Comedian Harmonists

With three tenors, a baritone, a bass, and pianist Erwin Bootz, the Comedian Harmonists took early 20th century American vocal harmony music and gave it a Western european, almost Teutonic sensibility. With an eclectic repertoire that got in jazz, pop, film, opera, and cabaret music, they were well-known in Germany in the first 1930s, and also other parts of European countries. Head Harry Frommerman exercised challenging vocal parts for the music group that shifted through the entire song, placing them aside from many other well-known vocal sets of those and potential moments. The Comedian Harmonists had been torn aside as the ’30s advanced. Three of these had been Jewish, plus they had been asked with the Nazis to avoid performing Jewish melodies before obtaining blacklisted. The Jews in the Comedian Harmonists remaining for Austria, and both they and all of those other trio attempted to keep carefully the group choosing replacements. Several years after their primary, a cult grew around them that included such improbable converts as rock and roll critic Lester Bangs and best folk and rock and roll maker Joe Boyd, who oversaw the 1st officially certified compilation of their function in the U.S. on Hannibal in 1999. There are also a film (The Harmonists) and a Broadway musical (Band in Berlin) influenced from the group’s story.