In early July I had a wonderful experience singing and playing in concert that featured one of the truly outstanding a cappella ensembles, Kitka, along with Davka, a quartet of virtuosi on violin, cello, bassoon and percussion. If you don’t know about Kitka (www.kitka.org), you should. They’re singing in the Slavic / Balkan tradition made popular by Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares a number of years ago.
It was a special concert titled “Kitka & Davka: Jewish Music from the Old and New Worlds” and it was filmed for future broadcast on PBS. That aspect of it was quite an interesting experience, in and of itself. Since I both sang and played trumpet, I was included as a guest artist in the third part of the concert when both groups got together for a combined set. I was pretty comfortable with both sides, even though I am not a member of either group – though I have professional history and good friendships with members of both Kitka and Davka. I’m hoping to write about that show and share it with you some time soon.
But first, here’s the second part of my interview with the amazing tenor / alto voice from both The Hi-Lo’s and The Singers Unlimited. If you’ve read the first installment, you’ll remember that he’s also a world-class instrumentalist and improviser on clarinet, saxophones, and flute. He also had some pretty sweet whistling solos on the Singers Unlimited recording of Claire.
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Stephen Saxon: What was the audition process like for the Hi-Lo’s?
Don Shelton: One of great intimidation! Mainly because of my size, being 5’6”, because I was trying to replace someone who was 6’4” and they liked two short and two tall. They had stationery with little…Bob Morse being artistic, he had been to the design school in Los Angeles. He used to design our clothing, he would design our suits… Wow! We had the most magnificent outfits, and that was all Bob Morse. He would find great fabrics, and we would go to our special tailor and did all the stuff for the Hi-Lo’s on stage.
But the process was, I kept getting called back but they kept telling me that they were really looking for someone who was six feet or over – they wanted to maintain that look. So I would go and do my thing, and as I was leaving, some tall guy was going in and I’d say, “Hmh! Not gonna happen…I don’t think I can make this because they’re looking for that.” And lo and behold, they finally gave up. They said, “We’re gonna change the way we stand.” They decided, OK, Gene will stand in front, Don will be over here right off of Clarke’s left shoulder, and then Bob will be over here right off of my right shoulder. Instead of two and two, it became just four individuals.
First thing I auditioned on was Steve Allen’s Passacaglia. Great arrangement of a wonderful tune, and it’s just full of augmented fourths. The entire second line is just one augmented fourth after another. And fortunately, I kept because I’d been listening to the Hi-Lo’s over the years, and because I read better than anybody else in the group. Gene, I guess, was the next reader. But I was able to impart that part to the group, too, that we need to be better musically - adept at reading things.
But it was a process of singing with them, and then again, the process included going into the studio. It was one thing to stand and sing, that’s very important, around a piano. Now, let’s take it into the studio and we took “Autumn in Rome,” I think, which we never recorded, actually. It was supposed to be in the “All Over The Place” album. That and “Moon Over Miami”. And I never made it to the islands – they were all over the place.
We went into the studio, and Columbia’s engineer, Allan…He was the head guy over at Columbia…And we recorded and I had a lot of cross-voicing things to be very careful on. And they would listen to that. So it was a process of starting at Bob Morse’s apartment in the Hollywood hills, at the piano and rehearsing. Then going into the studio, recording something, hearing that, and then they went on tour. They went off to the East Coast and sort of left me hanging.
SDS: With Bob Strassen on tour?
DS: Yeah, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I’m watching them on television doing this “Swing In The Spring” special, with Benny Goodman, Peggy Lee, The Hi-Lo’s, in New York, and I’m watching and wondering if they’re going to call after I’ve done all of these things.
And sure enough, they got home off of that tour and Gene called and said, “OK, we’re ready to go. They’re going to make the change.”
My life has been full of that kind of thing, because the same thing happened when I’m going back to Chicago to audition with the J’s with Jamie. The Hi-Lo’s were at the Tropicana in Las Vegas. That was the summer of 1963, doing a month there in the lounge of the Tropicana.
One day the phone rang in my room, and it was Joe and Jamie Silvia, who I knew all about, calling from Chicago. I knew they were very much into advertising, and knew all the stuff they were doing: Pillsbury, and Terryton cigarettes, and Marlboro, and just one commercial on the air after another. And they called and said, “Would you be interested in coming back and auditioning for us? We’re thinking of making a ‘change’ in the group.” And I go, “a change in the group” again… I’ve had a lot of that before.
And of course, I just got all a-twitter and I said, “Let me think about this and I’ll get back to you. I’ve got to talk to the other guys.” So I called them all and we had a little meeting down there in the lounge at the Tropicana. I told them what was up and they knew exactly the financial rewards that would be there for me. And they said, “You have to do what you think is best for you and your family.” We had two children at the time, and I was on the road – not as much as the Four Freshmen, but we were gone a third of the year, a hundred some odd days a year.
You know, I’d call and my wife would be in tears with two in diapers and no daddy around and I’d be having a great time in New York – < laughs> – Oh, she didn’t want to know about the times in New York, when you get home! That was some hard times. As great as it was for me, doing television and commercials, and working. It was all good things that were happening, but they were difficult. But that was the process that I went through.
We were talking about rejection today, Barbara (Morrison) was. There is the possibility for that, but I kept weathering the storms somehow and kept getting called and so on.
So I went to Chicago and I sang with them. It felt good and they liked it and they said, “We’d love to have you with the group, if you would see fit to leave the Hi-Lo’s.” It was a difficult decision for me, leaving the finest vocal group that ever came down the pike, to go and make more money was a difficult decision, even though that was very appealing. I loved my life in California. I was starting to play in the studios, I was freelancing, I was with the Hi-Lo’s, but things were just starting to change in the music business.
The Beatles had just hit. Our bookings were dwindling a little bit. We did a lot of college concerts…The Limelighters, the Kingston Trio, The Brothers Four, The Hi-Lo’s, we were all out there doing the college concerts, that circuit. As well as nightclubs.
One thing led to another, and I gave it a lot of thought and I moved back to Chicago and I stayed there for 25 years. After about three years of being there, Gene moved to Chicago to try his hand at getting a group together, and he couldn’t get it going. We were just too entrenched. There was just so much work and he couldn’t get it.
But we had a lot of fun that year, hanging out and getting together again, he and his wife, Helen. But ultimately, he moved back to California. And I didn’t know he wasn’t planning to come back. And about that time we were doing a Hamm’s Beer session one night with the J’s and Dick Marks. Before that session started, Joe and Jamie took Len [Dresslar] and I aside and said, “We’re moving to New York.” And they didn’t invite us to go. “We’re leaving and taking our two daughters to New York, and we’ve just bought the penthouse over the United Nations Plaza.” One story above Johnny Carson, who was on the 37th floor, and they took the 38th floor.
They didn’t invite us to go and my brain started ticking and I stood on my tip-toes, ‘cause Len was way over six feet. And I said, “I have an idea… Meet me for breakfast at such-and-such a place the next morning…”
SDS: So YOU called Gene?
DS: Oh, yeah. Len and I had breakfast, and I said, “We need to call Gene, and we need to check Bonnie out and see if we could get her in town and form a new group.” So Len and I agreed that that would be great. We were walking across the bridge at the Wrigley Building there.
I said, “What would you think about ‘Singers Unlimited?’ We’re going to have to do, in advertising, a huge spectrum of styles. From barbershop to rock and everything in between.” And he said, “That sounds good.”
And I called Gene and Gene didn’t even ask why I was calling. But Gene, I said, “There’s been a tremendous turnover here in Chicago. Can you come back and meet tomorrow with Len and me?” He said, “I’ll be there on United… blah, blah, blah… at 4 PM.” I said, “I’ll meet you, and we’ll go from there.” He never even asked.
He flew back, I met him, and he brought, “The Shadow Of Your Smile” which he had written for The J’s With Jamie. And Joe had vetoed it because he thought it was too… “moderne.” So he brought that chart. It’s all we had to sing.
And the big kicker was, I called Bonnie Herman’s manager, a trombone player in town. He’d been from Minnesota, where Bonnie was from - Minneapolis. And I said, “Ralph, is Bonnie available to meet with Len and I and talk about forming a new group?” And he said, “Don, this is your lucky day. Her contract just expired with the other group that she was with in town, and that was the competition.
I said, “Don’t do a thing until you hear back from me. Put her on hold. Got everything round up and I called him and said, “Have her meet at Len Dresslar’s house tomorrow at 4 o’clock.
So she drove out, I picked up Gene, he brought that one chart, and we went down into the basement of Len’s house and sang, “The Shadow Of Your Smile,” and looked at each other and said… “Straight ahead!”
We did it right there. We started to formulate our coming out party. Gene had some friends in San Francisco at an advertising agency and he said they’d be able to help us. We used the tuning fork as our logo, and they sent out teasers for about six weeks ahead of our coming out party, in October of ’67.
It was a very, very exciting time. Gene wrote some fictitious things for our demo, to play for people.
SDS: You mean, ads?
DS: Uh, huh… Camay, a shampoo, an airline, a this, a that, and we had about five or six minutes. We recorded that and kept sending out these little teasers. “Something is going to happen. You want to be there.” And sent it to ALL the advertising people. All the biggies in Chicago.
And they all showed up for this party. We had borrowed from Universal Recorders the two big Voice of the Theater speakers, and they were sitting up on the stage. And at an appropriate time – we had magnificent hors d’oeuvres, and champagnes, and cocktails, and things. We gathered everybody in front of the speakers in this big ballroom and pressed the button.
They played our demo tape and everybody just fell down. And that’s how it started. And for the next three years we did just about everything in town. The most exhilarating time in my entire career. We just RAN from studio to studio. One product to another. That’s how we got started.
And then we said one day, “Gene, you’ve got to write something longer than sixty seconds!” We’re getting fatigued, you know, we need to dig into something else. So he wrote “Fool On The Hill”. And we went in and with an 8-track Scully machine, we managed to record track one and two, and combine tracks one and two, put them on track two and leave one and three open again and go again… We managed to layer it all, and we did that in our off hours, because we’d be busy during the day, and we’d go in at night and record this.
Then we started playing that for people. Oscar Peterson heard that when he was at the London House. He said, “I was about to do an album with voices, so I have this INCREDIBLE recording situation in Germany, and I was going to do something with the Horst Jankowski singers. I think when Hans Georg [Brunner Schwer, the engineer and co-producer for all of the Singers Unlimited albums] hears this…” He knew Gene and I from the Hi-Lo’s, and he just fell down and said “This is what I want to do.”
He took that and played it for the people in Germany, and Bingo! Away we went. That just changed our lives. So we went over there in July of ‘71, and that was the first thing we did. The first two albums we did, “A Capella One” and with Oscar Peterson [“In Tune”] that summer.
What a blast! Fifteen albums later… That was our recording career. You know, we wouldn’t have stopped recording, except in 1980 there was a big change in the record industry around all the world and Hans very reluctantly said, “I’m so sorry, I just have to curtail all our stuff. I hope we can pick it up.”
SDS: And now he’s gone.
DS: Yeah, that’s a very sad thing.
SDS: Can you tell me something that nobody knows about the Singers Unlimited?
DS: The fact that we were very, very quick-working. Probably because if anybody knows anything about the recording industry, the thing that they’ve heard is how a rock group goes in and takes two weeks, three weeks, a month, to record an album, or whatever. And we were doing ten songs in five days. Two songs a day. One in the morning, one in the afternoon, like clockwork. Oh, Clockwork…
SDS: We aspire…
<laughter>
DS: And it’s something that nobody knows, that we literally put everything together in front of the mic. We all read fly specs on the wall and then could take it and do the things that you were talking about in your clinic, how to make music out of this and shape the lines and that. And the breaths, of course, the breaths are cut-offs. You learn with peripheral vision when you’re singing something.
I know in my case I used it a lot with the Hi-Lo’s. Following the lead singer, which was Clarke. Just by looking out at the audience and just out of the right corner of my eye, being able to detect when Clarke is [demonstrates taking a breath]. Just learn to look…
SDS: You don’t have to have someone waving their hand.
DS: That’s right. It’s very distracting. It’s also more dramatic to just take your breath, and everybody goes together. Because that’s your signal. So breathing can be very, very good.
And the same thing happens on cut-offs. A little nod of the head, like that. When you’re attuned to that – your antennae are up – you pick up on that and that helps a lot. Little tricks and things on how to make it work. More together.
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Amazingly, these two excerpts aren’t even close to the whole interview. Maybe some time I’ll prepare the rest for publication. But for now, I’ll close this month’s segment with a couple of necessary references.
First of all, if you don’t own it yet, you should purchase “Magic Voices”, the boxed set of almost all of the Singers Unlimited albums. That’s right, seven CDs worth of some of the best studio singing and most amazing vocal arrangements you’ll ever want to hear. Just having the three a cappella albums should be required of anyone who wants to have a clue about where a cappella jazz has come from.
Also available are some reissues of the Hi-Lo’s recordings. “Suddenly It’s The Hi-Lo’s” & “Harmony in Jazz” are included as a single CD release, and “Now Hear This” & “Broadway Playbill” are also combined as a single CD, both from the Collectibles label (www.oldies.com).
You should be able to find all of these at the normal a cappella music web sites and distributors (www.singers.com and www.a-cappella.com, for example), or from any other dependable sources. My advice is to shop locally if you can, and shop within the a cappella community when things aren’t available near you. Add as favorites (74) | Quote this article on your site | Views: 2017
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