Hum Along With Me - Instrumentals from 1962 Quiz

Answer: Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen

"Midnight in Moscow" was not solely an instrumental when originally conceived. It was composed in 1955 by Vasily Solovyov-Sedoi with poet Mikhail Matusovsky contributing lyrics and the original title translated to "Leningrad Nights". At the request of the Soviet Ministry of Culture, the title was changed to "Evenings in the Moscow Suburbs". When it won an international song contest in 1957, it became enormously popular in Russia and in 1964, started to be utilized as the 30 minute time signal for the national news and music radio station. Excerpts of the song have also been used extensively over the years by Soviet and Russian gymnasts in their routines.

I couldn't pinpoint how Kenny Ball became aware of the melody and transformed it into a Dixieland style jazz number but it was a shrewd and lucrative decision. It peaked at Number Two on both the U.K. and Hot 100 charts and at Number Six in Canada.

Kenny Ball was born in 1930, took up the trumpet in 1944, turned professional in 1953 playing with various British jazz bands, and formed his own group, Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen, in 1958. Although Dixieland jazz evolved in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th Century, its popularity in America was largely confined to that community with small pockets of adherents spread throughout the country. In Great Britain, especially in the early 1960s, it was a nationwide musical phenomenon and Ball took full advantage with 13 Top 40 hits and three gold records from 1961 to 1964. Across the Atlantic, he was essentially a one-hit wonder. Ball actively led his band right up to his death from pneumonia in 2013 but with his son now at the helm, it remains an active entity in the U.K. as of 2019.

Answer: Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass

Herb Alpert was born in Los Angeles in 1935, the son of Jewish immigrants from Romania. His entire family was musically oriented and he started playing the trumpet at an early age. He attended USC in the early 1950s and was a member of the USC Trojan marching band. Upon graduation, he became engaged in the music industry as a song writer and by the early 1960s founded A&M records with Jerry Moss, setting up a small recording studio in his garage.

During a visit to Tijuana, he took in a bullfight and was particularly enthralled with the part that the mariachi band played in the extravaganza. He had been working on a melody and decided to incorporate the sounds he heard there into his score. That song became "The Lonely Bull" and he recorded it with the assistance of session musicians known as the "Wrecking Crew". When it became a hit, an album was conceived on the same theme, Mexican mariachi music, and by 1964, a band was formed to tour that became the "Tijuana Brass".

Although they recorded several songs that charted reasonably high on the Hot 100 during the 1960s, it was their LP releases that truly made the group successful. One LP in particular, "Whipped Cream and Other Delights", sat atop the album chart for eight weeks in 1965. Alpert disbanded the group in 1969, reformed it a couple of times during the 1970s, did some solo work well into the 1980s before withdrawing almost exclusively into the management end of his enterprises. He devotes most of spare time to abstract expressionist painting and sculpturing, having had many exhibitions of his creations, as well as philanthropic endeavors with his spouse, Lani Hall.

Answer: Tornados/Tornadoes

"Telstar" was a monumental hit in 1962 for the British group The Tornados (shown as the Tornadoes in Whitburn's anthologies). It was Number One for three weeks on Billboard's Hot 100 and for five weeks in their homeland.

Assembled by record producer Joe Meek, The Tornados were primarily the backing band for other artists such as Billy Fury and became the go-to musicians for Meek's various musical projects, "Telstar" being the most noteworthy by far. Considered the British equivalent of Phil Spector, Meek parlayed a youthful interest in electronics to become a recording sound engineer and eventually, a producer with his own studio. He experimented with various recording techniques and was considered to be among the first to utilize over-dubbing, compression units and reverberation in his productions.

Although he may have been a musical genius, he was also saddled with a closet full of demons. He was diagnosed as bi-polar and schizophrenic, was openly homosexual when it was deemed to be illegal in the U.K. and abused drugs, most notably amphetamines. Anyone who would claim to "talk to the dead" clearly has issues and Meek insisted that he had regular conversations with Buddy Holly. Finally, overburdened with debt and deeply depressed, he committed suicide on February 3, 1967, the eighth anniversary of Holly's death. Coincidence?

Meanwhile, The Tornados had long since disbanded. "Telstar" was their only Billboard hit of any consequence and their follow-up releases did progressively worse on the U.K. chart. They were an instrumental group and, ironically, the advent of the Merseybeat sound, which was the death knell for so many American musical acts via the British Invasion, was fatal to The Tornados as well with strictly instrumental music no longer in vogue. They went their separate ways in 1964.

They earned virtually nothing from their recording of "Telstar". Royalties from the song were held up in litigation for five years pending a plagiarism claim against Meek by a French musician. When it was resolved, most of the royalties accrued were dissipated in satisfying his multitude of creditors!

Answer: David Rose

While I have no doubt that most people would recognize "The Stripper" when they heard it, I'm not sure that the name David Rose would be readily associated with that hit. Born in England in 1910, his family emigrated to the U.S. when he was four. After graduating from the Chicago College of Music in 1926, he played in Ted Fio Rito's orchestra for three years, worked at NBC radio in New York in various capacities until 1938, then made the move to Hollywood eventually becoming the music director at MGM studios composing movie scores. After WWII, he worked for Red Skelton on his radio and TV programs for several years. Skelton's theme song, "Holiday For Strings" was composed by Rose and was his biggest hit prior to "The Stripper". He also composed the music for over 20 TV programs during the 1960s and 1970s, most notably "Bonanza" and "Little House on the Prairie", and still had the time to record 70 to 80 LPs of show tunes and easy listening music. He passed away in 1990 following a heart attack.

"The Stripper" was an accidental hit. He had composed the song for a 1958 TV program about burlesque shows which commonly featured strippers as part of the proceedings. In 1962, he had recorded "Ebb Tide" for the "A" side of a disk and MGM wanted to release the song ASAP but there was no "B" side to accompany it. Rose was away at the time, so an office clerk went through Rose's collection of unreleased songs and liking what he heard of it, chose "The Stripper". This was one of those relatively rare occasions where the flip side out-performs the presumed and anticipated hit side. I wonder if the clerk was compensated in any way!

Answer: Booker T. & the MG's

In 1962, Stax Records formed a house band to back up the recording sessions of artists like Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding. Two promising members were the 17-year-old piano and organ player, Booker T. Jones, and the 20 year-old guitarist, Steve Cropper. They were joined by bassist Lewie Steinberg and drummer Al Jackson Jr., veterans of the Memphis music scene and in their late 20s.

They had just finished a recording session with Billy Lee Riley and were killing time in the studio when Jones started playing a riff that he had been working on. The others joined in on the jam and Jim Stewart, the president of Stax Records, happened to be in the control booth and liking what he was hearing, recorded it. Cropper reminded Jones of another organ riff that Jones had been playing around with, so they toodled around with it and another track was put on tape. Stewart wanted to get the songs on vinyl quickly and the group decided they liked song 2 for the "A" side and the first song for the "B" side. Essentially, Stax had a record with two songs, neither of which had a title by a band that was nameless. "Green Onions" became that first "A" side and the group decided to call themselves Booker T. and the MG's, after the car. To avoid any hassle with the name from the car company, they formally claimed MG meant Memphis Group. "Green Onions" proved to be a big hit, peaking at Number Three on the Hot 100.

The group continued to serve as the house band for Stax while creating their own records until 1967. By then, they were too big of an act to be cooped up in the studio all the time. Another band, The Bar-Kays, was formed to do the session work, freeing up the MG's to work on their own music and tour promotionally on behalf of Stax and themselves. In 1971, Jones left Stax and the band and moved to Los Angeles and the band's name was temporarily retired. Occasionally the band would get back together for special projects and the odd album. Jackson was murdered in Memphis in 1975 and "Duck" Dunn, who replaced Steinberg in 1965, passed away in 2012. As of 2019, the group consists of Jones, Cropper and Steve Potts on drums.

Answer: Bent Fabric

Bent Fabric, (nee Bent Fabricius-Bjerre), was born in Frederiksberg, Denmark in 1924. He formed his own jazz combo in 1950, played the club scene in Denmark and by the late 1950s, was composing and playing film scores for Danish cinema. In 1961, he scored a big hit there with a simple little song called "Around the Piano" in Danish.

The record was re-released world wide by Atco Records as "Alley Cat" in 1962. It topped the charts in Australia, rose to Number Four in Canada and peaked at Number Seven on the Hot 100.

He had another minor hit in the U.S. in 1962 but it seems that striving for stardom abroad was not what Fabric was after. He continued to reside in Denmark and did just what he had always done... write and perform scores for Danish theatre while also serving as the head of a record label there.

As of this writing in 2019, his Wikipedia page advises that he remains active there at the age of 94!

Answer: Mr. Acker Bilk

Mr. Acker Bilk only had one Top 40 Billboard hit but he made it a doozie. "Stranger on the Shore" reached the pinnacle of Billboard's Hot 100 chart in May 1962. Although it never reached Number One in the U.K., peaking at Number Two, it maintained a chart presence there for an amazing 55 weeks!

Bernard Stanley Bilk was born in 1929 in Pensford, Somerset, England and assumed the nickname "Acker", meaning "mate" or "friend" in local parlance as a youth. He learned to play clarinet while in the army in Egypt and when he returned to England in the early 1950s, formed his own jazz band. Traditional jazz became very popular in the U.K. during the late 1950s and he rode the crest of the wave until ill health forced his retirement in 2013. He passed away a year later.

Answer: Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd

Thanks to artist/composers like Luiz Bonfa and Antonio Carlos Jobim, Bossa Nova music from Brazil was making a significant impression on North Americans. "Desafinado", meaning "off key" or "out of tune" was a Jobim composition that worked its way up to Number 15 on the Hot 100 chart as performed by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd. It performed even better on the easy listening chart where it reached Number Four. I personally have a copy of that 45 and always thought that I got a bum disk because it did, in fact, sound off key when being played! Fifty-seven years ago, there wasn't an internet and Google to inform people of things like this!

Charlie Byrd was introduced to this style of music in 1961 while touring Brazil and enamoured with the sound decided to record an album of the music. He did all the arranging of the songs and recruited Stan Getz to be a featured soloist on the album entitled "Jazz Samba". Effectively, it was the album which introduced the Bossa Nova to North American listeners. Two years later, Getz scored an even bigger Number Five hit with another Jobim song, this time using the singing talents of Brazilian vocalist Astrid Gilberto. That song, of course, was "The Girl From Ipanema". Like most musical fads, the Bossa Nova craze would slowly fade away and by the middle of the decade, used record bins were filled with Bossa Nova disks. It was nice while it lasted though!

Answer: The Routers

If you were a cheerleader in 1962 and shortly thereafter, you almost certainly did this - clap clap; clap clap clap; clap clap clap clap, "Let's Go"! It was ubiquitous. Even soccer teams in England got into the act when after the round of claps, fans would yell out the team's name. Apparently, West Ham United was the first with fans of other teams quickly following suit.

"Let's Go (Pony)" was written by Lanny and Robert Duncan and a demo was recorded by them as part of a group named The Starlighters. That recording was never released. In 1962, the song was released by The Routers, a group formed by Michael Z. Gordon in 1961. However, it wasn't the musicians in the group who recorded the song - it was members of "the Wrecking Crew", that notorious bunch of session musicians, who actually performed on the recording. It's not entirely certain which "Wrecking Crew" members were engaged but it is believed that guitarist Tommy Tedesco and saxman Plas Johnson were certainly involved.

The Routers would persist as an entity for a dozen more years with a varying cast of members. Some would only perform in the studio on recordings while others were strictly members of the touring band. Among some later group members were drummer Hal Blaine, pianist Leon Russell and guitarist Scott Engel who later was a member of the Walker Brothers. Their output seemed to consist of five singles, one of which, "Sting Ray", made a brief appearance on the Hot 100 chart before stalling at Number 50 in 1963, and four LPs, two of which were instrumental covers of other artist's material. One last LP was released in 1973 before the band packed it up.

Answer: Duane Eddy

From his debuting Top 40 hit in 1958, the Number Six "Rebel Rouser", to this Number 12 hit in 1962, Duane Eddy was the premier instrumental recording act in the business. Altogether, he would have 15 Top 40 hits during that five-year span, the biggest of which were the Number Four "Because They're Young" in 1960 and the Number Nine "Forty Miles of Bad Road" in 1959. All these hits were produced by Lee Hazlewood and featured not only his "twangy" guitar, but an accomplished group of back-up musicians called "The Rebels".

Eddy was born in Corning, New York in 1938 and moved to Southern Arizona with his family in 1951. Having started playing guitar when he was five, he was accomplished enough to form a duo with a friend when he was 16 and started playing professionally. It was at that point that he met Hazlewood who essentially managed his career for many years thereafter.

The British Invasion of 1964 signaled a change in the musical culture in North America and instrumental music was one of the casualties. Eddy would have no further Billboard hits except for one last Number 50 hit in 1986, a re-release of his 1960 Number 27 hit "Peter Gunn" but he was only "featured" on the release credited to The Art of Noise. He would continue to make special appearances and record the occasional album, his latest offering being released in 2011. His webpage and Facebook page are the same and the last entry was in October 2018 suggesting that he has now eased into retirement.