Movies Til Dawn

Welcome back to 'lite music' month at MTD. Today I've posted the stunningly tastelessly titled 'MUSIC TO CHANGE HER MIND', a Jackie Gleason orchestral outing. Gleason was very clever about creating and marketing these 'mood music' albums and he had about as much to do with their making as most Executive Producers have to do with the movies they get their names on. But without the Great One, we wouldn't have the albums that allow us to do a Cosby/Trump/Weinstein on women who presumably look like the above model.   Subscribe in a reader

Carmen Cavallero was, along with Eddy Duchin, the ultimate antecedent and role model for Liberace, an arpeggio-spinning, glissando-wielding, sustaining-pedal obsessed 'light' pianist. As part of my continuing education in the world of 'society pianists'--which is my planned next career--I offer this faintly absurd 45RPM recording of Cavallero doing selections from the immortal 'Guys and Dolls' score by Frank Loesser. I can only imagine Loesser's reaction to the record--though he may well have liked it as it doesn't jazz things up and thus impinge on his vaunted melodies. The Latin playboy Cavallero, by the way, was in fact born in Brooklyn as Max Calvinsky and was the son of a singing waiter on Delancey Street named Baruch Calvinsky. His mother was a seamstress named Sadie Calvinsky (nee Porchnik). And Bob' Cavallero's your uncle.   Subscribe in a reader