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

[Erik Lindgren]

Excellent fellas, thank you for the additional commentary.

We restored the Living Strings catalog to PCM 16bit plus and it was not easy. At the very least, The Old Dude as he called himself had a measurable amount of intellectual property rights in it at that point. Perhaps the next step is to get back in touch at Gracenote [Shazam] and start loading this material in properly credited, or at least a place holder for those ambitious enough to stake claim on it, not seeing it in Shazam is some hoakie kind of permission slip to pay the lawyers for the copyright.

Haha, you know this is fast becoming yet another form of legal fraud, not unlike patent-trolls. Yuck


Thank fellas have a great day.

 

[Erik Lindgren]

Yet another example of the state of confusion and inconsistency we are seeing of recent. Just to be clear, I am citing examples that are not about infalliblity of the Shazam AI, mistakes that it can make in identification. It looks for patterns, it must have a reference pattern of the song in order to match it.

These examples are deliberate on original arrangements by who? (new?) copyrights, or whatever, nothing to do with Gracenote.

If I Shazam: Franck Pourcel - Make It With You
Album: Too Beautiful To Last
Label: Capitol Records – SM-11906
Format: Vinyl, LP
Country: US
Released: 1979

I get this:

By the Sea - 임예진: Song Lyrics, Music Videos & Concerts

Listen to By the Sea by 임예진. See lyrics and music videos, find 임예진 tour dates, buy concert tickets, and more!

www.shazam.com

Owner: 임예진
Album: Home of Golden Poem(Teacher, Let's Get Wet in the Rain, Happy)
Copyright: 오아시스레코드 뮤직컴퍼니

AI is only going to make all of this far worse.
I added the Pourcel track found on the link below in an attempt to argue.

 

[Dick's History]

Looking back at all this material listening to it now my preference:

SRP late 70s both BBC, and their own commissions. Those guys, Bernard Ebbinghous, Norrie Paramor, John Fox, David Francis (London Strings), golly that is nice stuff. I know why it was kept away from public sale, radio business models at that time, sure it was genius; but darn it all we lost out on a huge fan base that would live on today in my worthless opinion.

Greater Media’s Beautiful Hits, in my opinion the Sbarra/Gregory/Barber material is what SRP would have made into the 80s if such had been done. The qualities so enduring in the BBC and Paramor/Fox/Douglas fashion, they live on in those arrangements all the way into Ingman and Eales.

As big as Bonneville was the Million Dollar Sound “keeping up” with the times is a little too soft rock for me. More smooth-jazz, I like the quality of the early DeAzevedo material, especially 82-84, it became to synthesized for me in the late 80s. The 90s Ultra stuff, Valentino, Blom, Vanacore, and so forth is really not beautiful music, It lost its original meaning, and chased the original audience off that never really wanted it, and the old fellas were left to street for pickup it seemed. I get it, back in 1990 it was urgent at the time, I just wish radio was a different medium not so dependent on change to be financially responsible. We needed Spotify in 1983. Bonneville did greatly obviously and Marlin is an awesome friend and it’s so nice to correspond with him. The Fox late 80s material is astonishing, kept him recording and that was nothing short of a gift. I always enjoyed talking to John Fox, he and his wife Joy were amazing people.

My old friend said it right, when everyone removed the group-vocals that was too bad. Some of those like my mother used to say when I was little boy in 1980, “preachy”, but not all were and frankly today listening to them now, excellent stuff. Mike Sammes, Midas Touch, Neil Richardson, Encore, it’s great. A very important part of the sound that made us come back for more. It’s kept me on this quest since it all went away where I lived in Iowa around 1986 as a 10 year old. You programmers reached me, touched my soul, and I am never letting go of it.

Thank you guys for keeping the music in discussion alive. I am trying to share what I can on YouTube and Archive.net, it’s a load of work and a huge burden in my mobile data plan. But I keep adding more artifacts.

God bless you all.

Erik

We can identify what would come to be known as "beautiful music" formatted radio stations going back to KIXL AM and FM in 1948. And before that we can identify radio programs devoted to that kind of material going back to at least the Second World War which is when enough of that material was available commercially and on ETs marketed to radio stations to make up a program of an hour to three hours of such primarily orchestral material. Most of them combined it with Semi-Classical fare. As did many "Classical" radio programs live or recorded. Before that it originated on network "good music" shows which offered operatic, folk, light classical, Operetta, Broadway and popular material both sung and played in orchestral versions. Such as those conducted by Nathaniel Shilkret, Harry Horlick, Frank Black, Andre Kostelanetz, Meredith Willson, Morton Gould and others going back to the late 1920s. Orchestral and instrumental music was often as much as half or more of these programs, some of which continued on the networks through 1957 - 1958. Many of the original Beautiful Music radio fans were listeners who had enjoyed these network programs through the years. So one of the things which beautiful Music offered was a bit of the old more formal network programming. And it is interesting that as a radio genre Beautiful Music really took off in the late 1950s after such network good music programming had left off. After Marlin Taylor and Phil Stout got hold of it - well then it was further changed to become more intimate and less rousing and brassy than it sometimes became previously in the 1960s as I remember it on stations such as WBOS Boston and WPAT NYC.

 

[SCPirate]

Ferrante & Teicher, but I can't find anyone who remembers them.

I remember them best for the Theme from Exodus

 

[Dick's History]

I remember them best for the Theme from Exodus

Very active from the 1950s through the 1980s. Many hit records 1960 through '65 when they were with United Artists records. Hit singles and albums into the 70s. Usually appeared as duo-pianists but sometimes with orchestras. Often on TV in the 1960s.