New Pop Records

The music business, a rough & ready seismograph of all public concerns, was beginning to zigzag to the war in Korea. Biggest of a crop of new patriotic songs sprouting along Tin Pan Alley was a brash tune in march tempo called The Red We Want Is the Red We've Got in the Old Red, White and Blue. Dashed off in ten minutes last May by Bickley (Stop Beating 'Round the Mulberry Bush) Reichner and British Songwriter Jimmy Kennedy,* it had been around almost all summer before Band Leader Ralph Flanagan persuaded RCA Victor to let him record a mile-a-minute dance version. Last week, after being on the market only a fortnight, it had already sold 200,000 copies, promised to be one of the year's big hits. RCA Victor had rushed out a deluxe version by Hugo Winterhalter with full orchestra and chorus, and one for the country trade by sad-voiced Hillbilly Elton Britt.

Other new popular records :

Sarah Vaughan (Columbia LP). One of the reigning queens of jazz, using all of her old tricks and some new ones on eight standards, including East of the Sun, Mean to Me and It Might as Well Be Spring.

Sonny Stiff and Bud Powell, Stan Getz, Lee Konitz and Lennie Tristano (New Jazz LP). These three 10-in. LP records contain the last beads on the lunatic fringe of "cool" jazz. At times the music of these small combos is as weird as a hashish dream or as annoying as fingernails on a blackboard, but they occasionally manage (when the piano rides above the saxophones) some pleasant, if disorganized, sounds.

Why Don't You Think Things Over? and How Deep Is the Ocean? (Dinah Washington; Mercury). One of the best of today's blues singers wails her way expertly through a torchy ballad, does a passable blues version of a Berlin standard.

Lover and Little White Lies (Oscar Peterson; Mercury). An accomplished Canadian pianist ties these two cocktail favorites into knots with fingers that rival Art Tatum's and Fats Waller's at their nimblest.

Can Anyone Explain and Dream a Little Dream of Me (Dinah Shore, with male quartet; Columbia). Dinah back in her best, closer-than-breathing form with an up & coming new ballad and a standard.

*Who wrote a World War II flag-waver: We're Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line.

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