Loopy album notes - SLIGHTLY BAROQUE - notes by Stan Cornyn

I recently found a nice inexpensive LP copy of this Anita Kerr masterpiece. I had never heard it before, but was really taken with it.

But the album jacket notes by Stan Cornyn are something else. I gather he was noted for highly idiosyncratic style, and I had a few samples of it back in the 60s on Everly albums.

But this one is a tour de force, and frankly, some of it goes way over my head. Perhaps someone can explain some of the references?

Anyway, I thought it was worthwhile to capture the notes and print them here for your amusement, and possibly for my edification.

Enjoy!

"SLIGHTLY BAROQUE by Anita Kerr Singers


A lot of people are born slightly cross-eyed. Or slightly red-faced. Or slightly ugly. Anita Kerr was born Slightly Baroque.


"Baroque" does not rhyme with "barbeque". If you think it does, or even might, you are seriously ineligible to touch the album. Baroque does rhyme with a whole number of things which have been too long neglected:

1522 A.D....a year in which so little happened it is often overlooked:

J.S Bach...who was born in 1685 and has since, fortunately passed on: and

Fanciful Flourishes and Curlicues.


Anita Kerr, who flourishes and curlicues at the epicenter of today’s pop scene, is herself Slightly Baroque, as was said above. But, to be dead honest about it, not a hell of a lot baroque. But Slightly so. Prematurely grey, but still a lass who, given a pair of persimmon stretch pants, can cut a meaningful Frug. A lady who started out in the decidedly unBaroque world of Nashville Tennessee, arranging and singing pop music that normally goes Thump in the night.


Then she moved out.


She left Nashville for California, where she settled down in a small town seven miles east of Baroque. Here she lives today. It was in this new location that the Grammy-winning Miss Kerr walked up to her piano bench one day and did not sit. She opened it, and rustled among half-faded photos of half-forgotten trumpet men (with pencil thin mustaches), rustled among the Palmolive sachets and Nehi soda bottlecaps, the crumbling ceremonial cootie catchers and Valentines...until, towards the bottom of her bench, she found!!! a forgotten folio of works by one J.S. Bach. Finger exercises, with all the notes numbered, so that she (or nearly anyone) could punch the right piano key with the correct finger.


For a lost week, Anita relived those Bachannalian music-school days. Like an actress learning her Up-Right-Center from her Down-Stage-Left. Like a typist learning her qwertyulop1/2. Like that Anita reworked the fugues, the fantasies, the filigrees of Baroque.


Shut off that old transistor, mister, Anita’s in another world. Purge thy soul of ching-ching-a-ching-ching. Concentrate on taking one musical line and turning it into one classic-all-time-champion-top-ten-doodle. DoodDdDle went her arrangements...arrangements that would be almost heretical in the revved up Hollywood-hip studios where she was to record. (Violinists, gazing over the charts, would weep - "Glissandos, Herbie, Glissandos!" And there was to be one frightened looking sideman, shoved to one corner, sitting at - can it be?? - a harpsichord!)


Armed with armsful of baroque arrangements for her orchestra and fellow quartet members (who are, to put it mildly, B.J. Baker, alto; Gene Martino, tenor; and Bob Tebow, bass), slightly Baroque Anita Kerr recorded.

The results are Bach at Arthur’s.


The best of both them worlds. Peruques in XKEs. The modern sound of four singers who are at home with Mancini and Jobim, now turned on to the filigree of past centuries. They’ve come back with that little extra something that turns a memorable 18th Century album into a fenfational claffic of the fixtief."

So, did anything at all happen in 1522?

What are cootie catchers (do we really want to know?)

Was Arthur's a club?

 

Get it while it's hot!

 

"...you are seriously ineligible to touch the album."

I think I may have to add that to my signature line!

 

can cut a meaningful Frug

Well, that is all one really needs to know about the album.