During the late 1920s and through the 30s, the Vitaphone unit from Warner Brothers made a ton of sound shorts. Some featured comedy acts, some dance acts and, more than anything else, musical acts. These are all invaluable looks at many of the greatest musicians of the day...folks who otherwise never appeared in films. The styles and types of music ran the gamut and probably the strangest and least entertaining of these is "George Jessel and His Russian Art Choir".
It begins with Jessel talking and telling very bad jokes. Then he explains how he found this wonderful Russian choral group and he brought them to the USA. Whether this actually is the case is anyone's guess. What follows are three songs which would be hugely entertaining to Russians of the era...but not to anyone else. While I have seen hundreds of these recordings, I would have to say that this was the least entertaining one by far. In fact, the bad jokes and the music were god-awful...at best.