In Praise of Mood Music

Reprinted from http://jazzwax.com

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, I wrote an essay on the history of easy-listening music and its 70th anniversary, which as you'd expect was completely  overlooked (go here). Easy listening was meant to be overlooked. It's whole reason for being was to be there but never get in your way, engaging your emotions but not your brain.

The father of easy listening is arranger Paul Weston, who at the end of May 1945 released what's considered the first easy listening album—Music for Dreaming, on Capitol. The album comprised of four 78s—or eight songs (two per side). As I wrote in my essay, sales were strong from the outset, largely because the music had a way of detaching returning veterans from the stress of war and allowing them to relax and sleep.

Gentle pop music pre-dated Weston, of course. Sweet bands were popular in the 1930s, and Claude Thornhill and Glenn Miller (among others) favored a chilled out, inhale-exhale sound for their dance bands. But Weston was first to conceive of music that was designed to alter your mood, treating sound as soothing color.

Though Weston's first album did well, the format stood in his way, since 78s worked against the music's purpose. You really couldn't be fully transported by the music if you had to spring up every three minutes when the needle reached the end of a disc.

But with the introduction and rise of the LP in the late 1940s and early '50s, Weston resumed his easy pop crusade with a wave of albums. The genre came to be known as "mood music." Columbia and RCA picked up on the trend, as did most pop divisions of record companies seeking to reach suburban homes. The music was singer-less, preventing words and personalities from distracting the ear. Instead, recordings featured only instrumentals—the kind that appeared behind Frank Sinatra at Columbia in the late 1940s. 

By the 1960s, with the advent of stereo and the proliferation of FM stations, mood music took on a wider sound and became "easy listening." Back then, though, easy listening was an easy target for the youth culture. It was a punch line, the squarest of the square music, and mocked as "elevator music." It was the anti-rock, the stuff parents listened to clear their heads and teens despised.

The funny thing is that today, as baby boomers inch into retirement, more of them find contemporary music oddly unintelligible, numbingly similar in tone and just plain noisy. Many now are looking for music that will let them clear their heads and read, rest and relax. The problem, of course, is that easy listening was chided and purged decades ago. The music no longer exists. In addition, easy-listening arrangers and orchestras are simply too costly to revive.

So boomers are turning to satellite radio for easy listening. Which is sort of funny, since the music was once excoriated when our hair was longer, parents were uptight and teachers didn't get where we were coming from. Which only proves that the older we get, the more our parents' lives make sense. Like all music, there's good and bad easy listening. The good stuff tended to feature better artists while the lousy music lacked any sense of sass and charm.

With that said, I tend to be a fan of mood music from the 1950s and easy listening renditions of '60s hits, particularly by British orchestras (it's a quirk, I know). Here are a bunch of albums that will steer you to the genre's better neighborhoods...

Paul Weston—Music for Easy Listening, Music for Memories, Mood for 12 and Solo Mood. Here's You Go to My Head from Weston's Music for Memories...

Bobby Hackett—Complete Capitol Bobby Hackett Sessions(Mosaic), That Midnight Touch and A Time for Love. Here'sMy Foolish Heart from That Midnight Touch...

Johnny Smith—Moonlight in Vermont. Here's the recording, with Stan Getz...

Axel Stordahl—Dreamtime. Here's Imagination... 

George Shearing—Black Satin, Satin Affair and White Satin. Here's Early Autumn from Satin Affair (ignore the album pictured at YouTube...

And then there was this subgenre—'60s pop hits given a tender touch by British orchestras. Two from my collection:

Here's Tony Hatch and His Orchestra with Burt Bacharach and Hal David's Do You Know the Way to San Jose?...

Do You Know the Way to San Jose?

And here's the George Martin Orchestra with the Beatles' It's Only Love from his Help! album...

It's Only Love

JazzWax reader, saxophonist and jazz educator Bill Kirchner rightfully notes that Canadian arranger-conductor Robert Farnon deserves credit for advancing the easy strings sound. Here are a few examples Bill sent along:

Here's Laura...

Here's Pictures in the Fire...

Here's I'm a Dreamer (Aren't We All)...

And here's Birth of the Blues, which is a bit outside the scope of this post but smart band and orchestral writing just the same...

Used with permission by Marc Myers