PROF GIVES UP SEARCH FOR “LOST DRUMMER”

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PROF GIVES UP SEARCH FOR “LOST DRUMMER”

Los Angeles, Feb.22…An eminent musicologist has abandoned his forty-year quest to discover who played the drums on a classic Fred Astaire-Ginger Rodgers dance number.

Albert Phalange, Chairman of the Music Department of Triplett University has been trying to identify the drummer in the RKO Studio orchestra for the 1938 Irving Berlin musical “Carefree” since 1968 when he saw the film as a young composition student at Juilliard School of Music.

“It was in an American Songwriting class,” Phalange remembers. “There was this number ‘Yam.’ Minor Berlin, a silly lyric, but the band was hot and had an amazing swing drummer, who drove the dance with rim shots and tom toms and cowbells that seemed to pick up Astaire and Rodgers and fly them across the floor.”

After class Phalange says he “bombarded” his instructor with questions. Who was this drummer? Was his part written or did he ad-lib it? Did he play to the choreography or did they choreograph to his playing?

“My professor didn’t know anything about it and he wasn’t interested in finding out,” Phalange says. “But I was.”
For the next forty years, in the midst of a busy career that included playing, composing and teaching, Phalange searched for his mystery drummer. He looked in RKO studio archives, tried to track down the various conductors, the contractors, other musicians. They were either dead or “consigned to oblivion”, Phalange says.

In the course of his search Phalange says he realized that the “Golden Age of Hollywood” was made possible by thousands of artists and craftsmen, “the so-called below the line people,” he says, who toiled in anonymity and today are forgotten.

Phalange posted his query on message boards all across the Internet, but so far has not had one response. Now, about to retire, arthritic and suffering from Retinitis Pigmentosa he admitted defeat.

“I guess I’ll never know who hit those magic rim shots,” he says.