Broadway Melody 2018

For a large part of the nineteenth and all of the twentieth century to date, Broadway, that famous thoroughfare in New York, has spawned countless musical shows,all of which supplying an apparently endless stream of popular songs which, mixed with the non-show tunesby the song peddlers of Tin Pan Alley, have become the hits of their day. Not all of the songs reproduced on this record however are from Broadway musicals. In fact, most are from films, some of them about Broadway, some from versions of Broadway shows, or written by composers who provided scores for both. It is indeed interesting, to ponder the unanswerable question of why one show tune should have its brief moment of glory and then become all-but forgotten forever, whereas another from the same show and by the same composer, has stubbornly remained to become, what we now know as an 'evergreen' or 'classic , and is probably better known today than when it first appeared. This CD puts a new slant on the idea of show tunes by having the interpretations of these well known tunes performed by the top class British dance bands of the period 1929/36.