Uncovered from dusty old 78rpm discs, Music Is The Most Beautiful Language In The World is a highly amusing and fascinating musical soundtrack to Jewish life in London's East End in the post-WW1 through post-WW2 period. The album title is as colourful as its contents, coming from a slogan used in a 1920s newspaper ad for Weinberg's, a record and sheet music shop in Brick Lane. The music is a high frolics melting pot of music-hall, novelty song, Jewish cantorial song and klezmer fused with the upbeat sounds of the popular jazz-inspired dance band era. Captured on 18 tracks, humour is never very far away. Some are sung in Yiddish, the language of eastern European Ashkenazi Jews, and others in ‘Yinglish’ a hybrid of Cockney and Yiddish. The funniest tracks are celebrations of east London street market life from the ‘Beigel’ rhumba, a song recorded in 1935 by the unfortunately named Max Bacon (the drummer in the Ambrose Orchestra, pictured above); the hilarious semi-rapped ‘A Day in the Lane’ by Yiddish revivalist comics Baker and Willie, through to ‘Whitechapel’, a nostalgic yearning in 1951 for what had become by then the old Jewish East End. ‘Tzena Tzena Tzena’ and a crooning ‘Bei Mir Bist du Schoen’ are enjoyable versions of Yiddish songs that were later popularised by Bob Seeger's The Weavers and the Andrew Sisters respectively. The more well-known names here are dance orchestra leaders Ambrose and Lew Stone, the latter featuring jazz trumpeter Nat Gonella and the legendary Mozambique-born crooner Al Bowlly who sings entirely in Yiddish! The CD closes with a track transferred off a flexi-disc issued in 1960 entitled ‘Jews' temporary shelter 75th Anniversary Appeal’. It's a compassionate appeal for the plight of poor refugees at a time when immigration wasn't a dirty word, with the boys' choir at Carmel College signing off with contrastingly tranquil angelic tones. A hearty Mazel Tov to the compiler Alan Dein, an award-winning radio documentary presenter and oral historian, whose detailed booklet notes interestingly traces the origins of the tracks against a vibrant historical backdrop. An authentically kosher treasure trove of cockney Jewish London.