Music: Feathered Kapp

When Jack Kapp was recording master for Brunswick, he used to roam the South looking for new hillbilly quartets, jug bands, spiritual singers, colored jazz outfits and blues shouters to add to Brunswick’s list. Jack Kapp not only has big, useful ears, but kind eyes and a soft heart. When he returned to Chicago with his recordings, so depressed would he feel about the underprivileged folk among whom he traveled that it would take two or three nights listening to the Civic Opera before he felt right again. For Mr. Kapp understood Beethoven as well as 3-woogie.

In 1934 Jack Kapp founded Decca, and it was not long before his musical catholicity began to pay off. A considerable talent for salesmanship helped too.

As an old studio manager, Jack (and his brother David) made sure that customers would hear all the words as well as all the music on any record Decca released. As an old sales manager (also for Brunswick) he had abiding faith in packaging. Decca began putting out inexpensive albums — 35¢ a record, 25¢ and 50¢ for the album. Some were collections of songs by single composers, artists or bands, some were collections of types of popular or folk music. Thanks to Mr. Steve Stevens — another old Brunswick hand — they looked very impressive for any money. Decca now releases about eight albums a month, has established a trend with which the rest of the business is trying to catch up.

There is no industry-wide audit for record unit sales, but Decca believes it is now selling more units than either long-entrenched Victor or Columbia, its chief rivals. Whatever Decca’s quantity, the quality of Decca’s popular recordings remains outstanding in the business. And last month’s Decca list feathered Jack Kapp’s cap as never before. From the Cape of Good Hope to the Pacific coast and on around to the Bosporus, Decca had collected a rich variety of old and new music of the people, by the people and — at 35¢ a crack — for a good many people. Album items: Songs of the South African Veld, sung by Josef Marais and his Bushveld band. Part Huguenot, part Dutch and a lot of just plain cowboy is the music of the Transvaal. Sarie Marais, the song of a Boer girl waiting in the mealies (maize fields) by the old thorn tree for her lover to come back from fighting the English, should fall pleasantly on ears fond of U. S. Westerns and Spanish-American war ballads. Stellenbosch Boys is a rousing bumpkin march. The set’s three discs provide other good discoveries, among them Brandy, Leave Me Alone.

Turkish Folk Songs and Dances, by Nicholas Matthey and orchestra, is probably the most gratifying surprise of all the 150 albums Decca has released. Influenced by the melodies of Asia and North Africa, influencing the melodies of Eastern and Central Europe, Turkish music has everything from Bedouin thump to gypsy stomp. Notable in this collection is the weird and haunting Taxim, a harem dance which indicates that Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky were not faking their Moslem themes.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game, a rich piece of Americana sung by Frank Luther, is an exhaustive collection of songs of the national pastime, containing such rarer numbers as He’s a Fan, Fan, Fan and Let’s Get The Umpire’s Goat.

Individual popular Decca records-of-the-month are also full of listening fun. They include:

The cheerful On Behalf of the Visiting Firemen, sung by Author Johnnie Mercer, who never quite explains the nature of his raucous reunion, and Bing Crosby, who continually calls for a gypsy moth.

WPA, the Mills Brothers-Louis Armstrong ballad of Federal loafing that seemed to affront everyone except those who like to hear a song well swung, raised enough attention to have to be withdrawn (TIME, June 24).

Buds Won’t Bud, neatest, most Gershwinesque tune of the month, sung by the cinema’s Judy Garland from a recent picture of hers.