New Pop Records

Everywhere Bandleader Ray Anthony plays these days, dance halls develop a tremor under the thud of teen-age feet. The reason: a vigorous new conga-style dance number called The Bunny Hop, in which every verse ends with "Hop! Hop! Hop!" For Anthony, it all started last spring, when he heard that the Coke set of San Francisco's Balboa High School had worked up the dance. Anthony contrived a tuneless tune, recorded it (for Capitol), ordered a batch of fuzzy bunny ears to give a touch of costume and started plugging song & dance across the U.S. In cooperation with parents, who regard the dance as relatively sedate, if energetic, disk jockeys and Capitol press-agents have built The Bunny Hop into a minor teen-age mania.

Other new pop records:

Lyrics by Ira Gershwin (Nancy Walker, Louise Carlyle, David Craig; Walden LP). A fetching collection of ten off-beat tunes with lyrics ranging from innocence to sophistication. Only three are by Ira's brother George; the others are by Vernon Duke, Kurt Weill, Aaron Copland, Jerome Kern, Arthur Schwartz.

Old Curiosity Shop (Victor LP). Stagy old recordings, dating from 1911 to 1929, that should bring mist to many an eye. Among the performers: Maurice Chevalier (Valentine), Helen ("boo-boop-a-doop") Kane (I Have to Have You), Marlene Dietrich (Falling in Love Again), Fanny Brice (My Man), Gloria Swanson (Love). Added features: monologues by Will Rogers, De Wolf Hopper and John Barrymore.

Broadway's Best (Jo Stafford; Columbia LP). Several of these eight songs deserve to be ranked with the "best," e.g., Embraceable You, Night and Day, Come Rain or Come Shine, but not even Jo's pretty voice is appealing enough to survive the grief-stricken tempos.

City of Glass (Stan Kenton; Capitol LP). Somebody obviously threw a stone at this musical city; it is full of prismatic rubble and glittering shards of sound. But its four movements are among the best of Kenton's symphonic experiments, frequently stimulating (some of them closely related to such modern symphonists as Roger Sessions), and played with a virtuosity that a symphony orchestra might envy.

I Went to Your Wedding (Spike Jones; Victor). Spike lowers the boom on this one, and about time, with an outrageous vocal by "Sir Fredric Gas." Fun for a while.

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