Michael Laprarie's video: Isham Jones and his Orch - The Blue Room 1934

Here is a great arrangement (probably by Gordon Jenkins) of the standard Rodgers-Hart tune "The Blue Room," recorded by the Isham Jones Orchestra in July 1934. The trumpet soloist is the prolific Chelsea Quealey, a veteran of the New York jazz scene during the 1920s and 1930s who sadly is relatively unknown today. The winds swing hard, but the rhythm section, accustomed mostly to nudging the band along for society crowds, just doesn't give the group enough lift. Still, it's a great record. The record is played on my Sparton radio-phono console unit, built around the 8-57 AM-FM radio chassis with phono preamp input. The unit includes a "slicer" record changer and the tonearm is equipped with an Astatic ceramic phono cartridge that uses a standard size sapphire-tip needle. For this video, I mic'd the speaker at close proximity, rather than gathering the sound from further back in the room.