Through the 1930s English dance music developed a unique and characteristic flavour. Well-mannered, light and unobtrusive, it was perfectly adapted to the social dancing of the period, which even at the level of the humble tennis-club hop, aspired somewhat to the formality of the West End. The arbiters of acceptable dance music were the great West End bandleaders, and the haughtiest and most splendid of these was Bert Ambrose. It is said that Ambrose was once handed a request for a tune wrapped in a pound note – and returned it wrapped in a fiver.
The 25 pieces in this selection are almost achingly redolent of their period – matched saxophone vibratos (now there’s a lost art), straight-muted trumpets, subdued drums, the light baritone voice of Sam Browne intoning It looks like rain in Cherry Blossom Lane. The sound of it, issuing from every wireless set in every new semi-detached suburb, defined the dreams of glamour for an entire generation, and haunts its survivors still.
The Ambrose disc takes us from 1934 to 1937; the Lou Preager selection comes from the quite different world of 1945-6, when his band was resident at Hammersmith Palais. The Yanks had come and gone, leaving us with the gift of swing, and English dance music was a thing of the past. Never mind requests wrapped in fivers, you could buy the whole band for a bookful of clothing coupons. The old bandleaders, Ambrose included, banged on like the Ancient Mariner to anyone who would listen about the vile racket now in vogue.
Preager walked a careful line, on the one hand he essayed swing (Basie’s Doggin’ around, Ellington’s Sophisticated lady), while on the other he paid due attention to the doomed post-war attempt to establish a native, British popular idiom (Cruising down the river, Ashby de la Zouch). None of it is very impressive as music, but as a piece of social history it is fascinating. '