RIP Arthur Ferrante

Arthur Ferrante, one half of the legendary piano duo Ferrante & Teicher, died last week at the age of 88, one year after his partner Louis Teicher passed away. While most of the later Ferrante & Teicher recordings are quite schmaltzy easy-listening fare, their early 1950s albums of prepared piano pop were masterpieces of the space age, goofy, inventive, catchy, and influenced by John Cage, something nobody had ever tried before. Here is a video of the song African Echoes from their 1956 album Soundproof (mono).

Originally, Soundproof was released in two different versions, stereo and mono, with completely different songs. To make the confusion complete, they concurrently released the album Soundblast, consisting of the same songs as the stereo version of Soundproof, but this time in mono. Negativland would have been proud of themselves had they had done this in the 1950s... And nobody should have lived without having heard their version of Tico Tico from Soundblast: Ferrante & Teicher - Tico Tico (mp3)

As an encore, here is Christian Marclay's remix-or-something of Ferrante and Teicher from his album More Encores: Christian Marclay - Ferrante & Teicher (mp3)

Comments

[Clueless]

back in the early 80's, a wfmu dj was collecting as many variations of tico-taco as he get find or trick people into sending him. Isent him my stereo sampler tico taco and he gave me the business... no..i meant he gave me malcom mclarens take on Madame Butterfly.

[Mike Yahwak]

this stuff is tripy as hell, I want more is there more out there? And if so point me in the right direction.

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=504154862]

This is F & T at their best.

[Arvo]

I bought 13 of their records for $20 a few weeks ago, hoping to catch as much of this sort of brilliance you speak of as possible, and maybe a little schmaltzy charm as well. I found them randomly on the internet some time ago and wondered why I hadn't heard of them before. They are under rated for sure. Great stuff.