A regular series of posts I'd like to do is on awesome records found for the price of one dollar. Most of these I had no clue about but took a chance on and was pleasantly rewarded. I hope to focus especially on albums I see at thrift stores on a regular basis, so others may be able to discover these gems.
I chose a pretty unassuming record to start with: Spotlight of Dancing Album No. 3: All-Latin Rhythms, featuring the music of the George Poole orchestra. Printed by Windsor Records in their Ballroom Records series, Spotlight on Dancing claims to "provide a well balanced library of fine dance music for your parties, your social events, your practice dancing and your plain listening pleasure." And it works perfectly well for the latter, which is usually my preferred approach as I don't even know what the cha-cha-cha looks like.
Not much information about George Poole is available besides what I have here on the back of the record (abbreviated):
The popularity of GEORGE POOLE and his orchestra is attested to by a date book that is filled for months in advance. When any club, organization, festival or convention in the Los Angeles area wants music that their people can really dance to, George Poole is their first thought and preference. Mr. Poole comes from a many-generation musical family and started playing violin at the age of 4, winning a place in the first violin section of the Omaha Symphony Orchestra at 14. Since then he has mastered the saxapone, clarinet, piccolo and the entire flute family -- playing all of these instruments with skill and effect. At an early age he shifted from concert work to popular and jazz music and has played in many of the finest dance bands in the nation. His talents include composing and arranging and he was a staff musician for the American Broadcasting Co. for over 14 years. He has been heard and seen on many top-notch radio and TV programs, including the Liberace show. He is a veteran of hundreds of recording sessions in the capacities of musician, leader, conductor, and director -- and has done a great deal of work for several of the major motion picture studios.
Though I was never alive for them, I have a strange sense of protonostalgia (or fauxstalgia as I prefer things) about the phenomenon of local celebrity, when someone could become incredibly famous but only in a single metropolitan area. It seems like the only people like that these days are local fanatics and/or homeless, like San Francisco's Frank Chu or Boston's recently deceased Mr. Butch.
Anyway, here's a sample, followed by the tracklist, for this delightfully simple and danceable record:
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| Side 1 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Track | Title | Rhythm | Range |
| 1 | Cecilia | Cha-cha-cha | Medium |
| 2 | All I Do | Cha-cha-cha | Medium |
| 3 | Un Poquito De Tu Amor | Mambo | Med. Slow |
| 4 | Piel Conela | Rhumba | Slow |
| 5 | You Just Want To Cha-Cha | Cha-cha-cha | Medium |
| 6 | Third Man Theme | Cha-cha-cha | Medium |
| Side 2 | |||
| 7 | Quizas, Quizas, Quizas | Rhumba | Medium |
| 8 | Anything Can Happen Mambo | Mambo | Med. Slow |
| 9 | Cocktails For Two | Cha-cha-cha | Medium |
| 10 | Mi Rival | Cha-cha-cha | Medium |
| 11 | Brazil | Samba | Medium |
| 12 | Oye Negra | Samba | Slow |
You can snatch it from me here! The record's condition is far from perfect and I'm still learning how to rip vinyl so apologies if the quality is poor.
I hope to find the other three records in this series as I've become quite enamored with this one, and the colors on the whole series are awesome. I know he's done a Hawaiian dance album as well, which would just be delicious!