This is third post in a series centered on the 1931 jazz hit "Herr Lehmann, Herr Lehmann," made famous by Jack Hylton and His Orchestra.
After starting this
series, I came to realize that I definitely
knew less about
British big bands than I did about American ones. I've been athering music of the early 20th century for a while, so I went to the wooden cabinet where I keep my limited collection
of LPs,
including some best-of records from various bandleaders. For Jack
Hylton, I found that I only have this one record.
Once I'd thought a bit I remembered that I'd seen movies set in the past which included songs by Hylton and his band. For example, "Empire of the Sun," the 1987 film directed by Steven Spielberg, had "Swing is in the Air" as part of its soundtrack.
"Strictly Ballroom," the delightful 1993 Australian movie, included a dance scene which used "Happy Feet" as the accompaniment.
One of the facts about the life of Jack Hylton (originally Hilton), which interested me most while doing research, was found in the "Personal Life" section of Wikipedia. The traveling celebrity bandleader, unsurprisingly, had a few love affairs and a few marriages. Hylton separated from this musician wife Ennis Parkes in 1929, and during the Thirties, he fathered two children with a model named Frederika "Fifi" Kogler.
While Jack and Fifi were busy doing their thing, Ennis recorded some 78s, including the duet "Dancing Time." Later, in cooperation with her wandering husband, she led her own orchestra under her married name "Mrs. Jack Hylton." Around 1940, Ennis Parkes appeared in a patriotic British musical film. Here she is with officer's cap titled rakishly on her curls (very Marlene Dietrich) singing "Let's All Go Up in the Sky," backed by a squadron of tap dancers.
The dance number above, charming as it is, makes a political statement which now makes most of us uncomfortable. The dance troupe known usually as "The Sherman Fisher Girls" has been re-named "The Empire Girls." As in The British Empire. So we've got the ugly colonial thing going -- note that the dancers are wearing British-explorer type costumes with the diagonal straps attached to their belts.
On the other hand, it was 1940, and the United States was not yet in the Second World War. England had a realistic, reasonable concern that an attempted German invasion was not far off. The idea of the entire Empire fighting the Axis powders felt patriotic and morale-boosting to the average English moviegoer, I imagine.
That stuff is all about long-standing cultural struggles. But when we look at the year (1931) when Jack Hylton's Orchestra recorded "Herr Lwehmnn, Herr Lehmann,"Ennis Parkes' legal-if-not-present husband was living in Germany. British-born, he did most of his musical travels in other parts of Europe, very often in Berlin. He actually wanted to tour the United States, but American labor unions fought off musicians from other countries who hoped to come in a grab some of the very few Depression-era bucks to be made through live concerts. So Hylton played European cities which had enough club work to support him and the band.
So Hylton did a lot of recording and performing in Berlin, and on these records, a number of the vocals from the early 30s are in German, or in both German and English, or recorded separately in each language. In 1931, swing and jazz were more acceptable to the Nazi authorities coming to power than they were later. Hylton's was a dance band, and some of the characteristics which made music "anti-German" -- drum solos, syncopaation -- weren't as present in popular songs meant for couples dancing at dinner -and-a-show clubs.
But should an English band have been playing German nite spots at all? Jack Hylton was a complicated person, as we all were. Unlike so many people in this career field, he was an excellent businessman, and he attracted top players because he paid well. He had to take the jobs he could get for his musicians.
And yet... At first the slideshow for video version of "Herr Lehmann, Herr Lehmann" seems fun, playful and fitting to the lyrics. The song's about someone at a resort spa, after all. But the song was released in 1931, and the film footage accompanying it is from 1938. In seven years, The National Socialists were in charge and their platform was all about superior genetics. Note that every person in this film is light-haired and light-skinned, healthy, trim, athletic. Kinda creepy, huh?
Jack Hytton's own values seem sound, to my eye. He personally was not a racist or anti-Semite. When German authorities told Hylton to remove band members who were or or "looked" Jewish, Hylton ignored the commands. A bio I found on YouTube credits Hylton with "bringing Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and others to Berlin and Europe in the 1930s." It seems to me that Hylton's view was business was business, and politics didn't come into it. But perhaps this matter was more complex. Hylton is the subject of a section within a website run by a long-established Jewish organization. The "politics and propaganda" section of "Music and the Holocaust" is of interest.
Currently, someone on eBay has this old ad for a double bill at a Berlin club.
Jack Hylton shared the line-up at Berlin's Scala club with Juan Llossas, a singer and bandleader most famous for turning Ravel's "Bolero" into a tango. Should Juan Llossas have been playing Berlin in the early 1930s? I don't know.
Llossas was an outsider in Berlin, having grown up in Spain, where the Fascists were aligning with Hitler's hateful values. Was Llossas out of his home country for that reason, or did he choose Berlin as a home base? I don't know anything about his politics. But I do know he was so well-established in Berlin that he and his band are included in the album series "The Golden Era of the German Dance Bands."
Another of these compilation-clip mvoies was called "Band Waggon." (The old-English spelling was taken from the title of the British radio comedy show on which the film was based.)
Next week: The end of this series, with some points about internet research
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