When I first saw the phonograph records, I was drawn to the illustrations. All were brightly colored and painted into the surface – unlike the black vinyl I was used to seeing with a circular paper label glued to the center.
Several showed a man and woman dancing the rumba, whose instructional movements were illustrated with black footprints. Another record showed a couple dancing as a woman played a pair of maracas.
These were Vogue Picture Records made by a short-lived company called Sav-Way Industries, based in Detroit and founded by inventor Tom Saffady. The company was no Columbia, Decca or RCA Victor, the big names at the time, but a small operation that produced mostly 10-inch 78 rpms for barely a year. Saffady manufactured his records from May 1946 to April 1947, and filed a patent for illustrated phonograph records in 1947.
His discs were sold as singles (for $1.05) and two-record albums ($2.65). Vogue advertised several of these “unbreakable” and “warp-proof” records (including children’s records) in Sears’ 1946/1947 fall and winter catalog. The records also made their advertising debut in Gimbels’ New York store.
A May 1946 review in Billboard was not kind to Vogue. It chided the company for using what it called coal company calendar type drawings that lacked imagination. The records were deemed technologically “highly satisfactory,” but the direction was sometimes below standard, according to the review. “None of these weaknesses are fatal, but they indicate that Vogue has work to do if it wants to get that $1.05 per copy.”
It’s not clear how many records the company actually produced (a 1946 Billboard article quoted Saffady as saying Vogue was making 300,000 a month). The sound quality of the records was said to be very good.
Vogue records ranged from country to big band to jazz, but the company didn’t pull in the big-name singers and musicians of the day. Rock and roll singer Bill Haley was rumored to have recorded with the Down Homers for Vogue. A member from that time debunked that rumor, stating that Haley played with the group but not on the Vogue records.
As soon as I learned that some of Vogue’s tunes were jazz, I was curious about whom the company had drawn in. One name kept turning up: Charlie Shavers. So I wanted to know more about Shavers, whose name was unfamiliar to me. I listened to several of his recordings and loved his smooth sound (and his voice).
Shavers was a swing trumpet player who worked with some of the better-known jazz artists of his era – Dizzy Gillespie, Nat King Cole, Count Basie, Billie Holiday and Coleman Hawkins. He was born in New York and played the piano and banjo before turning to the trumpet. He wrote the popular jazz standard “Undecided” in 1938 with Sid Robin.
Shaver’s work with John Kirby’s Sextet as an arranger and trumpeter made the band one of the pre-eminent groups of the 1930s. During the 1940s, he played with Midge Williams and her Jazz Jesters, and was a member of the CBS radio orchestra and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. He recorded with Holiday, toured with Benny Goodman and performed in Europe with Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic, where he was well received.
In 1964 Shavers recorded a live album titled “At Le Crazy Horse Saloon” in Paris.
In a 1945 issue, Billboard described him as an “ace jazzman“ who was playing with Tommy Dorsey but was about to go to Los Angeles for a 10-week stint with Kirby.
In a 1946 review in Billboard, the Charlie Shavers Quintet’s performance of “Dizzy’s Dilemma” and “She’s Funny That Way” on Vogue was described this way:
“Buddy De Franco’s liquid mellow clarinet vamps into She’s Funny That Way, and Charlie Shavers’s raspy whispering voice takes up the lyrical chant. … Buddy follows Shavers’s vocals with some more clary and it’s hard to remember when he fades out to let Shavers trumpet ride out the side. Dizzy’s Dilemma is another cyclone-paced instrumental, with Shavers’s muted horn getting in a flood of notes. … Excellent jazz fodder for the hot music fans.“
On “Broadjump” and “Serenade to a Pair of Nylons,” another Vogue recording: “T-Dorseyites, headed by trumpeter Charlie Shavers, produce some fine music. … Broadjump is a torrid item. Beat is rabid; low register clary kicking off the side; muted horn then piano picking up the riff and from then on, the instruments weave in and out in fascinating style. Serenade is slightly slower, but still with steady punching beat. Collectors and hot fans will go for these; so will the j-bugs.”
Shavers died of throat cancer in July 1971, two days after his friend Louis Armstrong.
