Do you like budget background music? I happen to, and chances are, if you are reading this, so are you.
This fantastic instrumental record album contains stereo versions of some tracks uploaded to this channel for many years, namely tracks A1, A3, A4, and B4- which appeared on the B-side of a Halo release of "The Vagabond King." It would be an understatement to say that hearing stereo versions of tracks one has heard a hundred times in mono is a treat.
Tracklisting:
A1 Jalousie
A2 Night And Day
A3 Chinese [Swedish] Polka
A4 Star Dust
B1You The Night And The Music
B2 Street Scene
B3 Solitude
B4 Islands Bolero
Rondo-lette Records was the great last flowering of Eli Oberstein's many budget record lines. It was 1959, and budget stereo records were really becoming a thing, to the point that even Eli Oberstein had to enter the market. Eli Oberstien had many stereo recordings, real and fake reprocessed mono, issued covering everything from jazz, show tunes, classical, polka, you know, the usual budget stuff the older crowd that actually had the money to buy a stereo capable record player in 1959 would be inclined to pick off the shelves and take home with them. Rondo-lette Records also was home to cleverly marketed packages of the same 1940s material that Eli Oberstein had sold to the public multiple times via his stable of different record label lines that recycled and repackaged material with different records sizes, speeds, jacket art, and sometimes different generic artist credits. But, Rondo-lette Records was also unique in the Eli Oberstein tradition since it featured unique back slicks with liner notes- something that hadn't been seen since the earliest Royale Record album line pressings. Nevertheless, the party ended quickly, as Eli Oberstein died in 1960. His son subsequently sold his father's massive record catalog to Precision Radiation Instruments, who bought out the Tops Records founders catalog around the same time. Even then, within a short span of years, Precision Radiation Instruments ended up selling its holdings to Pickwick. Pickwick seems to have only reissued a small portion of the material, mostly the super-famous big names that people of the 1960s and 1970s recognized still, like Lead Belly, Percy Faith, and such. Pickwick had its own library of generic music, so many Eli Oberstien generic recordings have not seen the light of day commercially since the 1950s.
Thanks for that one. It's posts like these that make me keep an eye for easy listening 33 rpm when I go thrifting. Some are treasures !
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