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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

The Kessler Sisters, Scopitone And Desmond

February 24, 2009 by Doug Ramsey

When I was looking for something on You Tube the other night, what to my wondering eyes should appear but the Kessler Sisters. I hadn’t seen them in forty years, and they still looked terrific. Paul Desmond introduced me to them in 1965 at the Hilton Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Desmond had just played a concert with the Dave Brubeck Quartet at Willamette University down the road in Salem. I couldn’t go because I was working. When I got off the air, I met him for a drink. Here’s the story from Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.

In the Hilton bar, he was high on the success of the concert he had just played and delighted to see the Kessler sisters again. The Scopitone was a film jukebox. The first ones were made in France, in part from used World War Two airplane reconnaissance camera equipment. The more finished version that made its way from Scopitone.jpgEurope to the United States in 1963 looked rather like a big old soda fountain Wurlitzer with a screen at the top. Scopitone films on sixteen milimeter stock with magnetic sound tracks ran on endless loops through a projector inside the jukebox. They were descendants of the Nickelodeons of the first decade of the twentieth century and the soundies of the thirties and forties, and ancestors of the music videos seen on MTV and VH-1. French businessmen persuaded U.S. investors, who in turn persuaded bar and lounge operators, that Scopitone was going to get Americans away from their television sets and back out to night life. The films ran two or three minutes, with production values on a scale from almost absent to spectacular, and featured artists with talent to match. At the low end of the scale were groups like The Casualeers singing on a fire escape while two mostly nude girls gyrated. At the upper end were Scopitones starring the Kessler sisters, a pair of blonde, leggy young women who sang and danced with exhilarating zeal through pieces like “Cuando, Cuando” and “Pollo e Champagne.”

Desmond pumped quarters into the Hilton Scopitone, sending the Kessler Sisters cavorting again and again through an amusement park, singing as they leapt on and off a train, with a corps of dancers in the background executing routines that would have done Busby Berkeley proud. He was convinced that the Scopitone was going to be bigger than television and almost had me persuaded that we should invest large sums in the phenomenon. The more Dewars we had, the more sensible the investment plan became. Fortunately, the Oregon closing law kicked in before I committed to anything irrevocable. I don’t know whether Paul signed up for a share of the company, but I am glad that I didn’t. By the end of the decade, Scopitones were gathering dust in warehouses all over the world.

Ramsey, Desmond, Portland '65.jpg

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Comments

  1. Larry Kart says

    February 24, 2009 at 5:57 pm

    The fluidity of their “Say A Little Prayer” is something else:



    Could those girls move!

  2. Larry Kart says

    February 25, 2009 at 9:13 am

    Last night I had a dream about the Kessler Sisters (apparently they were twins) about which no more will be said, but while watching their videos beforehand the thought came to mind that the Georges Balanchine of “Agon” et al. might have enjoyed some of the Kesslers’ more rubbery, “moderne” gestures, not to mention the somewhat eerie relationship between their faces and bodies. It’s like they’re at once connected and not-connected — different parts of the same entity, but then what entity is that? Or better, perhaps — it’s like their bodies are moving through a dream, while their faces stand back from and/or present this.

  3. Bruno Leicht says

    March 28, 2009 at 7:02 am

    Thanks, Doug, for letting me dig those swingin’ sisters again.
    They completely disappeared off my radar for more than 35 years. — Hey, it needs an US-American author and Paul Desmond to show me what talented folks we had here in Germany in the past! The girls made it to the Parisian Lido and Las Vegas. Not bad for a double “Fräulein Wunder”, isn’t it?
    http://accelerateddecrepitude.blogspot.com/2006/10/scopitones-go-go.html
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_Twins

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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