Music: Two Right Hands

“Mr. Edwards places what he calls ’emotional honesty’ first in importance,” read the high-flown album notes. “He believes that technical accuracy, slavish adherence to original harmonies and melody are secondary. Mrs. Edwards returned from private life to take part in this album, selecting her own repertoire of sophisticated songs, several of which she originally introduced in Trenton, N.J.” Thus Columbia Records several weeks ago launched a new pianist-singer team on an album entitled The Piano Artistry of Jonathan Edwards, currently the liveliest sleeper on the market. In the album’s cover picture, two right hands linger over the keyboard, but the unwary buyer who fails to catch this subtle warning is in for an ear-jolting shock.

Jonathan sounds like a drunk at a cocktail party trying to fake his way through the songs (Stardust, Sunday, Monday or Always) that made him the life of the frat at Dartmouth in 1928. In Nola he throws a right hand wide in a high, lacy filigree, forgets what he started to say, drops the whole idea and piles into the middle again with furious drive. As for his wife and partner Darlene, she sounds as if she were singing in a closet through several folds of cheesecloth. In songs like Autumn in New York and You’re Blasé, she launches into the lyrics exquisitely off pitch, gropes up and down the scale in bewildered search of a key.

To discerning ears it was soon clear that Mr. and Mrs. Edwards were too gruesome to be real. One West Coast listener thought they were “an old couple obviously trying to make a comeback”; another insisted they were Margaret and Harry Truman. Their real identity: Orchestra Leader Paul Weston and his wife, Singer Jo Stafford. Paul and Jo have been burlesquing other pop performers at parties for years, decided to record the gag after Columbia executives heard Weston’s act at a sales convention (Columbia A & R Man George Avakian picked the name Jonathan Edwards, after the fiery Colonial preacher, because he thought it had a properly ossified ring). The howling mistakes on the album, says Weston, are about half planned and half caused by the fact that the performers were laughing so hard they could scarcely follow what they were doing. As far as the Westons know, no one in the record-buying public has guessed who Jonathan and Darlene really are. But a fellow musician called Weston and told him he had recognized the style at once. “Never,” says Weston, “have I been so insulted.”