The Magic Lingers

Musicians--as musicians--will little note nor long remember Columbia's LP Album No. ML 4975. It will neither change the hit-parade standings nor set hi-finatics atweeting and awoofing. For the most part Marlene Dietrich at the Cafe de Paris is little more than a collection of musical memories, taped directly from the floor amid the tinkle and clatter of a London nightclub performance almost a year ago, and sung, not always on key, by a middle-aged entertainer who has been around for some time. Yet, here, in the familiar laryngitic murmur of a voice as suggestive as the rustle of a taffeta petticoat in semidarkness, are echoed moments that have stirred men for as long as a quarter of a century. Among them are Jonny, Lili Marlene, The Boys in the Back Room, La Vie en Rose and the inevitable Falling in Love Again.

Marlene sounds mellower than ever before. She is still a bored, poised and cynical siren, but compassionate and full of ripe wisdom. "In your voice we hear the voice of the Lorelei." says Jean Cocteau in the album notes, ''but the Lorelei was a danger to be feared. You are not." In the album an enthusiastic British audience claps, cheers and laughs along with the performer, suggesting that beyond the bored and enigmatic smile of the screen Marlene. there is a skilled and warm variety artist who can pout, frown, tease, worry, smile and flirt in a constant kaleidoscope of expression.

The Dietrich magic lingers--far more persistently than the whiff of Lanvin's Arpege with which Columbia has obligingly scented the first 5,000 albums.

Some veteran performers bending U.S.

musical ears last week: Swing King Benny Goodman, who was doing a Series of weekend stands in Manhattan's Basin Street nightclub. Playing in an octet (including Trumpeter Ruby Braff, Trombonist Urbie Green. Tenor Saxman Paul Quinichette), Clarinetist Goodman occasionally seemed to be dreaming of other years, other sounds--and the jampacked crowd included many greying swing cats who could dream with him. But his playing revealed none of the tenseness that took him out of his ill-fated tour with Louis Armstrong (TIME, April 27, 1953), and little of the formality of his concert appearances with symphony orchestras. Instead, his tones soared pure and liquid above the fanciful riffs of his sidemen, and he seemed to have settled comfortably into a style that had its roots in his own past, with a few overtones of more "progressive" jazz. At the piano was Teddy Wilson, who starred in Goodman's first, well-remembered trio, and most of the tunes came from the same period: Body and Soul, Memories of Yon, One O'Clock Jump, etc. If things continue as well, Goodman hopes to take his "all-stars" on a tour of Europe next fall.

P:Kirsten Flagstad, 59, who interrupted her retirement to give a pair of concerts in Carnegie Hall and proved that she was still the greatest Wagnerian soprano of all. With the Symphony of the Air (formerly the NBC Symphony) under the direction of her longtime Accompanist Edwin Mc-Arthur, she sang four Wagner selections. Her voice had undeniably lost some of its freshness, but none of its security. She sang meltingly in two arias from Die Walkiire and the five Wesendonck Songs, with eloquence and sensuousness in the Love Death from Tristan. There was ringing power (even on her high A's and B-flats) in Brunnhilde's final scene from Gotter-ddmmerung. Before the concert Soprano Flagstad said she wondered whether she could still sing. Her listeners, some with tears in their eyes, rose to their feet and cheered, because she still can.

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