Belle Fenstock: Kit Kat Cuban

Phillip Sear plays a 1939 rumba by the fascinating American composer Belle Fenstock (1909–97).
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Belle Fenstock was born Belle Fensterstook, and spent her early years in Manhattan. As well as being a composer, she was also an artist. The young Fenstock was a fan of George Gershwin, and painted a portrait of him as a gift. On receiving it, Gershwin discovered her musical interests and arranged for her to have composition lessons with one of his own teachers. Fenstock wrote around a hundred songs, including the successful 'Strangers in the Dark', and several light piano pieces. Her best-known concert piece was 'American Rhapsody', which exists for both orchestra and piano solo.

Fenstock married a Russian-born Washington radio broadcasting executive, Joseph Carl “Brownie” Brown in 1944, but he died in 1951. In the early 1970s, Belle Brown moved to Palm Beach, Florida, and worked for many years as an arts and crafts tutor at a spa resort there, where she painted portraits of visiting celebrities, including Barbra Streisand and Elton John. Her final home was in Atlantic City.

In the title, "Kit Kat" probably alludes to a nightclub or bar, as "Kit Kat" was a popular name for fashionable nightspots in the interwar years—perhaps inspired by such venues as the Kit Kat Club in London and New York, which were associated with music, dancing, and modern nightlife at the time. "Cuban" signals the rumba’s origin in Cuba and advertises tropical exoticism, which was highly marketable in American music during this period.​​ This kind of title was mainly a piece of stylised Americana, created to invoke imagery of carefree nightlife with Latin rhythms rather than to document any authentic Cuban cultural expression.

Thumbnail image created with Wombo Dream ( t.ly/zhJa ).
#americanmusic #kitkat #rumba
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Played by Phillip Sear
http://www.psear.co.uk (Email: [email protected]
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