Wilhelm Grosz was a pupil of Schreker, and according to Thomas Gayda, who has written the booklet-notes for this latest issue in Decca’s Entartete Musik series, the first Austrian composer to introduce jazz idioms into his music. Like many of his contemporaries whose music is featured in this momentous project, Grosz fled his native land when the Nazis arrived, and found refuge first in England and then the USA, where he died in 1939, aged only 45. In England he composed popular songs under the pseudonyms Andre Milos and Hugh Williams.
Afrika Songs dates from 1929, and was a commission from Radio Breslau. The texts are translations into German of poems by several poets from the so-called ‘Harlem Renaissance’, notably Langston Hughes. Hughes’s first collection of poetry was called The Weary Blues, and even if these verses were not designed to be set to music, they are all infused with references to singing and dances – Moan, The new cabaret girl and Night song in Harlem, all by Hughes, Cotton song by Jean Toomer, and Arabesque by Frank Horne, a lament not unlike Billie Holiday’s Strange fruit, images of the victims of lynch-law.
Grosz has scored them with a plonking banjo and jazzy piano part. The sound evoked in Afrika Songs is very similar to a lot of the revues in Berlin and Vienna at the time, and one must ask to what extent they were all influenced by the Black American bands that had toured Europe in the mid-1920s with shows like La Revue negre, Chocolate Kiddies and Blackbirds. Cynthia Clarey and Jake Gardner sing them more in the manner of Lieder than jazz songs; I suppose this is what the composer intended. When Clarey follows with the three short Rondels dating from 1921, very much pastiche Mahler, one can guess how modern and shocking Afrika Songs must have sounded in 1929.
The rest of the disc gives us the two sides of Grosz as pop-song composer. Three Bankel und Balladen sung by Andrew Shore, are heavily satirical like visual versions of the paintings of Grosz’s namesake Georg (no relation, as far as I know). The second one, “Die Ballade von Seemann Kuttel Daddeldu” was quite a hit at the time for Kurt Gerron, the text by Joachim Ringelnatz, one of the poets of the Schall und Rauch cabaret in Berlin. Shore isn’t as explosive as Gerron (whose recording has been reissued on Teldec). Kurt Gerron died at Auschwitz; Grosz had escaped to England as early as 1934, where he wrote his first hit song with Jimmy Kennedy, Isle of Capri. I don’t know if this was specifically intended for Gracie Fields, but she recorded it that year on Rex, and she already owned the first of her villas there. Though the song became closely associated with Dame Gracie, the version I prefer is that by Tino Rossi, with an orchestra conducted by Marcel Cariven. They give the song a tremendous tango rhythm, with a wonderful accordionist.
Robert Ziegler’s arrangements are pleasant, midway between parody and nostalgia, and Kelly Hunter follows their lead, but doesn’t sound as if she believes in the words. Perhaps it’s impossible nowadays, but if you start to be too ironic about these fragile masterpieces, their charm evaporates. As it is, anyone who has so far fallen under the spell of other works in this series won’t be disappointed by this new ‘discovery’.'