Details

If there were to be a perfect marriage of venue and performer, there could be no better match than Sammy Davis, Jr. and the theatre that had become widely heralded as ‘The World’s Leading Variety Theatre’: The London Palladium. The Palladium had been built in 1910, and over the subsequent half-century, it cemented for itself its reputation based on the ‘who’s who’ roster of stars who had appeared there. This was particularly true during the 1950s and 1960s, when Val Parnell was its managing director – he adopted a controversial, but very successful, policy of presenting high-priced, big-name American acts. In the early 1960s, Sammy Davis, Jr. was at the top of Parnell’s list.

In 1963, Sammy signed on for a five week season at the Palladium; it would be his third visit to London, having performed at the Club Pigalle in 1960 and the Prince of Wales in 1961. He arrived at the end of March and was greeted by a gleaming Rolls Royce for his own personal use. He spent a week in Liverpool performing at the Empire Theatre before beginning five weeks at the Palladium on 8th April, finishing with nights in Leeds, Glasgow, and Brighton, before closing with one night only on 19th May at London’s swanky nightclub The Talk of the Town.

In those five weeks at the Palladium, however, Davis set London alight – marking new attendance records at the Palladium (the New York Post reported on the achievement, calling it “the greatest triumph of them all”), taping a one-man television special for the BBC called Meet Sammy Davis, Jr., and heading into the recording studios of Reprise Records’ UK partner, Pye Records, to lay down tracks for a new LP paying tribute to the London Palladium itself.

The conceit of this album was to record songs associated with some of the famous stars who had graced the Palladium’s stage over the years. Legendary British bandleader Ted Heath and his big band was Sammy’s first choice for accompaniment, but due to being contractually obligated to Decca Records he was sadly not available. Heath’s longtime arranger, Scotsman Johnny Keating was brought in to do the brass arrangements, while the string arrangements were handed to English composer and arranger Peter Knight, Sr. (his son, Peter Knight, Jr. was an A&R Manager at Pye Records at the time).

The artists chosen, the year they appeared at the Palladium, and the songs chosen to represent them were:

Nat “King” Cole (1954) – Smile
Duke Ellington (1948) – Sophisticated Lady
Judy Garland (1951) – Over The Rainbow
Danny Kaye (1955) – Ballin’ The Jack
Frankie Laine (1957) – Jalousie
Tony Martin (1951) – Tenement Symphony
The Mills Brothers (1937) – Lazy River
Matt Monro (1962) – My Kind of Girl
Johnny Ray (1958) – Brokenhearted
Frank Sinatra (1950) – This Was My Love
Frankie Vaughan (1961) – Give Me The Moonlight

In general, the brass numbers fare better than some of the five cuts with string backing. In particular, “Jalousie” and “This Was My Love” are over-elaborate and over-orchestrated. A clear exception is “Over The Rainbow”, a touching reading by Sammy in which he is given beautiful string support and an interesting arrangement: he begins with the song’s release (“If happy little bluebirds fly…”), before then moving to the verse (which Garland herself almost never sang). Meanwhile, “Ballin’ The Jack” and “Lazy River” are classic swinging Sammy romps of the highest order.

Sammy Davis, Jr. is perfectly at home inhabiting the worlds of the eclectic range of performers he pays tribute to on this LP, and even though you know he could do it if he wanted to, he chooses to perform these tunes without even a hint of his capacity for impressions creeping into his interpretations – and in making that choice, he helps make the material his own. At the end of the day, this is a high-concept album that really works. Sammy Davis Jr. Salutes The Stars Of The London Palladium spent 3 weeks on the Billboard Top LPs Chart.