Music: All-Star Blackbirds

Brunswick Record Corp.’s Manhattan laboratory has lately been a hotbed of Negro jazz—Duke Ellington and Don Redman with their high-spiced bands, Torch-Singers Ethel Waters and Adelaide Hall, Cecil Mack’s choir; the four Mills Brothers who learned to sing like tubas and saxophones back in Piqua, Ohio, because they could not afford to buy the instruments; Tapdancer Bill Robinson who went to the laboratory at midnight because his feet twinkle faster when the night is half done.

Brunswick was making records of the music from Blackbirds of 1928. They went on sale last week.* Instead of sending out stereotype notices smart Jack Kapp, Brunswick’s publicity man, sent phonograph dealers and record reviewers a disc announcing the album. On Jack Kapp’s record Dorothy Fields and James (“Jimmie”) McHugh, who wrote the Blackbirds score, paraphrased their theme song “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby” by saying “Let’s all say a prayer so they [the records] will sell, baby.” If Fields & McHugh’s prayer is answered, Brunswick will revive music from other oldtime shows, similarly performed by expensive, all-star casts.

*An album of six 10-inch records, price $5.