The Perennial Freshmen

When the Four Freshmen were winning 1950s Down Beat polls as the top vocal group and their recordings were ubiquitous on radios and juke boxes, I was more impressed by their contemporaries, the Hi-Los. The Hi-Los’ mix of voices was richer and more varied, their arrangements more harmonically daring, and the group always sounded as if they were enjoying themselves. I found much of the original Four Freshmens’ work lugubrious.
Well, the Hi-Los are no more, but thank heaven for recordings. I have been listening to the brilliant The Hi-Los And All That Jazz since it came out in 1959. I keep hearing new things in their performance of its brilliant Clare Fischer arrangements. Jack Sheldon’s eight-bar trumpet solo on the bridge of “Then I’ll Be Tired of You” is embedded in my psyche. Inexcusably, Columbia has allowed The Hi-Los And All That Jazz to go out of print, but “Then I’ll Be Tired of You” is included in this compilation.
The Four Freshmen roll on. The original members were Hal Kratzsch, Bob Flanigan and the brothers Ross and Bob Barbour. Kratzsch was succeeded by Ken Errair in 1953 and then Ken Albers in 1956. Flanigan, the last of them, retired in 1992, but the group has continued through a variety of incarnations. It seems to me that the current edition is the best of all, including the original. The new Freshman are Brian Eichenberger, Curtis Calderon, Vince Johnson and Bob Ferreira. Over the past two or three years, they have evolved, retaining the vocal matrix of the Barbour-Flanigan-Kratsch group, adding impressive instrumental musicianship and degrees of subtlety in their new album, The Four Freshmen In Session. Eichenberger, the lead singer, is a more than capable guitarist. Johnson chooses good notes in his bass lines and adds trombone to the textures of the instrumental ensemble. Calderon comes as the real surprise. He is a superb soloist, lyrical on flugelhorn in an intriguing arrangment of “My One and Only Love,” articulating crisply in the high register on trumpet in a seven-bar solo on “It’s All Right With Me,” then ending the piece softly muted over voices in a coda.
I might quarrel with a diction decision or two in the ensemble singing—occasional over-emphasis on consonants (“meaDow,” “ShaDows”)—and with the laconic whistling on a couple of tracks. But, all in all, I find myself enjoying this CD more than I ever thought I would enjoy a Four Freshmen album. They deserve accolades for helping to keep alive the wonderful Bill Carey-Carl Fischer song, “You’ve Changed.” Whoever has the vocal solo on “If I Only Had A Brain” captures the spirit of the song better than anyone since Ray Bolger in The Wizard of Oz.
If you’d like to compare the original Four Freshmen with the new group, Mosaic has issued a box set of their fifties Capitol recordings.