The Great American Composers: Leo Robin

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Being a lyricist and working for the movies are two factors that have prevented Leo Robin from being better known, and this is one of the very few collections devoted to his work. Compilation producer Didier C. Deutsch has rooted around in the large Sony Music catalog, and come out with 42 Robin songs recorded between 1929 and 1965. During Robin's prime, he wrote songs for a lot of forgettable movie musicals, and it was common for the dance bands of the day to record such material, so a large part of this collection is given over to bandleaders like Eddy Duchin, Hal Kemp, Kay Kyser and Ray Noble. Many of these songs were not hits and are as forgotten as the movies in which they were sung. In other cases, the song was a hit, but not in the version heard here; if the performer or song was memorable, however, these versions are often worth hearing. And the real finds on the collection are the recordings of Robin songs that were hits and/or the studio versions of songs the artists themselves introduced in films. As with all the Great American Composers collections, there are several '50s and '60s remakes of vintage Robin songs, and most of those are regrettable. A greater problem, however, is missing material. Annotator Roy Hemming notes that some Robin songs written with Jerome Kern and Jule Styne are on other volumes in the series, which is why 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend,' for example, is not here. But that doesn't explain why seven of Robin's nine Oscar nominees are also missing. One can only assume that there were no recordings of them in the Sony vault, but the result is that, while this is the most comprehensive collection of Robin's songs in existence, it is also incomplete and unbalanced, containing too many of his forgotten songs and not enough of his memorable ones.