Up from the Barbershop

Some highly successful reincarnations of the barbershop quartet have been producing a lot of lather in the pop-music business. Today's male vocal groups generally sport teen-age beanies, turtleneck sweaters and cloyingly cute names: the Four Aces, Four Freshmen, Hilltoppers, Platters, Pied Pipers, Crew-Cuts. The most refreshing recruits to this fraternity are four sober-suited young men who call themselves--no less cutely--the Hi-Lo's, but make a specialty of kidding the beanies off their brothers:

We were the Four Imposters,

Until it tore our voices to Tatters,

We sang like the Platters.

Last week the Hi-Lo's brought their far-from-tattered voices to Manhattan for the first time, and proved to the jazz-wise Birdland audience that when they are not kidding, they can husk out just about the slickest sound in the current trade. "We like to sing," says Hi-Lo's Leader Gene Puerling, "almost like a string quartet."

Bull's-Eye Pitch. The simile is apt. As 'they launch with bull's-eye pitch and sure-fire sense of attack into one of their jazz-flavored re-arrangements (You Took Advantage of Me, Stormy Weather), the Hi-Lo's suggest the Budapest String Quartet gone mad. But this quartet is not tied to strings, generally achieves its best effects with vocal approximations of all kinds of instruments. Their voices may sound like a brass section, and often they have the sculptured phrasing of a big band. They hit the opening phrases of My Sugar is So Refined with the rubbery beat and buttery sound of a good sax section. Then First Tenor Clark Burroughs spreads his arms wide and throws his silver-hued voice weaving and wailing high over the others, eventually slides back down to join in a typically altered Hi-Lo ending: "My girl is granulated sugar cane!"

Throughout their act, they spoof their own material, run in gag numbers kidding singing commercials and California's ad-mad mortuaries: "At Goldheim's you can lie on your crisp, moisture-free bier and know that your bier is Goldheim's, the dry bier."

A New Sound. Although they are the most polished neo-barbershop group going, none of the Hi-Lo's has had much professional training. Bass Puerling and Baritone Bob Strasen grew up together in Milwaukee, went to Los Angeles looking for a break in show business. There they teamed up with Tenors Burroughs and Bob Morse, who were appearing with a local band. They started practicing five hours a day, soon decided that they were getting good enough to sell their act. The group considered and rejected a dozen names (samples: the Brooks Brothers, the Lamplighters), finally hit on the Hi-Lo's because their heights ranged from 5 ft. 5 in. (Burroughs) to 6 ft. 3 in. (Strasen). Three years ago they opened at Pack's nightclub in San Francisco, and from the beginning the jazz buffs recognized that here was a new sound and a good one.

Currently the Hi-Lo's are looking high and low for new material, are even experimenting with arrangements of classical music. "There is no reason," says Arranger Puerling, "why four voices can't do Air on the G String by Bach. It's not sacrilegious."

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