Music Depreciation - Dixieland One-Step

The term 'music depreciation' is an interesting enough play on
words in and of itself. Spike Jones and His Orchestra may well
have coined the term in the course of their various irreverent,
but brilliant send-ups of popular--and traditional--music over
the years. Their aim being to both knock some of the most revered
classics off their pedestals a notch or two, while at the same
time deconstructing some of the most popular classics and
contemporary music to their basic common denominators: beat and
meter, dynamics, and harmony. Spike Jones, while ostensibly
clowning with famous music, was brilliant at breaking down those
three key essentials to illustrate what made truly great music
great. Kay Kyser had also been a proponent of musical
deconstruction. Over the course of their combined forty years of
influence in musical entertainment, they both helped to fire the
imaginations of countless music enthusiasts into looking at
music, its structure and composition in a far different light. As
mentioned above, The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street
often went to great lengths to illustrate these very points. It
was the popular success of The Chamber Music Society . . . that
inspired the Don Lee-Mutual network to create a similar program
that began airing in the Winter of 1944. Called Music
Depreciation, it aired a format very similar to the long-running
Chamber Music Society series, but in an even more abbreviated and
light-hearted tone. And in a nod to the era, the overarching
theme of most broadcasts was Swing Music of the era. The program
was in all likelihood the brainchild of Ruben Gaines, a poet,
writer and radio broadcaster with a flair for irony and music
education. His previous Meet the Band series over Don Lee equally
sought to shed light on not only the history of music, but its
proponents as well. Gaines assembled the team for Music
Depreciation comprised of the brilliant and versatile composer
and arranger, Frank De Vol, and Les Paul and his Trio.