It’s autumn 1962 and no one in the US record industry has seen the Brit Beat bombshell that’s about to explode on both sides of the Atlantic. The newly formed Ascot Records is a United Artists subsidiary overseen by music-biz lifer Chet Woods, and his first two signings are Dede Young (a singer so utterly forgotten that her releases aren’t even on YouTube) and 34-year-old Canadian jazz flautist Moe Koffman. Four years previously, Koffman had hit big with his Swingin’ Shepherd Blues single on Jubilee Records, and here he is again, tapping up that same captive, desperate-for-thrills market with his usual airy grace.
A collection of almost cosmic politeness, this is a classic quick-buck exploitation move that dates from an era in which you could record an album in a day and have it in the marketplace a few weeks later. The pitch is simple: get Koffman in front of what Billboard described as “a solid guitar-based combo” and let him loose on a selection of Twist-scented covers. At no point does it reach great levels of excitement, and yet you sort of fall in love with it all anyway. A musician of his talent – this is someone who’d play with Quincy Jones and Dizzie Gillespie during his long career – could record stuff like this in his sleep. Not only is the album the very essence of disengaged session players knocking it out before lunch, it’s an also-ran, by-numbers tootle-fest at best.
But – but! – Koffman also injects numbers like Twistin’ and Bumpin’ (which also features a gloriously will-this-do? piano solo) and Pretzel Twist with what at least appears to be genuine joy. If he’s faking it, he’s a true master of the art. You’d have to be a fantastically introverted, stay-at-home sort of teen to feel like dancing to music as steadfastly gentle and predictable as this, but then, maybe it’s precisely this tediously middle-aged way of watering down contemporary pop music for fast-growing children that created the soon-to-come revolution? The gum-chewing, hair-growing, fag-smoking, Cuban heel-stomping wave of Fabs-led creativity should have swept away this sort of cash-in LP forever, except, of course, it would endlessly reappear in an array of newer and hipper guises – I really like this one – over the years. Koffman would go on to cover The Beatles, record a best-selling album of Bach material and appear on the Moonstruck soundtrack, among a million other gigs. He died in 2001 on the very day he and Oscar Peterson were named as the first inductees into Canada’s Jazz and Blues Hall of Fame.
