The Sound Gallery (Scamp)
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But it’s Mr. Light’s work in the 1960s of which I am most enamored: his crusade to popularize what the liner notes to his Discotheque–Dance…Dance…Dance (Command Records, 1964) call “the Dynamic NEW Sound and Beat of Discotheque.” No, this is not the disco of Saturday Night Fever; this is, rather, the discotheque of countless 1960s movies–the music of dance clubs given over to the jet set in all their glamour and mystery. With the able assistance of, among other things, Phil Bodner’s flute and Dick Hyman’s organ, Light made the record a small masterpiece of jet-set civilization.
The liner notes are themselves a small joy. They are, of course, informative; this is a record intended not only to provide pleasure but instruction. “The disquaire [DJ] must be extremely discriminating in his choice of records,” the notes explain. “The beat and the sound of every selection must be so precisely right for doing the Hully Gully, the Watusi, the Monkey, the Swim, the Surf and other variations of the basic contemporary dances that the dancers become a captive of the music, so mesmerized by the sound and the beat that they dance on and on and on.”
To describe this music as inauthentic is not quite fair, though; it’s authentically inauthentic. These are records designed by the hip-impaired for the entirely hipless (hence the often instructional nature of their liner notes).
