EDMUNDO ROS & I
When I was a kid, I was an avid fan of the radio. A set was always on in our home and I listened to everything that was available. Radio was richly entertaining in years gone by – so unlike the rubbish that pollutes the airwaves today – and I followed soapies, radio plays, quiz shows, sitcoms and of course, all kinds of music programmes.
I had pretty wide taste in music and listened to the pop of the day, swing from my Dad’s era, light classics and even Latin American music from bands like the Edmundo Ros Orchestra. My dad was an inveterate participant in radio competitions, sending in entries endlessly and regularly winning prizes. Quite often the prizes were the records which made up the Hit Parade of the day. Early on we received 78s which I could play on my Dad’s old HMV wind-up gramophone but in time, the little 45s, known as seven singles back then, made up the prize parcel. I badly wanted to play such records but my parents flatly refused to buy me a record player. My Mom always said that I would outgrow pop music and the player would just be cast aside but at 74, I’m still that same kid that I was then and still like to play music whenever I can.
One of the bands which caught my youthful ears was The Edmundo Ros Dance Band. This band was dedicated to South American dance music – sambas, rhumbas, mambos, Edmundo played them all. My first favourite was “The Wedding Samba”, which came out in 1949 on a 78 but which was played throughout the 50s on the radio. There was just something about his voice which I liked and it really was very distinctive. In 1960 I often used to hear tracks from an album which he had made with Caterina Valente. I liked several tracks off the album and dearly wished my folks would relent and buy me a record player but there just never was a tiny bit of surplus in my Dad’s budget and I had to just silently dream about the album. I never did find out what it was called but I never forgot it. I used to moon over some records almost as much as I did over certain pretty girls who were also forever out of my reach!
I decided that once I was earning a salary, my first priority would be a player but in the meantime, I made endless lists of the records I would like to own. I still have those books of my lists and they testify to the fact that dreams do come true at times. From my very first pay cheque, I “blew” R10 at Abe Levin’s shop in Fauresmith and bought a tiny, secondhand Phillips record player and at last I could play my records – both of them! One was the LP “Conniff meets Butterfield” which a friend had given me as he hated it and the other just a single which I can no longer recall. Abe also had some dusty jazz LPs for a Rand a time which I bought as well. Thus was started a lifetime of collecting records, tapes and CDs and now MP3s, a hobby which continues to this very day.
I spent many happy hours scouring record shops, secondhand record shops working at the lists which I had created as a schoolboy and eventually I got round to that mystery Edmundo Ros album. It was the early days of the Internet when I found a fan website dedicated to The Maestro, as he was sometimes called. Turned out that the affable lady who ran the club, was Edmundo’s daughter-in-law and she helped me identify the album. So now I at least knew what I was looking for but where to start. To my surprise she took pity on me and said that she would ask “Dad” when she next spoke to him in Alicante, Spain where he had retired, if he would tape the album for me. “Yeah right” I thought to myself, “The great Edmundo Ros is going to sit around and make a tape for me!! Yeah right!!!”
Some weeks later I found a registered package notice in my postbox and went to collect it myself. Imagine my surprise and delight when it turned out to be a tape made by Edmundo HIMSELF, of no less than two albums which he had made with Caterina Valente. I wasn’t even aware of the second one until then. On the tape he addressed me personally in the voice which I had grown to know so well through hearing it so often on the radio, since I was just a little chap. What an incredible thrill that was and what a delight it was to finally be able to play that album to my heart’s content.
But now a sour note – when we moved down here to Cape Town, I had disposed of most of my records and tapes as I could now store them electronically. I KNOW I packed that most precious tape of all securely but to date I’ve not been able to find it. Can you believe such rotten luck? I don’t know if it was stolen or if it went out with all the junk that was thrown out – I just no longer have it. Luckily early on I made a copy of the tape on a CD for a friend of mine in Canada and he was able to copy that again back to me, so I have the actual content and most particularly, Edmundo’s message but the tape has gone.
Sadly the Maestro passed on in 2011, a few weeks short of his 101st birthday. I still have dozens of his albums on computer and never tire of playing them but some days I wonder if I didn’t dream that incredible cassette. Try and imagine one of today’s “stars” going to so much trouble for a fan in a far off land. No I can’t imagine it either.
JAMES GRIFFIN
I think the majority of my readers will have been around when the soft-rock group BREAD, was at their peak. The two main fellows in the band were David Gates and James Griffin. I owned all their albums and tapes of those LPs went with me everywhere I audited.
I was overjoyed when sometime in the 90s the band reconvened after having broken up and toured worldwide. They came to Port Elizabeth on the South African leg of their tour and I, in the company of my wife and a friend Dick Bryant and his wife, went to see the show. They were every bit as good as they were in the studio and we had a fabulous evening’s entertainment.
I should mention that Dick was (and is) a big collector of vinyl and music generally and was also an avid fan of Bread and Jimmy Griffin in particular. Both David and Jimmy had released excellent solo albums so even though the band had broken up, we could still enjoy their style of music. Dick and I were sitting discussing the band one night and trying to figure out who in the band had composed what, so we could listen to Jimmy’s work separately. I pointed out that that there were no composer credits on their “Guitar Man” album which was going to scotch our plans. We searched various websites dedicated to Bread but could not resolve the problem. On one particular fan site, I spotted email addresses for the band members and I suggested we email Jimmy and simply ask him which tracks he had written. I really did not expect any response but to my amazement, Jimmy himself came back and answered the question, in quite some detail. We were stunned that such a famous star actually answered his own fan mail. Dick’s wife would not have it that it was Jimmy – she maintained it was his secretary pretending to be him. I felt a bit foolish asking Jimmy if it really was him but he was amused and said that he remembered Port Elizabeth well and he had gone for an enjoyable run along the beachfront, early in the morning.
This started a spell when I actively had a bit more correspondence with him. He was such an affable, modest guy that it was like talking to a long lost buddy. What we weren’t aware of was that Jimmy had been diagnosed with lung cancer and was seriously ill. He was a clean living, family man and had never smoked so it was such an unkind illness for him to contract.
Out of the blue one day in 2004 I received an email with an MP3 attachment by Jimmy called, “Break and Run”. It was a pre-release edition of a song which he had just recorded and he thought I might like to hear it. Naturally I loved the single and wondered just how many other people had had my privilege. That was Jimmy all over – modest and generous. And less than a month after I had received that, he had passed on. Only then did we get the news that he had been ill for some time and we just didn’t know it. Sadness hardly describes how bad we felt about his demise.
HOLLY CIERI
Jimmy’s passing introduced me to a lady, Holly Cieri, with whom he had also cut a single (“For all we know”) before he died. I took a chance and dropped a line to her and she too came back without any hesitation. She was trying to break into Nashville and had made a couple of CDs. She not only sent me the CDs, she added some DVDs of live performances which she had undertaken in Nashville. She should have got her toe in at the door because she had a good voice, good material, a fine band of session musicians and best of all, the support and name of Jimmy Griffin behind her. But I guess the music scene in America is jampacked full of hopefuls and you’re just lucky if you manage to catch the public’s ear. I wish I could say I’m still in touch with Holly but she has simply disappeared and never even said goodbye. I have just noticed that she was active on Facebook about a year ago, so maybe I’ll still re-establish contact with her.
KENNY LEVINE
Kenny is a South African who emigrated to America and makes his living in New York. While he is an excellent pianist, he is probably better known in South Africa for composing a number of pop tunes which did well on the local hit parades. I was browsing through a Rock Newsletter which someone used to maintain in the early part of the century and came upon a request from Kenny for someone to help him obtain copies of all the tunes he had written but which were performed by other musicians. I had several of the tracks as well as the ability to rip music off LPs, singles or tapes, clean all surface noise and clicks off such tracks and produce copies a lot better sounding than the originals. I volunteered to help him and before long, I was able to present him with a CD of all the tunes he had had a hand in writing.
I thought my work was over but Kenny had decided to establish a website, on which he could demonstrate his abilities by means of musical samples of the tracks I had already processed. He had set himself up as pianist-for-hire for functions in New York, as well as wanting to be a tutor for people wanting to learn to play. He also had numerous radio clips detailing his successes on the Hit Parades and interviews which had been done with him at the time. I cleaned up all such tapes as best I could and they may be heard even now, on his website. www.kenlevinemusic.com
I’m not a sound engineer or anything like that – I just used my battered old turntable, tape deck and Adobe Audition software to make it possible for Ken to show the world what he had done. I had a huge amount of fun doing it and Ken has always seemed happy with the results. A couple of years ago it became possible to replace the song samples with full tracks which caused a big revamp of his website.
I’ve not heard from him for a while now but his website still seems to be active, so presumably he’s still out there playing and composing. Incidentally, his mother was a Miss Scheckter so they are related to the famous racing driver Jody Scheckter.
MALFORD MILLIGAN
Don’t worry if you’ve not heard of him – he’s pretty obscure. He is a gravel-voiced blues vocalist who first came to my notice in a blues rock band called STORYVILLE. I liked what I heard and bought what CDs I could source but their first album, “Bluest Eyes” was nowhere to be found on the internet. In one of my trawls I came across an email address for Malford and took a chance and asked him if he knew where one might buy the CD. This affable chap recommended Hollywood Records in his hometown Austin, Texas. I ended up buying two copies of the CD from the store and they are quite probably the only copies in all of South Africa. He does only gospel music these days.
DAVID CROSBY
Crosby has been a big name in America for many years. He was a member of the fabulous BYRDS as well as CROSBY, STILLS & NASH (YOUNG) amongst others. In the late nineties, I read somewhere that Crosby had discovered he had a son he was not aware of by the name of James Raymond and that he had formed a band with the son and another fellow, Jeff Pevar. I found his email address and asked him bluntly if what I had read was true and to my delight, he confirmed it and told me his new band was called C.P.R. (Crosby Pevar Raymond). A CD appeared on the charts soon after.
BLONDIE CHAPLIN
This gnarled, wizened little man from Durban has paid his dues over and over. Starting off in the South African FLAMES, he and Ricky Fataar from the same band stepped into empty shoes in the Beach Boys, many years ago. He is involved with the Rolling Stones these days and has played on any number of other people’s albums. He’s really highly respected in the music industry and other artists think it’s an honour to have him play on their albums. I had a friend in Amsterdam who went to see Blondie playing solo somewhere in the city. He got Blondie to autograph a copy of one of his solo CDs for me and mailed it out. His albums are pretty good but unfortunately seldom heard out here.
DAVID MARKS
I went to a Shawn Phillips concert at the Feathermarket Hall in Port Elizabeth and bought a couple of CDs which Shawn autographed for me. This eccentric Texan had married a local widow and was living at nearby Seaview. I found a pamphlet with the CDs which gave me an address in Durban from which I could order more of his CDs. The next day I phoned the number from the ad and found myself talking to a fellow who identified himself as David. He was friendly and we started chatting amiably about Phillips and music in general. After a while, I decided to get his name in case I needed to contact him again. He said he was DAVID MARKS. In a joke I said, “You’re not the guy who wrote the song Master Jack are you”. Imagine my surprise when he admitted that he was! The guy was a legend to me – the song sung by FOUR JACKS AND A JILL got to Number 18 on the American charts. I had even seen David play live at the legendary Troubadour Folk Club in Hillbrow years previously. I ended up buying not only Shawn Phillips’ albums but David Marks’ album as well
I’ve just discovered that the name he was born with was Spiros David Markantonatos. I’d never have guessed that.
RAY (ROY) WOOD
no ! Not THAT Roy Wood. Not the fellow who was in THE MOVE, ELO, WIZZARD etc. This Roy Wood came from Zambia in the late sixties and he is actually RAY not Roy as some websites claim. This keyboard player was with the group, THE GENTLE PEOPLE, which in the early 70s released an album and some singles. I had cleaned and converted my copy of their album to digital and was able to send him a copy of the CD, when I contacted him via a friend who worked with him. I also added both sides of their singles to the disc. I wish I knew what happened to him as he was an interesting and friendly chap.
HENRY MARSH
Henry played keyboards with the 70’s band called Sailor. The band, which was led by George Kajanus, played a cheerful, tuneful brand of pop which appealed to me and as they never reached great heights, they were popular mainly in Europe and I eventually managed to find all their records. I was talking to Edmundo Ros’s daughter-in-law about her Dad’s records and she came through one evening with the name of Henry Marsh, who was looking for old Edmundo Ros 78s and she thought I might be able to help him. I contacted Henry not realizing who he was and only after quite a bit of shared correspondence did I suddenly realize that he was from Sailor. My word! That was a pleasant surprise. He turned out to be down to earth, modest and amusing and as far as I can tell, he is still active in theatre music in America, although I’ve unfortunately lost touch with him.
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