Always Chasing Rainbows: The Young Judy Garland Review

07/13/2005 4:13 AM, AMG


The comparatively brief copyright period for recordings in Europe can make for important rediscoveries, as archival labels assemble digital transfers from 78s of long out-of-print recordings which the companies that released them originally would never think of re-introducing into the marketplace but which have historical importance and enormous value to music fans. Britain's ASV/Living Era is a leading purveyor of such material, but its Judy Garland title Always Chasing Rainbows, the 22 tracks of which constitute just over a quarter of the masters Garland recorded for Decca Records in the '30s and '40s (none of those included coming from after 1941), is not such a valuable addition to the collections of the singer's fans, though it was more important when it was first released in 1992. Since then, the Decca masters have become readily available in the U.S. in frequent reissues in much better fidelity than the present collection, which has had its sound processing applied heavily to eliminate all those pops and crackles embedded in the old 78s, but also in such a way as to eviscerate the higher frequencies, resulting in a muffled sound. The selection and sequencing make no particular sense, jumping back and forth in time and from style to style, including some of Garland's better-known performances, but not others. Peter Gammond's liner notes are surprisingly poor, committing their first factual error in the opening sentence, which has Garland born in Michigan rather than her real birthplace of Minnesota, and then going on to repeat a number of long-discarded myths in the singer's biography. The result is not one of ASV/Living Era's better efforts, either in the value of its existence to begin with or in its actual execution. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide