CoronaVinyl Day 307 (F): Beautiful, Beautiful by Ferrante & Teicher

For an explanation of CoronaVinyl, click here.

Today's CoronaVinyl category is "F," and one of the many albums I randomly acquired as part of a larger lot of records is Ferrante & Teicher's 1975 album Beautiful, Beautiful.

Despite the alluring album cover, I've never listened to the album or done any research on Ferrante & Teicher until today.  As with many of the other bands and artists I haven't previously known much about that I have discovered during this CoronaVinyl journey, I enjoyed learning about Ferrante & Teicher.

Arthur Ferrante and Louis Teicher were piano prodigies who met in 1930 while studying at Juilliard as children (and they later became faculty members there).  They eventually joined forces in the late '40s and began playing classical music together with an orchestra behind them.  In the '50s, they sometimes practiced in the home of the grandmother of future Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler.

Between the '50s and '80s, they released dozens of albums, mostly in the classical, jazz, and easy listening genres.  They were known for their arrangements of movie themes, classical pieces, show tunes, jazz songs, and contemporary pop songs.

Beautiful, Beautiful is an instrumental album, with the duo backed by an orchestra.  It has songs of various genres, including covers of relatively contemporary pop songs Jim Croce's "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" and Stevie Wonder's "You are the Sunshine of My Life," a few songs from movies, Scott Joplin's classic ragtime song "The Entertainer," and the Broadway tune "Over Here" from Over There, among others.  It's a good album to listen to when you need some background music without words while you're working from home during a pandemic.

All in all, Ferrante & Teicher had five Top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, including four Top 10s.  Teicher died in 2008, just before his 84th birthday, and Ferrante died in 2009, less than two weeks after turning 88 -- and he apparently once said he wanted to live as many years as there are keys on a piano, so that's pretty poetic.

The album isn't on Spotify, but there is a YouTube playlist with the songs on the album, so I embedded that below.

Favorite song from Side 1:  "The Entertainer"
This is probably the most recognizable ragtime song, and Ferrante & Teicher do a good job with it, both on the piano and with the orchestral backing.

Favorite song from Side 2:  "African Echoes"
This one has, as the name of the song implies, an African-inspired drum beat that permeates the song, with various other trippy instruments, before the whole orchestra dramatically kicks in.