The Phantom Dancer, heard every week over radio 2SER 107. 3 Sydney, 23 Australian radio stations and online, is your non-stop mix of swing and jazz from live 1920s-60s radio and TV.

Presented by Greg Poppleton, you can hear Phantom Dancer episodes online at 2ser.com.

THIS WEEK’S PHANTOM DANCER MIX
– has sets of swing bands from 1940s radio, bop and hard bop from 1950s radio, 1943-45 commercial recordings by the Sydney swing orchestra of George Trevare, a set of women jazz singers on-air with the Duke Ellington Orchestra on 1930s-50s radio and more. See the play list below.

A & P GYPSIES
One of the curiosities on today’s Phantom Dancer is part of a weekly broadcast from 1933 of one of the last of the 1920s commercial brand orchestras. In this case, the orchestra is the A&P Gypsies.

A&P, otherwise known as the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, was a U.S chain of grocery stores that ceased supermarket operations in November 2015, after 156 years in business.

U.S radio historian Elizabeth McLeod writes about these commercial brand orchestras,

“The most popular program format of the late 1920s was the sponsored musical feature. It could be a large symphonic group, a dance orchestra, or a song-and-patter team—and it would usually carry the sponsor’s name. The A&P Gypsies, for example—a large, genre-crossing orchestra conducted by Harry Horlick. The Ipana Troubadors—a hot dance band directed by Sam Lanin. The Goodrich Zippers—a banjo-driven orchestra conducted by Harry Reser, when he wasn’t leading the same group under the name of The Clicquot Club Eskimos. Everyone remembers The Happiness Boys, Billy Jones and Ernie Hare—but what about Scrappy Lambert and Billy Hillpot, who performed exactly the same sort of material as Trade and Mark, The Smith Brothers. The list is endless: The Silvertown Cord Orchestra, featuring the Silver Masked Tenor. The Sylvania Foresters. The Flit Soldiers—yet another Harry Reser group. The Champion Sparkers. The Fox Fur Trappers. The Ingram Shavers, who were the Ipana Troubadours on alternate Wednesdays. The Yeast Foamers. The Planters Pickers. And, the magnificently named Freed-Eisemann Orchestradians. All playing pretty much the same sorts of music, all announced by Phillips Carlin or John S. Young or Alwyn Bach or Milton Cross in pretty much the same sort of stiffly formal style.”

Your Phantom Dancer Video of the Week this week is a 1929 commercial recording by the A&P Gypsies, ‘Only The Girl’. Happy Listening…

Make sure you come back to this blog, Greg Poppleton’s Radio Lounge, every Tuesday, for the newest Phantom Dancer play list and Video of the Week!

Thank you.