Eddie Fisher - Academy Award Winning Songs (1955/2018)

For one of his earliest forays into the full-length 12" LP, Eddie Fisher undertook an ambitious project, to record every composition that had won the Academy Award for best song. Since there were 21 of them by 1955, that might have taken more than one disc, but Fisher, backed by Axel Stordahl's orchestra, gave abbreviated performances, most lasting less than two minutes. Even so, the LP ran 39-and-a-half minutes, lengthy for a 12" album in those days. Not only were the songs cut down to a chorus or two, but they were also interrupted by Fisher's spoken introductions, in a commentary written by Carroll Carroll. Fisher's recitation of these remarks sometimes left something to be desired -- he had trouble pronouncing The Gay Divorcée (from which came "The Way You Look Tonight") and Waikiki Wedding (which produced "Sweet Leilani") and the comments themselves weren't all that entertaining, especially after you'd heard them once. It would have been a better idea to have left them on the album's back cover and allowed more time for Fisher to sing. He handled the varied material, which included many standards, well, but the album had a start-and-stop pacing that wasn't well-suited to a record album. It might have worked better as a radio program or as a feature on one of Fisher's television shows. These were the early days of the LP, however, and performers were looking for ideas to fill up the extra space. The idea of singing Oscar-winners, especially from a relatively static musical period such as 1934-1954, was a good one, but the music should have been enough.