I Love a Piano
LP CBS 460991 1
This double LP with more or less well-known tunes from the great Irving Berlin contains a rarity. It is very unpretentious, and that is the point here. Just a man with a piano love song dedicated to his instrument.
It could as well have been Berlin himself, but here it is a unique performance by Arthur Schutt (1902–1965), one of the most important figures on the jazz and dance music scene of the 1920s. He started his professional career with Paul Specht and did jazz recordings with The Georgians, then continued with, among others, Roger Wolfe Kahn and Don Voorhees. Besides this, he did countless studio sessions with the greatest New York jazz musicians of the decade, and he was making the arrangements for many successful recordings by Sam Lanin, Ben Selvin, and Fred Rich, among others. He had a good reason to love a piano!