Jean Shepherd Tonight: Part 2 of "Ham Radio." PLUS: A proper posting of "The Great Ice Cream War of Hammond"

In case anyone thinks that Eduard Strauss, younger brother of the Waltz King, Johann Strauss II, didn't write anything other than the Jean Shepherd standby Bahn frei!, here's another Eduard Strauss polka, Mit Vergnügung (With Pleasure). It's performed by the Vienna Philharmonic under Lorin Maazel, from the 1996 Vienna New Year's Concert.




BEFORE WE PROCEED TO THE CONCLUSION
OF "HAM RADIO" . . .

For those who missed it in last night's comments section, responding to the post of part 1 of "Ham Radio" reader Barry Brenesal raised a valuable point, writing in part: "Though I found Shepherd ultimately repetitive, I loved listening to him in small bursts over WOR, back in the late 1960s, when he was on around 10 PM. Had great personality, and was a fantastic writer."

I replied:

You raise an interesting point, Barry, about the repetitiveness. Shep was, after all, filling an hour of radio time five nights a week for the run of his show(s), and of course while he had listeners who had been with him through many campaigns, he also had the right to assume that most of his listeners hadn't heard all of his talk. And of course even in the repetitions there were infinite variations -- I think of the comedy equivalent of the oral traditions of the ancient bards.

Next week we're going to take a look at Shep on the printed page. As I mentioned already, his tale-telling seems to have translated surprisingly well to print, and I think it's because he had been telling versions of these stories for so long that they had already taken on a fair amount of structure.

NOW HERE IS THE CONCLUSION OF "HAM RADIO"

You'll find part 1 here.




MAKEUP POST: OOPS! HERE IS "THE GREAT ICE
CREAM WAR OF HAMMOND" (SORRY ABOUT THAT!)

I've only just discovered, thanks to a commenter, that on Tuesday, instead of the promised "Great Ice Cream War of Hammond," I repeated "The Attic." Sorry! I've corrected it there, and here again is the correct clip:




SUNDAY in JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT: As noted above, we go to the books: Shep on the printed page. (I haven't figured out exactly what yet. Tune in Sunday night.)


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, and JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Jean Shepherd Tonight: Part 1 of "Ham Radio"

One more performance of Jean Shepherd's theme music, Eduard Strauss's Bahn frei! (Clear Track) polka, by the Czechoslovak Radio (CSR) Symphony Orchestra (Bratislava) under Ondrej Lenard:


AND NOW PART 1 OF "HAM RADIO"




TOMORROW in JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT: Part 2 of "Ham Radio"


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, and JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Jean Shepherd Tonight: "The Great Ice Cream War of Hammond"

Another performance of Jean Shepherd's "theme song," Eduard Strauss's Bahn frei! (Clear Track) polka, by the Royal Philharmononic under Peter Guth, quicker and more rambunctious than the lovely Boskovsky-Vienna Phil one we heard last night:






TOMORROW in JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT: Another of his radio monologues


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, and JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Jean Shepherd Tonight: "The Attic"

We might contrast [two contrasting performances of Johann Strauss II's polka Amid Thunder and Lightning] even further by tossing in what must be the best-known piece composed by Johann II's younger brother Eduard Strauss (1835-1916), Bahn frei! (Clear Track, in the sense of a railroad track, 1869 -- conducted here with a wonderful blend of flair and poise by Willi Boskovsky, whose name is almost synonymous with the Vienna of the Strauss dynasty), which will be familiar to any fan of the late great radio monologist Jean Shepherd or to any fan of one of Jean Shepherd's great fans, Keith Olbermann, who uses it to introduce the "Oddball" segment of Countdown.

-- DWT Sunday Classics, Sept. 13, 2009

No, this isn't the performance of Bahn frei! Jean Shepherd, which began with a race-track fanfare and was quicker and tackier. Still, if we're going to listen to one of his classic radio monologues, it helps set the tone. Here he tells the story of one of his father's apparently numerous ambitious but doomed projects. -- Ken





TOMORROW in JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT: Another of his radio monologues


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, and JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Sunday Classics: Let's get ready to . . . polka!

Carlos Kleiber conducts a rousing performance of Johann Strauss II's Amid Thunder and Lightning (Tokyo, May 1986), the very model of a polka. (For an interestingly more moderate performance, here's Herbert von Karajan from the 1987 Vienna New Year's Concert.)

by Ken

You may remember that I wrote recently about a project some years back where I wound up creating little 15-20 minute suites of wonderful short piece joined by some sort of theme. You've already heard my "lark" group, comprising the first movement of Haydn't Lark Quartet, Fenton's aria "Horch', die Lerche singt im Hain" from Otto Nicolai's opera The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Ralph Vaughan Williams' romance for violin and orchestra The Lark Ascending. This week it's Polka Time!

No, we're not going to start with The Beer-Barrel Polka -- you know, "Roll out the barrel, we'll have a barrel of fun"-- but you can hear it here played by "Canada's Polka Master," Walter Ostanek. No, we've started in more primly proper classical polka terms with the most-performed of the wonderful polkas of Johann "The Waltz King" Strauss (1825-1899), Unter Donner und Blitz. And already, if you compare the Kleiber and Karajan performances, you can feel two distinctly different ways of feeling the rhythm of a polka, even in this same piece. (You may recall that we talked about Vienna's Strauss family and the Vienna New Year's Concert awhile back.)

We might contrast that even further by tossing in what must be the best-known piece composed by Johann II's younger brother Eduard Strauss (1835-1916), Bahn frei! (Clear Track, in the sense of a railroad track, 1869 -- conducted here with a wonderful blend of flair and poise by Willi Boskovsky, whose name is almost synonymous with the Vienna of the Strauss dynasty), which will be familiar to any fan of the late great radio monologist Jean Shepherd or to any fan of one of Jean Shepherd's great fans, Keith Olbermann, who uses it to introduce the "Oddball" segment of Countdown.

We move now to the polka with which the great Czech nationalist composer Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884) brought the first act of his comic treasure The Bartered Bride (1863-70) to a close. It's one of a series of dances Smetana sprinkled through the opera, which go a long way toward defining its spirit. In the opera, in fact, the final iteration of the polka is sung, in potentially roof-raising fashion, by Smetana's villagers. It would be fun to hear the Bartered Bride Polka as it's heard in the opera, but here's a fairly lively rendition of the polka on its own:



Finally our Polka Tour brings us to Soviet Russia and the simultaneously hilarious and intoxicating Polka from the 1929-30 ballet The Golden Age (L'Age d'or) by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), in the composer's own wicked arrangement for string quartet (the second of his Two Pieces for String Quartet, unpublished in his lifetime), performed by the Aurelia Quartet (warning -- the Internet connection where I am this weekend is spitting out clips in two-second bursts, so I can't even tell whether the performance is any good):



For the brazen orchestral original of the Golden Age Polka, the best I can offer is a more poker-faced than polka-paced performance by Bernard Haitink and the London Philharmonic. And while we're cavorting with the youthfully rambunctious Shostakovich, I can't help but urge on you his unbearably delicious 1927 orchestral arrangement he made, supposedly in 45 minutes, from memory, on a bet, of a ditty known to Russians as Tahiti Trot -- which I assure you you'll recognize under a much more familiar name.

SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

The updated list is here.

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