DESCRIPTION:
"You learn a lot about people when you listen to the songs that mean something to them"
Oscar Wilde ▼▼▼

PERCY FAITH
Percy Faith was a Canadian bandleader, orchestrator, composer and conductor, known for his lush arrangements of pop and Christmas standards. He is often credited with popularizing the "easy listening" or "mood music" format. Faith became a staple of American popular music in the 1950s and continued well into the 1960s. Though his professional orchestra-leading career began at the height of the swing era, Faith refined and rethought orchestration techniques, including use of large string sections, to soften and fill out the brass-dominated popular music of the 1940s.
He played violin and piano as a child, and played in theatres and at Massey Hall. After his hands were badly burned in a fire, he turned to conducting, and his live orchestras used the new medium of radio broadcasting.
He made many recordings for Voice of America. After working briefly for Decca Records, he worked for Mitch Miller at Columbia Records, where he turned out dozens of albums and provided arrangements for many of the pop singers of the 1950s, including Tony Bennett, Doris Day and Johnny Mathis.
His most famous and remembered recordings are "Delicado" (1952), "The Song from Moulin Rouge" (1953) and "Theme from A Summer Place" (1960), which won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1961. Faith remains the only artist to have the best selling single of the year during both the pop singer era ("Song from Moulin Rouge") and the rock era ("Theme from a Summer Place"); and he is one of only three artists, along with Elvis Presley and The Beatles, to have the best selling single of the year twice.
Though Faith initially mined the worlds of Broadway, Hollywood and Latin music for many of his top-selling 1950s recordings, he enjoyed popularity starting in 1962 with his orchestral versions of popular rock and pop hits of the day. His Themes for Young Lovers album was a top seller during this era and introduced the Faith sound to a younger generation of listeners.

POPSICLES AND ICICLES
A one-time hit for the The Murmaids back in 1963. "Popsicles and Icicles" began receiving airplay in Los Angeles in October 1963, breaking nationally in November to reach its #3 peak in Billboard and Cash Box on their charts dated 11 January 1964. The Record World chart ranked "Popsicles and Icicles" at #1 for the week of 18 January; as Record World's next #1 was "I Want to Hold Your Hand" by the Beatles, "Popsicles and Icicles" is sometimes cited as the last #1 of the pre-British Invasion rock and roll genre.
In the UK, "Popsicles and Icicles" was released on Stateside Records -- with "Comedy and Tragedy" as the B-side. The tune did not chart, however, possibly due to the Brits' unfamiliarity with the term Popsicles, which in Britain are called "ice lollies".

MHO
Sparkling. That's the word that comes to my mind when I listen to Percy Faith's rendition of this early sixties hit. As is always the case with Percy Faith recordings, the "sound picture" is complete and "paints" an accurate "image" of the song in question. One can only admire Mr Faith's extensive and creative musical imagination, knowing that each instrumental song has to be "born" first in the mind of the arranger, before musicians can actually start performing the score. The arranger has to know - in advance - which instruments will be playing what part of the composition and as such, he has to know exactly how each instrument sounds and what it's "capabilities" are.
Having all this in mind, you might enjoy this orchestral gem even more ......