The Things That Were Made for Love
CD Timeless Historical CBC-087
”Hot dance music,” such as this, means approximately three minutes of an attractive melody played in a good dance rhythm and blended with or at least spiced with improvised jazz. One can only wish that such a mixture in popular music would have survived the 1920s. In reality it didn’t, maybe because the majority preferred one or the other or simply because it became easier to market the music by genre.
In this example by Paul Specht and his Orchestra, we get the spice of muted trumpet, eight bars of improvised tenor sax, and a few bars of a jazzy trombone in the first chorus. After a vocal trio, we hear an arranged swinging brass section and some high register clarinet improvisation before the tenor sax returns and the orchestra plays ”tutti” until the final cymbal crash.
Though some important musicians have passed through the Specht Orchestra over the years, there are no memorable names in this 1929 lineup where most of the participants remain unknown. Still, there is very good musicianship to be enjoyed, and the studio engineers who recorded it also did a very good job.