Best Album by a Chorus. Best New Artist.
The album spent 74 weeks on Billboard's Top 200 and peaked at #15. The group made only 2 subsequent appearance on this chart:
- Going Baroque (1964). 17 weeks. #65 peak position.
- Anyone for Mozart? (1965). 6 weeks. #$140 peak position.
Ward Swingle, Who Made Classical Music Jazzy, Dies at 87. (The New York Times , 1/25/2015)
Trained in classical music and jazz, Mr. Swingle began the group almost as a lark in Paris, where he had lived off and on since the 1950s. In 1962 or thereabouts, while he was working as a studio session singer, he and seven French colleagues, wanting something novel to put their voices to, tried vocalizing Bach much as a jazz singer would, using scat syllables.
The result, backed by string bass and drums, was a 1963 album, released as “Jazz Sébastien Bach” in France and “Bach’s Greatest Hits” in the United States. Featuring Mr. Swingle’s arrangements of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” and “Art of the Fugue,” it spent more than a year on the Billboard chart.
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