The Ultimate Irving Berlin Vol. 2

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Personnel: Arthur Johnston (piano). Liner Note Author: Dwight Blocker Bowers. British reissue label Pearl's Ultimate series of albums on great Broadway songwriters is devoted to digging up contemporaneous recordings of songs from Broadway and West End productions, usually performed by the people who sang them on-stage. "Ultimate" may not be the right word for the result, if only because there is a catch-as-catch-can quality to the available material; until the 1940s there were no comprehensive recordings made of Broadway shows by the original casts. But the material is nevertheless of interest to show music fans. The first volume of the Irving Berlin series traced Berlin's theater career from 1910 to 1915. This second volume picks up in 1917 with the title song from a nightclub show called Dance and Grow Thin performed by the popular team of Van & Schenck, who appeared in it. Then it skips forward to the Ziegfeld Follies of 1919 for several well-known songs, notably "You'd Be Surprised," sung by Eddie Cantor, and "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody," sung by Ziegfeld mainstay John Steel, the first of his eight selections on the disc. Most of the rest of the album is taken up with songs first heard in either the Ziegfeld Follies or Berlin's own Music Box Revue shows of the 1920s. There are standards, such as "Say It With Music" and the concluding song, "Blue Skies," from the 1926 musical Betsy, but most of the songs are little known three-quarters of a century later. The performers include such stars of the day as the Brox Sisters, Beatrice Lillie, and Whispering Jack Smith. Largely drawn from the acoustic era of recording, the tracks are sometimes primitive sounding, but the exuberance of the performances belies that. Still, this is as much a historical document as a disc to be listened to for pleasure. ~ William Ruhlmann