It was ‘The Golden Gate Quartet’. They sang in Opera House (Tel-Aviv). They did it acapella and with instrumental trio: piano, drums and bass. The first part of the concert included acapella spirituals and gospel songs. Second was with the musicians. They sang different black American music. I didn’t know they still existed because I had their ‘vinyl’ so long ago – in far 70s, but it was a disk that had been recorded in the 1962. My father gave me the carton with old sandy-sounded disks for LP player that I constructed when I was 11. The disk was small, just 8 inch size with four songs: ‘Down By the Riverside’, ‘Jericho’, ‘When As The Saints…’ and ‘Nobody Knows The Troubles’. It was sounding so noisy and scratching, but I remember something magical happened in my mind. I liked American music very much and I had many disks with jazz and soul music. I listened to Marian Andersen and Mahalia Jackson, Paul Robeson and Louis Armstrong. I had some vinyls of Ella Fitzgerald and Basie Smith but ‘The Golden Gate Quartet’ was something special.
They began in California. I just learned in their concert that they had existed 83 years just like the famous Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. But I saw more-less young men with age about 50 years like me – no old faces from the picture on the scratched disks’ cover from my childhood. They are keeping the traditions of the old band and this is amazing.
My classmates didn’t understand why I listened to this music and I tried to explain them that there is so much music in the world that they can’t imagine. And in the deep Soviet times only a few people could get the music from America. Soviet establishment tried to change American and British music for French or Italian. They were afraid that it could change human mind in our Soviet folk. Somebody called it ‘Iron Curtain’. It was interesting. But chines said: ‘God bless not to live in interesting time’.
I was old enough to understand that sometimes doesn’t matter how it sounds. Me and my father had a great hobby to build Hi-Fi sound equipment. First of all there are LP-players. But we were met with many musicians that were famous and played in great orchestras, but listened to their vinyls on simple plastic pathephone sounding like a pocket radio. They were not interesting about technical aspects of sound. They learned how the musician took a breath in the pause or how long he touched the strings with his bow or how the pianist had used the pedal when played Chopin or Beethoven. And I self listened ‘The Voice Of America’ in the short waves with all noises of air. Just I wanted to know what was happening in American music.
It was old ‘transistor’. I took it under my armpit, and me and my dog walked out the city almost every evening. My radio received there better the way. It was ‘Jazz Hour’ by Willis Conover. Also, I recorded some broadcasts and I had many tapes with jazz music. About his death, I learned after a year of living in Israel. And there was the end of his broadcasting. I was sorry about Willis Conover’s death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Conover