The Best Of Ray Conniff

Description

There was a time, in the 1960s, when it was impossible to walk down a suburban street without hearing Ray Conniff's music coming from open windows, radios... We still like to think that the popular music of an era is always defined by its most radical and innovative elements, but in the 1960s, Conniff was omnipresent on the radio, a sound so familiar and comforting that we forgot how radical he had been. Who else had the idea of doubling trumpets with female singers and trombones with their male counterparts? Conniff was a self-taught musician, an excellent trombonist who had worked with Artie Shaw and then produced a series of popular hits with Frankie Laine, Rosemary Clooney, and Johnnie Ray. Along the way, he developed a musical formula, now largely forgotten, that allowed him to chart nearly thirty albums in a decade.