Just realised that an edition of Serendipity with Sykora can be found online which takes its theme as the month of June, positively demanding comparison with the Maytime episode of the Russell Davies Song Show discussed in the previous post. It's harder to compile an equivalent playlist, however, as Sykora often plays only a brief snatch of music, not the whole record, with artists and even song titles frequently left uncredited.
With thematically linked quotations from poems, newspapers and other sources added to the mix, the overall effect is more stream-of-consciousness than Russell Davies's May-minded show. Yet it works: Sykora's choices don't seem random because his links do serve to make us feel that the jumble of information is the musing of one man. I'd forgotten just how soft-spoken and intimate his presenting style is, ideally suited to night-time broadcasting, when the mind may be permitted to wander more freely than within the constraints of daytime programming. (My memory is that Serendipity was on late at night though other shows he presented about big bands and the like were early evening.)
The Serendipity show does not consist, as I'd thought, of the Great American Songbook plus a few token novelties but is genuinely wide-ranging, with music from many other countries included. His distinctive voice and avuncular manner make it feel all of a piece but it's less formally educational than Russell Davies's programme - not that Mr Davies is formal in manner, merely that the narrower scope of his musical choices inevitably teaches you a lot about that golden period of American songwriting between the twenties and fifties in particular, whereas the experience for the listener to a Serendipity programme is more like falling into a kind of dreamy pinball game, rapidly (but not violently) shot from one musical or literary idea to another.
The Month of June edition begins with Ken Sykora wondering whether June is "busting" or "bursting" out all over; he makes mention of Oscar Hammerstein deciding that June should bust out - "rather like the gentleman convict Dubarry", which takes us into the first selection: Dubarry Done Gone Again. We're not told, but I presume the recording is by the Chad Mitchell Trio, a sixties American folk group who celebrated a prison escapee in a composition cowritten by Mitchell and Tom Paxton.
The link to the next track, quoted in full below, provides a flavour of the Sykoran style and his rather loose associative process:
Dubarry Done Gone - just away from jail but a lot of people in many parts of the world have to go for long periods to get work - and the people they leave behind do miss them. In Southern Africa gentlemen of the villages go off to the towns to work and sometimes are away for six months, a year, two years; behind them in the village their fathers, mothers, their betrothed ones, their girlfriends, their brothers, perhaps, who stay and work on land join together to sing, and the time when they miss them most, the time of loneliness, is the time of sunset longing.As so often, no details are given about the record. After that, however, by way of a news item in an a June 1732 edition of the South Carolina Gazette, we proceed to songs about marriage and relationships:
"On Saturday last, a certain gentleman, belonging to his Majesty's ship, the Aldborough, met a jolly widow at a public house in this town, where after a full bowl or two, and a little courtship in form, they came to a resolution to decide the matter by a game at all-fours: Their bodies and all their worldly goods for life, were the stakes on each side. Fortune favor'd the fair, and she insisting on the wager, nothing remained but for the parson to tie the sacred knot."Thereafter we're into the fruitful area of marriage-related songs, starting with music from A Midsummer Night's Dream, followed by Django Reinhardt's Moppin' the Bride. Talk of Lonelyhearts ads then leads to the Zulu song, Mama Tembu's Wedding then the celebratory tone abruptly changes with Skyora quoting a cynical passage from Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure:
"If the marriage ceremony consisted in an oath and signed contract between the parties to cease loving from that day forward ... and to avoid each other’s society as much as possible in public, there would be more loving couples than there are now. Fancy the secret meetings between the perjuring husband and wife, the denials of having seen each other, the clambering in at bedroom windows, and the hiding in closets! There’d be little cooling then."
"Whatever that means," he adds about that final sentence. We're then off the Andes with music about virgins being sacrificed to the Sun God then we hear the traditional American folk song The Old Maid's Song by the Peruvian singer Yma Sumac ...
That is enough, I think, to give a flavour of the two-hour (minus ads) programme.
I still remember hearing an episode of Serendipity on Radio Clyde for the first time in the seventies and being instantly hooked. That was possibly the first time I heard Spike Jones's Cocktails for Two but there were other novelties too, including Phil Harris's The Thing, and a newspaper article or book extract about some men falling or being pushed from a tower or lighthouse but mysteriously seeming to vanish into thin air. Barnacle Bill the Sailor, with Hoagy Carmichael, Bix Beiderbecke and others in a mood of playful frenzy might also have come a-knocking on that occasion.
I'm not sure how long Ken Sykora's tenure at Clyde was but he seemed a good fit for the station, in that he was painlessly opening up listeners' ears to new sounds, new ideas. It's many years since I listened to the station but certainly in the seventies it broadcast regular programmes about reading (its theme tune was Jimmy Durante's I'll Never Forget the Day I Read a Book), classical music (So Who Disnae Like Opera?), folk music (Folk and Suchlike) and doubtless others whose titles I have forgotten. Worthwhile as all of these were, some presenters did seem to lay the chummy tones on a bit thick, but the authenticity of Ken Sykora's style, honed by decades of broadcasting, was never in doubt: he sure played a mean pinball.
To hear that June edition of Serendipity with Sykora, along with other Serendipity shows and other examples of his work, make haste to the Ken Sykora Radio Station on mixcloud.
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