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LADIES ONLY CAFE STRINGS In the earliest decades of the twentieth century when
recording was in its infancy, before dance music and
jazz were commonplace and when cinema was silent
and radio was new, but as yet untried as a commercial
medium, the recording companies found a most
profitable growth area in what we have since broadly
labelled salon, or more specifically Palm Court. The
ubiquitous background music of select nightspots,
restaurants and hotel lounges, at such plush venues it
was played to entertain the Edwardian equivalent of
21st-century couch potatoes, but in contrast to
elevator music and other modern equivalents it was
live, not canned. A long-lost night world of accordions
and plangent violins, its daytime backup was a boom
industry that kept both writers and players busy.
Directly mirroring public taste it also provided popular
ensembles with regular work in recording studios where
output was as prolific as it was diversified.
Salon musics early key figures were mostly
violinists of European origin, moustachioed men with
exotic, foreign-sounding names like Herr Iff and De
Groot, who apart from the latest lancers and
schottisches and cake-walks purveyed staples of the
genre music repertoire. With Mendelssohns Spring
Song, Rubinsteins Melody in F and pieces by Grieg,
Raff or Moszkowski to the fore, they specialised in such
tuneful trifles as Tosellis Serenata, Thomés Simple
aveu, Silésus Un peu damour and, as bosom
companions to the gypsy airs (always sure sellers),
tunes inspired by monastery gardens and sleepy
lagoons, scores of violin-preponderant, now longneglected
miniatures with schmaltzy titles like Quand
lamour meurt or Parfum du passé.
By the end of the first World War the waltz had
given way to jazzy American imports and within a few
years the trend for hotter tempi opened a new avenue for
the more adventurous groups and laid the foundations of crossover. From
the late 1920s onwards themes from classical landmarks
were jazzed up by small dance orchestras and big
bands alike and, in a later juxtaposition well graphed on
recordings, the last centurys final decades brought a
cloaking of jazz in a classical idiom, playing Bach
jazz like Jacques Loussier or jazz on a Strad à la
Menuhin, which despite its short-lived niche-market
limitations, took the crossover style through a new
phase of its evolution.
The vast genre music back-catalogue is not just a
legacy but also a reminder that short, light classics, even
low-brow compositions elevated, have always been
popular and commercially viable. The formula is
proven and the advantage of hindsight and a tradition
spanning more than a century is that it is now possible
for Ladies Only, a seven-piece classical chamber
ensemble of Swedish Chamber Orchestra players and
their arrangers, to plumb the archives for, so to speak,
other suitable strings to their bows. They have proven that it is possible to adapt suitable material in
other styles, which when skilfully and unpretentiously
managed and
subtly understated by the playing of the Ladies
themselves, will either syncopate or starch up to the
same high standard.
Peter Dempsey
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