Reviewed by David Torresen (Washington, DC)

Vito Rocco Farinola, born June 12, 1928 in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York, began singing practically from the cradle. His mother, a piano teacher, taught her three-year-old son the basics of vocal warm-ups. His father, an electrician and aspiring singer, taught him his first song, You’re Driving Me Crazy. It wasn’t until the mid-1940s, though, that the teenage Damone determined that singing was his true calling, courtesy of two encounters, one "virtual" and one actual, with seminal 1940s crooners.

"It was the reason for my being a singer – the Sinatra sound," Damone told Jonathan Schwartz in 1983. "When I heard Frank – in fact, I remember the day. It was a Sunday afternoon, and there was a show called The Battle of the Baritones. I was listening, and a record came on called Ghost of a Chance. I was eating – I was having a beautiful dish of pasta – and I had to stop and go to the radio, because my sisters were talking, and I had to listen to what he was doing. All of a sudden it hit me – this marvelous sound, and this interpretation of a beautiful lyric was so real to me, and I went closer to the radio and I listened. I started humming with it, and I felt like I could almost imitate Frank, I could almost mimic him – voice-wise, and also breathing-wise. Everything was very mechanical for me at that time. That was the very first time I really realized that I would like to be a singer."

Around the same time, Perry Como was performing five shows daily at New York’s Paramount Theater. As Damone explained in 1987 at the Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Como: "I was the usher who ran the backstage elevator, spending two dollars a week for singing lessons. For me and my family, that was an awful lot of money, and I wasn’t sure that I had the talent. So one day when Perry came into the elevator after one of his afternoon shows, I asked him if he would listen to me sing and tell me if I had any talent. ‘Go ahead, kid,’ he said. So I stopped the elevator between floors, and I started singing one of his hit songs. I sang about eight bars, and he said ‘No, no, continue – finish it.’ Then he told me, ‘Listen, keep up the lessons. I think you’ve got the talent.’ So he set up an audition for me, with an orchestra leader by the name of Johnny Lang. I sang my heart out, but I didn’t get the job."

Soon enough, Damone got the job. His reputation as one of the major technicians of American popular song grew slowly but steadily, decade by decade, in a performing career now entering its 54^th year. You won’t find the above anecdotes in the liner notes for the newly-released British compilation Young Vic, but you will find 72 minutes of warm, mellifluous singing, circa 1946 and 1947, in a commendable anthology of some of his earliest recordings.

Damone’s first legit recordings were made with Lehman Engel’s orchestra in New York for RCA, as part of a various-artists Rodgers and Hart songbook. His October, 1946 duets with Marie Greene (Falling in Love with Love) and Betty Garrett (Manhattan) are most welcome additions to his CD discography – great songs and good examples of his considerable talent at the very outset. (He would soon sign a recording contract with Mercury Records, where he had little control over the selection of his material, and where the songs of Rodgers and Hart were considered passé in favor of current novelty tunes and booming Italian ballads.)

The 26 recordings are drawn from a variety of 1946-47 sources in addition to the RCA tracks: cuts from WHN Radio’s Gloom Dodgers Show, transcriptions (intended for radio airplay only) made for the Associated company, and some early Mercury efforts. The standards in this collection include Embraceable You, You Made Me Love You, Temptation, Mine, Exactly Like You, Dearly Beloved, and A Fellow Needs a Girl. Also included are several popular tunes recorded by many singers of the day, such as A Gal in Calico, It’s a Good Day, The Lady from 29 Palms, and I’ll Dance at Your Wedding. The sound quality from track to track varies dramatically, but given the rarity of many recordings, this is a minor quibble. Liner notes by Gerald Mahlowe are well written, and special mention should be made of Denis Brown, the world’s foremost Damone researcher, who assisted with this project. Brown’s huge, self-published, labor-of-love discography, detailing almost every facet of the singer’s thousand-or-so recordings, is a marvel.

All in all, Young Vic is a generous sampling of good songs, very well executed by a 19-year-old balladeer with a big future ahead.

The Hi-Lo’s: Suddenly It’s The Hi-Lo’s / Harmony in Jazz
Collectables (COL-CD 6026), U.S., 1999

Reviewed by Ben Glenn II (Washington, DC)

Just what was it that set The Hi-Lo’s apart from the other male singing groups of the 1950s? Not only did most groups’ harmony come in fours – such as The Four Lads, The Four Aces, The Four Freshmen, and The Four Coins – but most of these capable quartets (with the exception of The Four Freshmen) recorded standards dripping with sweet sentiment, likely designed to romance Eames-era housewives as they tended to house and home to the strains of AM radio.

But The Hi-Lo’s were formed in 1953, in Hollywood, in the early days of television, rather than radio; from the start, they were one of the most visual singing groups of the decade. Not only were they television regulars – appearing on 39 episodes of The Rosemary Clooney Show alone – but their engaging on-screen camaraderie, playful album covers, and Technicolor musical arrangements made them the "singing acrobats" of televisionland. Collectables’ new reissue of two of the quintet’s most successful albums, Suddenly It’s The Hi-Lo’s (1957) and Harmony in Jazz (1959), restores this delightful group to living color.

Suddenly It’s The Hi-Lo’s marks the group’s first album for major-label Columbia. Up to then, they had been struggling on small, Los Angeles-based labels such as Trend and Starlite; their obvious thrill and excitement of "hitting the big time" comes through loud and clear on this peppy, exuberant recording. With Clarke Burroughs’ trademark, elastic tenor voice leading the way, the group careens through an amazing, twelve-song program encompassing spirituals, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and even Brahms’ Lullaby. The Hi-Lo’s perfectly tread the line between toying with various musical canons without poking fun at them. Listeners will thrill at the quintet’s vocal "trapeze act" on The Desert Song, for example, without being put off by their irreverent take on this Hammerstein-Romberg-Harbach classic. Throughout, favorite Hi-Lo’s arranger Frank Comstock presents the group in a virtual "Vistavision" of charts, peppered with visions of marching bands, Arabian harems, and TV variety-show production numbers.

With Suddenly It’s The Hi-Lo’s, along with their other album of that year (Swing Around Rosie, based on their successful TV appearances with Rosemary Clooney), The Hi-Lo’s hit their stride. The group was now freer to test their abilities, and they next paired with West Coast jazz virtuoso Marty Paich to record an album of cool jazz-inflected tunes. This album, Harmony in Jazz (alternately titled The Hi-Lo’s and All That Jazz and previously reissued on CD by Columbia Special Products) finds the quintet far more controlled – reminiscent of Mel Tormé’s sessions with Paich – yet hardly restrained. Burroughs and group-mate Gene Puerling find ways to inject their vocal shenanigans into even the coolest of sessions. For example, in Paich’s serene arrangement of Small Fry, Burroughs breaks up the smooth veneer with gleeful exclamations of a wildly harmonized "Yeah!" Throughout Harmony in Jazz, The Hi-Lo’s are like small children trying their best to "behave" under Paich’s disciplined baton. While he allows them to have a bit of fun now and then (The Lady in Red, for example), one wishes The Hi-Lo’s were given a bit more freedom to let loose with their hijinks.

One final production note: the sound quality on this Collectables reissue is very good, and Mark Marymont’s liner notes are informative. However, it is a pity that the CD insert does not include reproductions of the albums’ original cover art.

Collectables Records