Marshall Sosson - Jazz Violin Virtuoso - Schon Rosmarin
Channel: Peter Stamos
Date: 2013-05-28

Track 07
Fritz Kreisler

The recordings presented here are from live, nationwide broadcasts between the year 1933 and 1942. They feature a truly remarkable friend and colleague:  Marshall Sosson, whose violin solo work has brought about heart palpitations for many years on the soundtracks of countless Hollywood motion pictures.

A scholarship pupil of Efrem Zimbalist and Leopold Auer, Sosson attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. His extraordinary professional career has spanned half a century. He had played with Paul Whiteman, Ben Pollack, Benny Goodman, and Artie Shaw bands and was a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Fredrick Stick, subsequently becoming concertmaster for CBS in that city. Chicago in the thirties and forties was the center for the network radio in America and during those years Marshall Sosson let his own jazz quartet in regular coast-to-coast broadcast. The group, consisting of Sosson, Ralph Mazza, guitar, Bill Moss, piano, and Slip Nelson, bass, was known as Marshall Sosson and the Chicagoans. Their broadcast performance, witch heated up the airwaves for a decade, make up the greatest part of this album.

During World War II, Sosson was a member of the Armed Forces Symphony Orchestra at Santa Ana, California. Under Lt. Col. Eddie Dunnstedter, drew from fine orchestras all over the country and was the support professional caliber. The two selections Paganini Caprice and Schon Rosmarin were arranged by Marshall Sosson and Earle Hagen and broadcast with Armed Forces Orchestra conducted by Felix Slatkin.

After the war, Marshall Sosson was very active in the concert field, in particular with chamber music performance by his own trio. He was concertmaster at Columbia Pictures from 1947 to 1959 and currently holds that post at Walt Disney Studios. Unique among concert violinists, he truly swings with the most inventive jazz improvisations -- maintaining a beautiful, full tine even while playing the hottest "licks". In the near future, I hope to collaborate with the esteemed colleague in a contemporary recording; in the meantime, here is a sample of the kind of musical magic that came from millions of living rooms during the swing era.