Five Heartbeats

Charming Hostess is a whirl of eerie harmony, hot rhythm and radical braininess. Our music explores the intersection of text and the sounding body– complex ideas expressed physically, based on voice and vocal percussion, handclaps and heartbeats, sex-breath and silence. We live where diasporas collide, incorporating piyyutim and Pygmy counterpoint, doo-wop and niggunim, work songs and Torah chanting. The texts speak of mysticism and sex; angels and demons; and the trials and joys of love and sex…

Charming Hostess is a whirl of eerie harmony, hot rhythm and radical braininess. Our music explores the intersection of text and the sounding body– complex ideas expressed physically, based on voice and vocal percussion, handclaps and heartbeats, sex-breath and silence. We live where diasporas collide, incorporating piyyutim and Pygmy counterpoint, doo-wop and niggunim, work songs and Torah chanting. The texts speak of mysticism and sex; angels and demons; and the trials and joys of love and sex…

No pop genre has defined what a summer night can be as much as doo wop, with its countless songs about the moon and the stars and the light they cast on the possibilities of romance, and no pop genre has ever had more earthly angels residing per square foot. This four-disc, 100-song collection of doo wop vocal groups has numerous examples of both, along with seemingly a song for every girl's name ever invented.

No pop genre has defined what a summer night can be as much as doo wop, with its countless songs about the moon and the stars and the light they cast on the possibilities of romance, and no pop genre has ever had more earthly angels residing per square foot. This four-disc, 100-song collection of doo wop vocal groups has numerous examples of both, along with seemingly a song for every girl's name ever invented.

Rhino's four-disc collection The Doo Wop Box may not contain every classic doo wop single ever recorded, but it comes damn close. Featuring 100 tracks, superb sound, and amazingly detailed liner notes, the set is one of the best various-artist box sets ever assembled; although these four discs will be all the doo wop some listeners will ever need, hopefully the set will make most listeners want to investigate the genre even further.

Linda Ronstadt's generically titled four-CD, five-hour, 86-track box set retrospective attempts with considerable success to encompass the many types of music she's sung from the mid-'60s to the late '90s. The album is divided into five unequal parts, with 31 tracks given over to an "Album Retrospective," followed by seven tracks from "The Nelson Riddle Sessions," her three albums of classic pop, then five songs "En Español," drawn from her three Spanish language albums. That takes up the first two discs, with the third disc consisting of 20 "Collaborations" and the fourth 23 "Rarities".

Rhino's first box set of doo wop classics was obviously successful enough to bring about a second, four-CD set. This time around, with all of the hits covered on the first box, the compilers have dug deep into the genre's history to put together a selection of some of the music's great sides, lesser-known hits, and rarities.

In the late 1950s, the Doo Wop era began in a small subway arcade shop located beneath the Walgreen's Drug Store at Broadway and 42nd Street in New York City. Jerry Greene, a young teenager from Brooklyn, would travel to Times Square in search of records he heard on the Alan Freed radio show. One of his favorite stops was a costume jewelry store that strangely enough, also sold records - twenty for a dollar.