First Times

This week, it’s personal. Boneapart skipped into new territory at the GNCC Arena Championship bonspiel — a first time playing on Sunday, a first time in a championship final. Runners-up in the C final, sure, but the letter on the bracket isn’t the point. The point is he’d never been there before. This was his first. So here’s the question: what are some others? First, off-theme and by way of welcome, Tuchki nebesnyia — “Clouds of the Skies” — a setting of Lermontov’s poem about clouds as eternal wanderers, composed by Alexander Dargomyzhsky and sung by Russian soprano Maria Mikhailova in 1903. The label names the composer and the singer but forgets the poet, so we’ll put Lermontov back where he belongs. Mikhailova made over 300 records and became one of the first singers anywhere to win her fame chiefly through the gramophone. Then the firsts. Chimes Blues, cut by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band for Gennett in 1923, is a tidy twelve-bar blues — but listen to the twenty-four bars in the middle, the first recorded solo by a twenty-one-year-old second cornet named Louis Armstrong. Everything he’d become starts right there. And You May Be Lonesome, by Art Gillham, “The Whispering Pianist,” for Columbia in 1925 — credited as the first electrically recorded disc issued to the public. The first time a record caught a whisper, sung by the man who whispered for a living. Three firsts. What’s yours?