NBC's Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street

NBC broadcast The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street East from 1940-44. This half-hour radio program of jazz was delivered in a tongue-in-cheek manner that satirized the opera and symphony broadcasts hosted by Milton Cross.

Dinah Shore and Lena Horne were among the featured vocalists with Henry Levine & His Barefooted Dixieland Philharmonic and Paul Laval & His Woodwindy Ten providing the music.

The album of selections from the show that's pictured above was first released on the RCA Camden label in 1956 (Some of the selections had appeared on an RCA Victor 78 r.p.m. album). I'm not sure which of the two covers came first, but I suspect it was the grey one. It was probably reissued with the second cover to emphasize the presence of Shore and Horne. There were a couple of more reissues of this album on Camden in ensuing years, with different covers again. The track selection was identical on all of them.

Here's trumpeter Henry Levine and his group with one of the most recognizable Dixieland tunes. The MP3 is taken from a copy of the vinyl LP that has the grey cover.

Basin Street Blues



All of the material on the Camden LP (plus another dozen bonus tracks) is easily available on CD in a 1995 release on the Harlequin label.

New and used copies start at about $6 on Amazon.

The Camden album also can be had as a download, but it's almost certainly taken from a vinyl LP.