| ACKER BILKLP | ||
| Stranger On The Shore | ||
| This Vinyl is graded EXCELLENT on my grading system. The Cover is graded EXCELLENT on my grading system. with the Leon Young String Chorale Titled for the monster hit which dominated charts around the world in 1962, Stranger on the Shore is light listening at its best, a dozen slices of drifting, clarinet-led melody which simultaneously had absolutely nothing to do with English pop music as it moved toward the denouement of the Mersey boom  and encapsulates it as well.Whichever golden age of pop history one chooses to look at, the U.K. charts' capacity to throw up unexpected shockers has remained their most constant (and constantly redeeming) feature of all. Whether it's Englebert Humperdinck outselling "Strawberry Fields Forever" in 1967 or Bob the Builder beating Eminem to number one 30-some years later, the most popular pop refuses to be driven by either fad or fashion. And in the light of those successes, Bilk's domination of 1962 seems so natural it's all but mundane. This album, on the other hand, is anything but. Drawing from traditional, classical, and light orchestral sources, Bilk  expertly accompanied by the Leon Young String Chorale  is a master of the sweeping epic, and it doesn't matter whether he's tackling a standard as trite as "Deep Purple" or "Brahms' Lullaby" or something as impossibly soul-stirring as "Greensleeves." Everything emerges a major statement. "Stranger on the Shore" itself, meanwhile, is so deeply embedded in the musical consciousness that it seems incredible that it's an original Bilk/Young composition, one of just two on the album. The other, "Is This the Blues?," is just as captivating, by the way. With that song and this album, Bilk didn't simply give the world a set of well-played standards; he set a standard which has still to be eclipsed. All Music Guide | |
Acker Bilk  or Mr. Acker Bilk, as he was billed  has won immortality on rock oldies radio for his surprise 1962 hit "Stranger on the Shore," an evocative ballad featuring his heavily quavering low-register clarinet over a bank of strings. To the jazz world, though, he has a longer-running track record as one of the biggest stars of Britain's trad jazz boom, playing in a distinctive early New Orleans manner. After learning his instrument in the British Army, Bilk joined Ken Colyer's trad band in 1954 before stepping out on his own in 1956. By 1960, a record of his, "Summer Set"  a pun on the name of his home county  landed on the British pop charts, and Bilk was on his way, clad in the Edwardian clothing and bowler hats that his publicist told his Paramount Jazz Band to wear. Several other British hits followed, but none bigger than "Stranger," which Bilk wrote for his daughter Jenny. The single stayed 55 weeks on the British charts and crossed the sea to America, where it hit number one in an era when radio was open to oddball records of all idioms (Bilk gratefully called "Stranger" "my old-age pension"). Released on English Columbia in Britain, several Bilk albums came out in America on the Atco label, and he continued to have hits until the British rock invasion of 1964 made trad seem quaint. With that, Bilk moved into cabaret and continued to have some success in Europe, leading jazz bands, recording with lush string ensembles, and even scoring another hit, "Aria" (number five in Britain), in 1976. Continuing to perform through the 1990s, Bilk slackened his pace recently so that he could pursue, like Miles Davis, a hobby of painting.  Richard S. Ginell | ||
