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The Happy Six - By the Pyramids, 1919

3,252 views · Published 15 July 2015 · 3:05 · Indexed 31 October 2026

Channel: 240252 · 2015 · Music

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The Happy Six – By the Pyramids, Fox Trot (Fiorito) Columbia 1919 (USA)

NOTE: The Happy Six  were the dance band organised by Harry A. Yerkes in 1919. They  recorded for Columbia between 1919-1923, employing some of the most important names of the jazz and dance band world of the time (Rudy Wiedoeft, Ross Gorman, Clyde Doerr, Bennie Krueger, Earl Oliver, Ted Fiorito, Phil Ohman or xylophonists Joe and George Hamilton Green). Harry A. Yerkes was a marimba player and recording manager who assembled many recording sessions in the early years of jazz. Many of the sessions organized by Yerkes used his name for the bands such as  Yerkes' Jazarimba Orchestra and Yerkes' Marimbaphone Band on Columbia Records, which are estimated to have some of the best selling records of 1919 and 1921. He was among the early proponents of blues music and jazz as a serious form of art. Because of commercial reasons most of his bands’ recordings have to be classified as “light classical”, yet among them many performances had became  important link between ragtime and early jazz. Yerkes often mixed classical musicians with jazz artists in his sessions, so he can be considered an inventor of the "jazz fusion" concept. 

Once again in my channel, this kind of “oriental” pop-dance music from the accoustical recording era, gives us a chance to make a nostalgic trip to the past times, when in the winter seasons the glamorous hotels of Cairo, Luxor, Alexandria were full of the cream of European aristocracy, of artists like Anna Pavlova, of famous writers or the theatre and silent movie stars. Unfortunately, in the context of terrible political events of recent years - bloody wars, assassinations, massacres, from which the blood flows down the whole of the Middle East and the Northern Africa - that lost time of luxury and idleness in lobbies of  the Mena House, the Shepheard's, the Grand Continental hotels, as well as limousine tours to Gizeh,  crazy dance nights in the hotel restaurants or lazy afternoon teas on the verandas overlooking the hotel pool and the pyramids - seems to have sunk forever in the depths of irreversible past.

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