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

What about solo artists that have an orchestra behind them?
Al Hirt
Bert Kaempfert (previously mentioned)

And some famous pianists:
Roger Williams
Peter Nero
Ronnie Aldrich
and who could forget Floyd Cramer?
 
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.
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Remember, Shulke (SRP) and Bonneville had "matched flow" versions where each quarter-hour set was pre-programmed. Shulke and Marlin Taylor put a lot of thought and time into "perfectly" combining the segues. That service was more expensive than the random select version because there were many more reel exchanges each month.
michael hagerty said:
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.
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Except Peters Productions "Music for the Two of Us" which had fades and overlaps between songs.
 
davideduardo said:
Except Peters Productions "Music for the Two of Us" which had fades and overlaps between songs.
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And it was a terrible version of Beautiful Music. They would force fade songs after about two minutes.

(That was what replaced my groundbreaking AC format on KAAP-FM in the Oxnard/Ventura CA market after the station was sold in 1981. I was very happy to see that it lasted less than a year.)
 
K.M. Richards said:
And it was a terrible version of Beautiful Music. They would force fade songs after about two minutes.
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I ran it, somewhat modified, in San Juan and was vastly the #1 FM, beating all the others as well as 4 competing Beautiful Music formats. I never noticed songs being shortened, just faded for the overlapping segues.
K.M. Richards said:
(That was what replaced my groundbreaking AC format on KAAP-FM in the Oxnard/Ventura CA market after the station was sold in 1981. I was very happy to see that it lasted less than a year.)
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After about 2 years, I switched to FM100 Plan. Paid more, ratings went down. After another year, went to all Salsa as Z-93 and from a 4 share to 33.5.
 
cc333 said:
Ah, I misunderstood.

Are there any airchecks of stations you did work at?

c
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(he had to ask---yikes!)

As a matter of fact---a few years ago I guy I worked with at KOLO in Reno tossed three airchecks of mine up on YouTube. Imagine my surprise and potential horror:

October 7, 1979 (the graphic says 1978, but it's wrong):

March, 1980:

June 17, 1980:

I went to TV news in 1981, and apart from some fill-in shots, that was it. But in 1997, Charlie Van Dyke and I teamed for mornings at Nationwide's just-acquired Eagle 96.9 FM (KGLQ) in Phoenix. Nationwide sold to Jacor within 90 days, so it was short-lived. This, incredibly, is our first morning (I have not heard this in almost 28 years):

fmairchecks.com

KGLQ (Eagle 96.9) - Phoenix - 9/22/97 - Charlie Van Dyke & Michael Hagerty - FM Airchecks

In September 1997, shortly after a sale from Bonneville to Nationwide Communications, Classic Hits-formatted “96.9 K-Hits” rebranded itself as “Eagle 96.9”, and brought on legendary radio/TV voice talent Charlie Van Dyke to host mornings. For 4 months, he was joined by local (KTVK) news...
fmairchecks.com fmairchecks.com
 
K.M. Richards said:
And it was a terrible version of Beautiful Music. They would force fade songs after about two minutes.

(That was what replaced my groundbreaking AC format on KAAP-FM in the Oxnard/Ventura CA market after the station was sold in 1981. I was very happy to see that it lasted less than a year.)
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Sounds like it Petered out
 
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...
This is true. There were gaps between songs on B/EZ one could drive a Kenworth through, on some stations as long as five seconds, but typically 2-3 seconds.

It probably made B/EZ one of the easiest formats to automate because one didn't have any of that high energy kid stuff to deal with. However towards the end of the format, it wasn't uncommon to hear standard, AC type segues with announcers talking over the opening notes on an instrumental (but still in most cases, rarely, if ever referring to the artists playing the instrumental music.)

It's a key factor in the difficulty in locating music for format research. Many versions were/are proprietary versions held in eternal copyright limbo. But some were from tragically unmentioned international recording artists. Like a German conductor named James Last.

For example, I only a few years ago found what Gen-Xer's across Puget Sound only remember as "The K-Bird Song" It was the snippet of an unknown instrumental heard in the TV commercial of what was KBRD (103.7, now KHTP.) With the Norman Rose voice-over "As Beautiful....As A Bird In Flight.......K-Bird, FM 104....Brings You The World's Most Beautiful Music....". The commercial ran on Puget Sound TV periodically from 1979 to 1991, just weeks before it's change to KMTT (The Mountain) in April 1991. I saw a similiar commercial for KQYT Phoenix "Quiet FM 95" with the same Norman Rose/James Last voice-over/music. So I'm guessing this was a market customized national TV ad theme campaign package.

And that song is?

"The Last Guest Is Gone" James Last (1970)


(Cue to :47 for the instantly familiar TV commercial snippet part.)

James Last also has a nice version of "Hey Jude"

Another criminally overlooked B/EZ conductor is Jackie Gleason (yes, that Jackie Gleason.) While best known as an actor, from the 1950s to the early 1970s, he made a series of albums for Capitol that made instrumental fans take notice. It's been said he couldn't read a note of sheet music. But this guy could conduct an orchestra better than John Williams.

Example: "A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody" Just listen to that soaring string section! To me, this is the quintessential B/EZ song. Strings, perky trumpets, lush arrangements. Natural ending.............(long dead air pause).............."Your dial is set to Krisp........K-R-S-P.......Stereo 106......"

When vocals get brought up in these conversations, bear in mind in the old days, there really weren't as many mainstream solo Top 40/AC pop vocalists of any sort in B/EZ as you'd think.

And what you did hear was more the Jerry Vale, Roger Whittaker and Engelbert Humperdinck lot. Lots of "crooner covers". But generally, a mish mash of other super soft hits too wimpy for AC anymore (like "You Light Up My Life", Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Christopher Cross, that sort. Nothing more uptempo.) But instrumentals strictly dominated each hour by 80%.

I know. I sat in many doctor's offices for many, many hours as a kid, playing Name That Tune with the office radio. How many of us did that?)

You'd be lucky to hear two vocals an hour on B/EZ. You'd find a unicorn if one of them were an original version of a familiar pop song. That's generally how they were spread out in this format. So, pretty much, once every 3 hours on KSEA Seattle, circa 1981.)


But overall, mainstream pop vocals was more MOR/"Full Service" AC's turf. There were distinct lines between these formats and B/EZ. And they were kept that way. Almost religiously.

It wasn't even really until the 1980s when MOR began dying off that AC vocals started really popping up on B/EZ radio playlists. And ultimately taking over most of them.
 
b-turner said:
I have heard Jackie Gleason attributed as a major player in the creation of what became beautiful music.
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By the time that the format became "Beautiful Music" in the very late 60's, the more Big Band styles of instrumentals had pretty much been dropped.

While they can be easily criticized as formulaic, the stuff done by the Hollyridge Strings and their clones (mostly LA studio musicians brought together for these projects) created the core concept of more recent pop songs done in instrumental versions.

And that whole batch of stuff done to celebrate the introduction of stereo LPs about decade before were also dropped; most of those had emphasized stereo separation of specific instruments and they were intended to allow owners of new stereos to feel proud of their purchase and even show it off to friends!
 
davideduardo said:
By the time that the format became "Beautiful Music" in the very late 60's, the more Big Band styles of instrumentals had pretty much been dropped.
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Gleason (Jackie, not David) was not big band. It was exactly what @Bongwater and @b-turner said...the music that typified Beautiful Music radio, recorded years before anyone made a format out of it. This one's from 1952:


This one from 1953:


And this one from 1954:

 
Apparently Gleason's albums made money for Gleason as he was still recording them up to 1971. (We had several in the KOVA library before I got the format updated a couple of years after that.)
 
K.M. Richards said:
Apparently Gleason's albums made money for Gleason as he was still recording them up to 1971. (We had several in the KOVA library before I got the format updated a couple of years after that.)
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More to the point, they made money for Capitol Records. They signed Gleason to a three-year contract in 1952 and just kept renewing.

I learned some fascinating stuff about Jackie and the music while looking things up just now, including that he had the idea for this type of music in 1941, but couldn't get anyone at the record companies interested.

This is from Wikipedia (trained writer, closed course, don't try this at home):

Gleason believed there was a ready market for romantic instrumentals. His goal was to make "musical wallpaper that should never be intrusive, but conducive".[31] He recalled seeing Clark Gable play love scenes in movies; the romance was, in his words, "magnified a thousand percent" by background music. Gleason reasoned, "If Gable needs strings, what about some poor schmuck from Brooklyn?"[12]

Gleason's first album, Music for Lovers Only, still holds the record for the longest stay on the Billboard Top Ten Charts (153 weeks), and his first ten albums sold over a million copies each.[4] At one point, Gleason held the record for charting the most number-one albums on the Billboard 200 without charting any hits on the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.[32]

Gleason could not read or write music; he was said to have conceived melodies in his head and described them vocally to assistants who transcribed them into musical notes.[12]
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So, the great irony is that Jackie apparently thought this was baby-making music and it ended up forming the backbone of the least-erotic music radio format ever.
 
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OOPS. You caught me, Mike.

I meant to say "made money for Capitol". I should stop trying to compose coherent posts when I've been awake for less than an hour.
 


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