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Kay Kyser


The Red Menace

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Kayser was a businessman whom a failing band brought in to front and manage the band. He got the band a quiz show on the radio, which was run as something of a joke, and became very popular, due mainly to the ebullient personality of Kayser,, and some of the musicians.Remember radio then was as popular tv is now. I don't know who ran the band musically but despite the fact that it was a better than average pop band, they played very cleanly and well and had very good arrangements and had very good and popular singers. In no way did they touch on the jazz genre, but they managed to have a distinguishing sound (soprano lead for sax section) and some pretty good players. All in all, I liked the band.

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  • 6 months later...

My folks used to listen to this guy. The College of Musical Knowledge. Boy, is that clever or what? I saw Kayser in a movie the other night with Bela Lugosi. Something about a touring band being stuck in a weird house, stormy nights, seances, lights going out...the whole nine yards. They played a couple of numbers. Pretty stock stuff. Way more novelty than anything one could consider musically serious.

Up over and out.

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Did a little research on the Kyser movie. It's called "You'll Find Out". Made in 1940. Not only is Bela Lugosi in it, but Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre as well. The only other names you might recognize are M.A. Bogue who plays a character called Ish Kabibble. I think Kabibble was a Kyser band regular. Ginny Sims also appears and plays herself.

Up over and out.

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You're right again--Bogue-Kabibble was a member of the band---trombonist I think.

actually, he played the cornet:

ishkabibl.jpg

from the kyser website:

Everyone's heard the name, but from where? Ish (Merwyn Bogue) got it from his comedy version of an old Yiddish song, "Isch Ga Bibble" (loosely translated, it means "I should worry?"), which he performed after joining Kay in 1931. The public (and band) began calling HIM Ish and the name stuck. Raised in Erie, Penn., the fine cornetist developed the rural "Ish" character with pudding bowl hair, who constantly interrupted the show to recite nonsensical poems to a frustrated Kay, becoming his onstage comedy foil. But he was no dummy offstage- he handled the payroll!

btw, take a quick look at ish's picture above and you begin to wonder if he might have played some small role in the evolution of bebop, no? :lol:

Gillespie-5.jpg

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Kay Kyser's band was in a few films, actually. AMC, back when AMC wasn't crap, used to run the RKO films now and then...TCM does now, as mentioned above.

Part of the allmovie bio....

Though in later years he claimed to dislike moviemaking, Kyser was so anxious to enter films in 1939 that he put a lot of his own money into his first starring film, That's Right, You're Wrong. The film proved to be one of RKO Radio's biggest hits, spawning a series of popular Kyser vehicles: perhaps the best known (but not the best) of these films was You'll Find Out (1940), which was distinguished by the only screen teaming of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Peter Lorre. Not long after completing his final film, Columbia's Carolina Blues (1944), Kyser married his band vocalist Georgia Carroll and began raising a family. He moved his radio show into TV in 1949, by which time his featured singer was a young Mike Douglas. Having promised himself that he'd retire from show business when he'd saved a million dollars, Kay Kyser did just that in 1950, returning to Chapel Hill to devote himself full-time to his family and to the Christian Science movement. — Hal Erickson

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college.gif

That's "Kollege," comrade (or should I say "komrade"); please remember your spelling!!!

Ain't that funny, a website devoted to him, and they don't know it's Kollege!

They do list all the movies though, guess they didn't run all of the RKO films then! Cool posters as well!

Red, good to see you have interests beyond politics! :P

http://www.kaykyser.net/movies.html

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