see that it's pretty much within the range of what works.

c
 
K6JHU said:
Remember that Sirius/XM still runs all those artists on Escape.

I kind of preferred Hollyridge Strings. Uptempo arrangements of what was currently popular
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I was just going to mention them. For current day stuff, the Vitamin String Quartet is great:



Just found out they did a Taylor Swift album!
IMG_1762.gif


 
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