THE BIZ : Cantor Buried Tale

The closets in Beverly Hills--like bowling alleys. And sometimes what you find in them, well! Broadway composer and performer Brian Gari was rummaging through his Aunt Natalie’s closets last year searching for remnants of his grandfather’s long career in vaudeville and film. Gari’s grandfather was old “Banjo Eyes” himself, singer and actor Eddie Cantor. Gari found more than old posters and ticket stubs: He turned up the mother lode of Cantormania--the only recordings, in mint condition, of his grandfather’s legendary 1950 Carnegie Hall performance. “This was supposedly one of the best concerts he had ever given,” Gari says. “People raved about it 40 years later. And no one had heard this performance since.”

Gari took the recordings back home to New York. He carried the delicate acetate pressings to the Brooklyn basement studio of record preservationist Seth Winner. Using digital technology, Winner cleansed them of their pops and crackles. The result, a 90-minute, two-CD set called “Eddie Cantor: The Original, Complete Carnegie Hall Concert,” was released on the Original Cast label in November, in time for the centenary of Cantor’s birth.

Gari knew his grandfather, who died in 1964, as someone who would take him to a Three Stooges movie and for a bite at a Hollywood deli. But Gari, who wrote the songs for the 1987 Broadway show “Late Nite Comic” and off-Broadway’s “A Hard Time to Be Single,” hadn’t realized the effect of Cantor’s onstage charisma. “Until I heard this performance, I never had a sense of my grandfather’s one-on-one rapport with an audience,” he says.