I'll be the Master of Ceremonies Saturday night at a show my my pal, ex-Angry Samoan Gregg Turner,
Turner currently is pushing his Kickstarter project to raise cash to record a new album he;s calling Chartbusters! (Click that link and check out the groovy promo video where you'll see my sensituve portrayal of Sammy the Spatula.)
The show is at Phil's Space Gallery, 1410 Second Street at 7 pm Saturday Jan. 24.
It's free, but Gregg will be shamelessly begging you to donate to his Kickstarter. (For $15 you get a CD when Chartbusters! is released. Bigger pledges bring you more goodies).
So come by Saturday night. I might even join turner to sing our favorite Bono song.
Damn, I hate winter! The snow here in Santa Fe made me start fantasizing about Hawaii ...
So let's have some music from Andy Iona & His Islanders to warm us up.
Ioana was born New Year's Day, 1902. He's best known for combining traditional Hawaiian music with swing jazz. According to his bio at the University of Hawaii's Hawaiian Music Collection site:
He was considered an all around musician with the ability to play many instruments; but was noted for being an excellent steel guitarist and saxophonist. Beyond his musical talent, Andy was a superb arranger and composer, having the ability to write a quality orchestral arrangement without using an instrument. Despite the loss of his thumb in a machine shop accident at school, Andy became the first saxophone player for John Noble and the Moana Orchestra in the early 1920s. He also was a member of the Royal Hawaiian Band. Though he started out in the biz playng sax, Ioan became better know for playing Hawaiian steel guitar.
Ioana died in 1966, but his music lives on through the records he left behind -- and through Youtube and the Internet Archives.
Here is one of his better-known songs:
I'd heard "Lovely Hula Hands" (done by Bing Crosby, Don Ho, Marty Robbins, Junior Brown and many more) by "Naughty Hula Eyes" is even more intriguing:
Here's one of the tunes he recorded with Louis Armstrong
And in case you can't get enough, here is a playlist of 14 Ioana tunes from the Internet Archive. Most of these were recorded in the 1930s.
On this Wacky Wednesday, I'm going to pay musical tribute to one of my childhood heroes, Popeye the Sailor Man.
I first became acquainted with Popeye through TV in the late 1950s or early '60s. If my memory serves me well, one of the stations in Oklahoma City had an afternoon slot where they ran Popeye cartoons weekday afternoons.
I didn't know -- or care -- at the time, but Popeye had been around a lot longer than TV. He was around even before he was an animated cartton. He first appeared as a character in a comic strip called Thimble Theater by Elzie Crisler Segar. That was Jan. 17, 1929 -- 86 years ago last Saturday.
The spinach-chomping sailor became so popular that in 1931, Billy Murray, a well-known singer of his era, recorded a novelty tune with Al Dollar & His Ten Cent Band.
This was two years before Popeye became the subject of animated cartoons. Along with Olive Oyl and Bluto, he first appeared in a 1934 Betty Boop cartoon by Max Fleischer, for my money the greatest of all the animated cartoonists.
Fleischer Studios cranked out 90 cartoons between 1934 and 1942. (They showed a few of these ever so often when I was watching Popeye on the tube as a kid. But most of the ones I saw were the vastly inferior ones made by Famous Studios and King Features Syndicate
Music always seemed to play a big part in the cartoons. Here's Popeye's version of one of my favorite songs, "The Man on the Flying Trapeze."
Just for historic weirdness, here's Woody Guthrie & The Almanac Singers singing one of Popeye's favorites
And here is Popeye's theme song from the live-action Popeye movie from 1980, directed by Robert Altman and starring Robin Williams. (Despite the fact that I love Altman, Williams and Popeye, the movie was pretty crappy. But this little scene is cool.)
Friday, January 16, 2015 KSFR, Santa Fe, NM Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time Host: Steve Terrell 101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrel(at)ksfr.org
