Rating : - Give Me That Old Time Pop Music
I'm not sure popular music today tells you anything about American culture, except in the negation. But, popular music such as this describes a very beautiful world, of a gentility without cloying characteristics, a culture at ease with itself. That history had a lot in store for such a languid culture, does not undo the loveliness of that culture, precisely because history always has a lot in store for every culture. Healthy cultures take what is good in them, admit faults and move on. Woe to the culture that destroys itself for whatever reason, even for the putatively good reason of social justice. One cannot listen to immensely charming music on this album and not feel that the popular vein in the American ethos has not lost something tremendous. There is nothing great here, but how great the feeling it conjures. I originally bought the LPs when I was a child. My mother was one of the first winners of the Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair competition run by the Steven Foster Memorial in White Springs, Florida. That was in the fifties, but when we visited the Steven Foster Memorial in the seventies it still felt very much like the South. At any rate, that this set is as beautiful as it is remains a real anomaly as far as I'm concerned. Two of the musicians involved Gilbert Kalish and Jan DeGaetani have elsewhere produced some of the worst records in the serious music catalogue. Kalish's Ives Violin and Piano sonatas are a particulary heinous reminder that sheer ugliness and clangor was actually a musical fashion statement. I can only attribute the difference here to the presence of Joan Reinthaler whose influence, I'm guessing, worked some magic. I can only assume this to be the same person who has dutifully written blurb-review music criticism for The Washington Post. That her blurb-reviews have always been uncommonly intelligent and informed as to music history argues in favor of her having been the health-giving influence in this recording. Having written a few words of criticism for the same paper, I can only see a connection between Reinthaler's molding of these Foster ditties, from something potentially quite banal into something quite lovely, to her ability to overcome the mind-numbing state of musical criticism today.