Difficult Listening 28 - Gordon Jenkins "Seven Dreams"

I seem to be working a theme of mainstream musicians who seize the opportunity to write something for themselves instead of for an audience or patron. Gordon Jenkins wrote arrangements for all the big names (and then some). Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and many others recorded using the lush, stringy arrangements written by Jenkins. His side interests were unique.

Gordon Jenkins can probably be seen as the father of the concept album (sorry, not The Who). In the mid-1940s he put out a four-disc box of shellac titled "Manhattan Tower", sort of like a 16 minute Broadway musical, that was surprisingly a hit. As vinyl LPs became the new medium, Jenkins saw the opportunity to expand his concept and he released a few more of these efforts.

By far my favorite of those is "Seven Dreams" from 1953. This is a series of seven musical skits/dreams concluding with the sound of an alarm clock ringing. They range from the ridiculous to the sublime; from the hilarious to the inspirational - sometimes both at the same time. "Living on a houseboat ain't like living in sin."

One more thing - there is a song on this album, "Crescent City Blues" (Dream 2) that will be immediately familiar as the basis for Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues".