JazzWax

Lou Levy Said It

"I remember sitting, with the saxophone section in the bend of the piano—Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, and Sam Marowitz and Stan Getz and Serge Chaloff when these guys would stand up to play, I would hear all this stuff coming out. When the section would play, I would hear Al Cohn. Now I didn't know him that well, but I could hear that sound coming out of the section, that soulful sound. Then when he'd stand up to play a solo, I noticed that he didn't play as slick as Stan Getz—I'm not knocking Stan Getz's playing—but he played so beautifully and soulfully, and so melodically that he made everybody else in the band—I could tell everybody in the band liked him better than anybody else. He was something else. I remember even Stan, with those cold, blue eyes of his, would look over and say, "That's it!" Needless to say, Zoot loved him and [so did] all the guys."

—Pianist Lou Levy on Woody Herman's 1948 band, in Ira Gitler's From Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s.

Lester Young Said It

"I had a decision to make between Frankie Trumbauer and Jimmy Dorsey, you dig, and I wasn't sure which way I wanted to go. I'd buy me all those records and I'd play one by Jimmy and one by Trumbauer, you dig? I didn't know nothing about Hawk then, and they were the only ones telling a story I liked to hear. I had both of them made... I developed my tenor sound like an alto, to sound like a tenor, to sound like a bass, and I'm not through with it yet. That's why they get all trapped up , they say, 'Goddam, I never heard Prez play like this.' That's the way I want them to hear. That's modern, dig? Not what you played back in '49—it's what you play today, dig? A lot them got lost and walked out."

—Lester Young, in a 1959 interview with Francois Postif, from Jazz Panorama: From the Pages of The Jazz Review.

The Johnny Bothwell Story

During my interview with Johnny Mandel last week, we spoke about Boyd Raeburn's band and lead alto saxophonist Johnny Bothwell [pictured]. Johnny Mandel noted that Bothwell had left the band in 1945 after a flare up with Lenny Green, the band's other alto saxophonist. Bothwell's replacement was Hal McKusick, who at the time was in Los Angeles with pianist and arranger George Handy. The two had flown to California a year earlier after leaving Raeburn's band over another Bothwell incident involving Al Cohn. Hal and Handy were fed up with Raeburn handing solos written for Cohn to Bothwell.

So who was this guy, Johnny Bothwell? And whatever became of him? Jazz is peppered with artists who almost made it, made it for a few years, quit the business, wiped out for one reason or another or died young. Bothwell's name is virtually unknown today, but back in 1945 and 1946, he placed fourth in the Down Beat alto saxophone polls. He also was named the most promising new alto saxophonist of 1946 by Duke Ellington and Anita O'Day in the Esquire poll of musicians.

As Dan Morgenstern writes in his fine liner notes to the rare LP, What Ever Happened to Johnny Bothwell: "Always at the brink of really making it, [Bothwell] seemed somehow jinxed or handicapped—whether by fate, circumstances beyond his control or quirks of character we cannot fairly judge." Based on my conversations with Johnny Mandel and Hal McKusick, much of Bothwell's misfortune may have been due to a runaway ego.

Bothwell came to some musical prominence in Boyd Raeburn's cutting-edge band of 1943 and 1944. In addition to recognizing the appeal of bebop early, Raeburn featured African-American and white musicians, a bold move for a lesser-known band at the time. Raeburn's goal was to create a new sound with the finest instrumentalists and arrangers, and the result was a band far more advanced than most others at the time, including Stan Kenton's.

Raeburn provided artists with plenty of running room for experimentation. Which is why the band was able to attract brilliant writers and strong sight-readers. The list included Dizzy Gillespie, Lucky Thompson, Oscar Pettiford, Trummy Young, Earl Swope, Don Lamond, Roy Eldridge, Juan Tizol, Serge Chaloff, Al Cohn, Shelly Manne, George Williams, Ed Finckel, Ralph Burns, Johnny Mandel, Hal McKusick and other rapidly rising stars of the new music.

According to Dan Morgenstern's fine liner notes:

"Bothwell beat a hasty retreat from Raeburn's band after fellow altoist Lenny Green allegedly threatened to knock him down if he ever returned to the stand...

Bothwell said that the split had been peaceful, and denied that he had taken with him arrangements belonging to the band, as Raeburn had claimed. The leader also said that it wasn't Bothwell's 'superior attitude and insults to other members of the band, but his loudness and inconsistent manner of leading the section' that had caused the split."

After leaving Raeburn's band with singer Claire Hogan, the pair went to New York, where Bothwell joined Gene Krupa and recorded Boogie Blues, one of the band's biggest hits on which Bothwell had a strong solo, Dan writes. Bothwell led his own band for a time and then joined a series of other lesser-known bands as well as smaller jazz groups. But mostly Bothwell faced more bad luck. By 1950, Bothwell exited the music business. What happened to him after his departure remains a mystery. [Pictured: Bothwell, on stage, left, fronting his band circa early 1946, when his band featured vocalist Claire Hogan and the Dave Lambert Singers.]

Earlier this week I asked Hal McKusick [pictured below] to shed light on Bothwell:

"Johnny Bothwell was a highly social guy when I knew him in Boyd Raeburn's bands, and he had major star eyes. He was always pushing for recognition, which is OK in moderation. I've always thought it's far better to let that happen naturally.

Bothwell also created cliques in the bands he was with, including Woody Herman's in 1943. This often pitted one group in the band against another and created bad blood. The big underlying tension in Boyd's [pictured] band was that Bothwell wanted an Ellington sound while most of the guys wanted a Basie influence. If you listen to Bothwell, his playing style was based on Hodges' sound, but exaggerated. Basically Johnny was a good guy with unwise diplomatic judgment.

When Bothwell left Raeburn's band in 1945, I was playing with Johnny Otis [pictured] in Los Angeles. When Boyd called and asked me to rejoin the band, Otis said that if things didn't work out with Boyd I'd always have a place in his band, which was great.

When I rejoined Boyd at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, I wanted to get George Handy [pictured] back into the band. I knew Boyd had enormous respect for George's arranging work. I told Boyd that George was developing a whole new amazing approach to his compositions and arrangements. Boyd was hesitant at first, since George and I had left his band a year earlier. But Johnny Mandel, who was writing terrific material for the band, was hugely supportive.

The fact that the piano chair was vacated also made it easier for George to return. Boyd's pianist, Harry Biss, had to leave suddenly for New York after crushing a glass goblet in his hand with devastating results.

Boyd gave his approval, and we brought George up to San Francisco from L.A. with an agreement to write whatever he wanted. One of George's first charts was Out of this World, a Stravinsky-like rendition of the song featuring a new sound and David Allyn on the vocal."

JazzWax tracks: Street of Dreams, a CD featuring Johnny Bothwell and his band from 1946, is available at iTunes and Amazon. As for the George Handy arrangement of Out of This World that Hal mentioned above, you'll find it on Boyd Raeburn: The Radio Transcription Performances 1946 at iTunes and Amazon.

JazzWax video clip: While Johnny Bothwell isn't in this 1946 clip of Boogie Blues, it's too good to miss for Krupa's stickwork and Carolyn Grey's vocal.

Sonny Rollins: Road Shows Vol. 1

Today, Sonny Rollins releases the first in a series of live albums unlike any other in his already vast catalog. The album, Sonny Rollins: Road Shows Vol. 1, is a compilation of stage performances culled from his own private tapes and those of Carl Smith, one of the country's leading collectors of unauthorized Sonny Rollins recordings. A DVD, Sonny Rollins in Vienne, also is being released today.

Smith, a Maine attorney and lifelong Rollins fan, has amassed hundreds of recordings of Sonny's concerts from around the world and has offered them to Sonny to use as he wishes. Apparently, there's a major sub-rosa market for bootleg Sonny Rollins recordings that are purchased and swapped like ivory or antiquities. Fortunately, Smith is the first Newk dealer to make these recordings available to Sonny, and three of them are on the new CD.

To choose the Road Shows tracks, producer and long-time band trombonist Clifton Anderson [pictured] reached deep into Sonny's stock and Smith's trove for tracks recorded between 1980 and 2007. Hats off to Anderson; his choices are superb. To create cohesion, engineer Richard Corsello wisely blended the applause between tracks so the result sounds like a single concert featuring Sonny at different points in time.

The result is a fascinating concept album that all of Sonny's fans will find astonishing. In large measure, Sonny's fans are fiercely loyal and adoring of the saxophonist's creative energy and output. But even among his most ardent fans, Sonny has had mild detractors of late who have felt his recent recordings have been somewhat rambling and repetitive. Even Sonny has been keenly sensitive to this, which is why he resisted releasing a live recording of his 2007 Carnegie Hall appearance.

JazzWax was the first blog to report Sonny's decision back in February, during my interview with the tenor saxophonist. At the time, Sonny said he was unhappy with the results during a playback:

JW: When you were at Carnegie Hall last fall, what did you think of the recording? Is it coming out?
SR: No, it’s not coming out. I didn’t like the recording after I heard it, so I’m not going to put that out.

JW: Was it the sound of the recording or the playing?
SR: I didn’t really feel that I was playing up to a level that I wanted, as a 50th anniversary recording. So I didn’t think it was ready to be put out, you know. I’ll be putting out other records.

So Road Shows in many ways is a critical entry for Sonny. If the CD had simply unloaded similar versions of what already exists, there was a real risk of Sonny becoming pegged as a "peaked legend," a risky place to be as the country's preeminent jazz artist. To Sonny's and Clifton's credit, they know full well that simply turning out albums that don't advance Sonny Rollins' art can work against him and his reputation.

After giving Road Shows 10 complete listens, I'm gratified to report that it is one of Sonny's most interesting and significant albums in years. What you hear is the result of long hours spent critically evaluating archived recordings of Sonny's concert performances and assembling a careful mix that roars with excitement and risk-taking.

For starters, I'm positively overwhelmed by the album's warm fidelity. Even with all of the newfangled technology on the market to make music sound rich today, Road Shows is a cut above. The album's sonic quality is so vivid and dimensional that Sonny sounds as if he's in the room with you. What's more, the up-close feel of the recordings makes you forget these are live dates. I don't know how they did it, but there's virtually no ambient noise, except for the applause at the end of each song. Imagine dislodging your theater seat and placing it on stage, in a choice location, and you get the picture.

As evidenced by these tracks, Sonny thrives in public. He's energized by the open space, free to roam with his horn, and stoked by the feedback of roaring crowds. Word is that a studio date is next for Sonny in 2009 followed by Road Shows Vol. 2 in 2010.

There are seven tracks on Road Shows Vol. 1, and each is a steamroller of creative force. Fans will certainly be pleased to see a track from the Carnegie Hall concert of 2007. Word is Anderson put together two versions of the album, one with Some Enchanted Evening from last year's performance and one without. Sonny chose the former.

Above all, Road Shows is a smart, tasteful collection of standout Sonny Rollins performances. Instead of rigidly lining up the tracks in chronological order, which would have been a mistake, Anderson has shuffled the deck. By doing so, the album avoids the "hear Sonny change over time" trap, forcing the listener to just, well, listen. In the process, the myth that somehow Sonny was better at one period or another is dispelled, since you can't actually tell which Sonny is playing unless you consult the CD case.

Sonny's 28-year output on this album is electrifying:

Best Wishes—was recorded in Japan in 1986 and appeared originally four years earlier on a studio album called Reel Life. Listening to the two versions, you realize they have completely different attitudes. This one, from Carl Smith's collection, is much more dynamic and forthright, not to mention cognizant of where it's going and what it hopes to achieve. The rendition leaps out of the speakers onto your chest like an uncaged tiger.

More Than You Know—is from a live 2006 performance in France. Sonny's sound is firm and soulful as he orbits the standard again and again before diving in at the end for a solo run-down of the track. Sonny first recorded the standard in 1954 on a leadership date with Thelonious Monk for Prestige. 

Blossom—is an original composition that Sonny never recorded before or after this 1980 debut performance in Sweden. This Latin-jazz fusion track comes from Smith's collection and features Sonny's fondness for edgy lines coupled with Caribbean rhythms. There's a Last Tango in Paris feel about Blossom that's both dangerous and inviting.

Easy Living—was captured in Warsaw in 1980 and also comes from Smith's collection. Sonny takes this ballad apart and reassembles it as a supercharged woolly standard. His speed-bag workout on the melody line at the end is one of the album's breathtaking high points. He first performed this song live during a TV segment filmed in Italy in 1976 and recorded it in the studio a year later for an album of the same name.

Tenor Madness—is taken from a performance in Japan in 2000. Sonny reworks this original from 1956 with a tip of the reed to John Coltrane, his tenor-mate on the original album. Sonny has a lot of fun here, including tagging Doin' What Comes Naturally from Annie Get Your Gun.

Nice Lady—this upbeat original was recorded for the first time in 2007 in Victoria, B.C. in Canada. It's a stealthy Calypso reminiscent of Brownskin Girl and Don't Stop the Carnival from the album What's New (1962).

Some Enchanted Evening—comes from the famed 2007 Carnegie Hall concert, and Sonny performs it almost like a lullaby. Sonny had recorded the South Pacific tune 50 years earlier at the hall, so he was obligated to reprise it last year. Sonny sounds bored stiff by the lackluster melody line, and rightfully so. You sense here that a great artist was forced to play what he doesn't feel in his heart was worthy of his time or effort. The beauty of live music, of course, is that you can't take it back. So you get to hear a slightly subdued and frustrated Sonny struggle to enter a passionless and dated tune. The anatomy of a creative struggle is what makes this track so fascinating. What's more, you get to hear Roy Haynes, whose brushwork continues to amaze.

As for the DVD, Sonny Rollins: Live in Vienne, the 2006 performance was produced by French television and places the viewer in an enviable spot: On stage with Sonny as he performs in a large amphitheater. The surprising camera angles tell you the crew was running all over the stage while the performance was under way. To grow comfortable with such company and to staunch rampant bootlegging, Sonny had many of his performances taped. This is one of them.

JazzWax tracks: Sonny Rollins: Road Shows Vol. 1 is available as a download at iTunes or on CD here. Sonny Rollins in Vienne is available here.

JazzWax video clips: To see a video clip promoting Road Shows, go here. And here's a clip promoting Sonny's new DVD.

The Night Has a Thousand Eyes

One of my favorite jazz standards is The Night Has a Thousand Eyes. The melody line is so sensual and beckoning that it's pretty hard for a jazz artist to mess it up. Yet plenty have in the past and many still do. To deliver a version that makes listeners' arm hairs stand on end (the test of any song, really), an artist has to linger in the right places, play delicately in others, and watch the tempo. Too fast and it's like a rushed meal. Too slow and it's plodding and saccharine.

Interestingly, many listeners assume that the standard and the one Bobby Vee recorded in 1963 are the same song. They're not. Though the two sound oddly similar, they are quite different. The pop hit by Vee was written by Benjamin Weisman, Dorothy Wayne and Marilynn Garrett. The standard interpreted by jazz artists dates back to 1948, to the movie of the same name starring Edward G. Robinson. This song was written by Jerome Brainin and Buddy Bernier. Also interesting is that the standard sounds remarkably close to Benny Carter's Key Largo, which Benny first recorded in 1947 with Anita O'Day and Ralph Burns.

The Robinson film depicts the life of a fortuneteller whose act turns real when he starts seeing the future. Hence, the night and all those hundreds of eyes. The arrangement and score for the movie was by Victor Young.

Why the Vee hit has the exact same title and similar build and release device remains a mystery to me. Same with Carter's Key Largo. There's a story here, I'm sure, and I'll circle back to get to the bottom of it at a later date. For now, here are my favorite versions of The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, in order of preference. All are available as downloads at iTunes or Amazon and, when assembled, make for a fabulous music folder:

1. Horace Silver—Silver's Blue (1956). Recorded for Epic, this was a Silver leadership date that came on the heels of his famed 1956 session with the Jazz Messengers for Columbia. The tempo here is perfect, and Hank Mobley's interpretation on tenor sax is the big surprise. It's about as tasty a rendition as you'll find and the one to beat. Donald Byrd was on trumpet, Mobley was on tenor sax, Silver was on piano, Doug Watkins was on bass and Art Taylor was on drums. Interestingly, Taylor's Latin beat at the opener is close to a bossa nova, though the Brazilian beat hadn't yet been coined or popularized.

2. Sonny Rollins—What's New (1962). This album is the lesser-known and friendlier follow-up to Sonny's The Bridge. What's New features Sonny with Jim Hall on guitar, Bob Cranshaw on bass and Ben Riley on drums. Though Sonny's version came two years after John Coltrane's, his reading for me is more engaging, with his working of the lower register channeling African instrumentation. You also can hear Sonny listening intently to Hall and playing off the guitarist's ringing chords. Though technically a bossa nova, the track has a fascinating series of beats all mixed together.

3. Sonny Stitt—My Main Man (1964). This gem was recorded with Bennie Green on trombone and featured Bobby Buster on organ, Joe Diorio on guitar and Dorrell Anderson on drums. Everything about this track is fabulous, from the organ-guitar intro with the bossa beat to the exchanges between Sonny and Benny. The entire Prestige date was smartly thought out by producer Esmond Edwards, a photographer who was hired by label owner Bob Weinstock to produce albums.

4. John Coltrane—Coltrane Sound (1960). Coltrane struggled a bit with this tune. His first attempt, at the December 1959 Coltrane Jazz session, was rejected. Coltrane tried again on October 21, 1960 during the My Favorite Things date. But it, too, was tossed. Finally, four days later, while recording tracks for Coltrane Sound, Coltrane produced a master take. What makes the version so interesting is the cyclic feel that's reminiscent of Giant Steps and Coltrane's powerful attack on the standard.

5. Kenny Burrell—Lotus Blossom (1995). This entire album is a must-own. Burrell offers a tasteful, soft approach that patiently teases out the beauty of the song. On some tracks, Burrell plays solo. On others he's joined by Ray Drummond on bass and Yoron Israel on drums. On The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Burrell, Drummond and Israel play a rendition that allows Burrell's chord choices to linger and shine.

6. Paul Desmond—Bossa Antigua (1964). Jim Hall appears twice on my list, the first time above on the Sonny Rollins session. Here, Hall plays off Desmond perfectly, and Desmond's playing on this album is nothing short of miraculous. I've always thought the album was the best of their collaborations. You simply can't stop listening to their version of The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, and Desmond's approach to the standard is tender and feathery.

7. Bud Shank—Taking the Long Way Home (2005). Bud takes a completely different approach to the standard. Rather than execute it as a bossa nova, Bud and his big band handle the track as a blowing session. The band featured Roger Ingram, Dennis Farias, Pete DiSiena, Ron Stout and Carl Saunders (trumpets); Andy Martin, Mike Barone, Charlie Morillas and Craig Gosnell (trombones); Bud Shank (alto sax); Lanny Morgan, Keith Bishop, Doug Webb, Brian Williams and Jack Nimitz (reeds); Bob Florence (piano, arranger and conductor); Christian Jacob (piano); Joel Hamilton (bass) and Kevin Kanner (drums).

8. Pharoah Sanders—Moon Child (1989). Sanders picks up where Coltrane left off, adding a slightly more pensive feel to his interpretation. A much underrated tenor saxophonist, Sanders' spiritual effort is often overlooked. Sanders was joined by William Henderson, III (piano), Stafford James (bass) Eddie Moore (drums) and Cheikh Tidiane Fall (percussion).

9. Stan Getz—Didn't We (1969). This song, like Luis Eca's The Dolphin, was tailor-made for Getz's sound and breezy phrasing. A fabulous strings and brass arrangement here was crafted by Johnny Pate, and it frames the tune's mood perfectly. Getz also recorded two Johnny Mandel standards on this album, The Shining Sea and Emily, that are absolute classics. Interestingly, Getz also recorded The Night Has a Thousand Eyes on The Dolphin, a live album from 1981. I think this one is a little finer.

10. Harry Belafonte—Deep as the River (1949). In general, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes doesn't lend itself well to a vocal. I'm not sure whether it's the lyrics or that the jazz solos over the years have rendered the words meaningless. There is one exception, and it's Harry Belafonte's version. Before you start groaning, you need to know that vocalist Belafonte was a 52d Street regular back in the late 1940s with a cool Jackie Paris sound. Belafonte actually recorded The Night Has a Thousand Eyes on his very first record session for Jubilee. And before you question whether this is truly jazz, let me hip you to the musicians on the date: Zoot Sims (a great solo), Al Haig, Jimmy Raney,  Tommy Potter and Roy Haynes (on brushes!). Trust me, it's a beaut.

Sunday Wax Bits

Johnny Mandel. Following my five-part interview last week with legendary arranger-composer Johnny Mandel, a flurry of emails arrived. [Pictured: Johnny at the piano with songwriting legends Alan and Marilyn Bergman]:

From the great saxophonist Bud Shank, who appeared and played in I Want to Live, scored by Johnny:

"I still shudder at the thought of that film. All of the source music for I Want to Live was performed on the stage next to the one constructed for the death scene! But, of course, performing Johnny's music was never anything but joy."

From saxophone legend Hal McKusick, who worked in several big bands with Johnny:

"Great stuff on Johnny Mandel, one of my heroes! It's so nice that JM is represented so beautifully by you. He is one of the best and always was!"

From saxophonist and jazz historian and writer Bill Kirchner:

"Great interviews with Johnny. When I interviewed him in 1995 for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program, he mentioned doing ballad arrangements for Buddy Rich's 1947 band. One of them, Jerome Kern's The Song Is You, was recorded in 1953 by THE Orchestra, the Washington, D.C., band fronted by radio personality Willis Conover. It's a forgotten masterpiece—one of the first big-band charts I know of that used counterpoint in a major way, and all the more extraordinary having been written by a then 21-year-old Johnny Mandel."

Editor's note: The Song Is You is available on Willis Conover's House of Sounds Presents THE Orchestra here.  Or, if you don't have the $70 that sellers are now charging for the CD, you can download Thou Swell for 99 cents from Charlie Parker: One Night in Washington at iTunes. Johnny Mandel arranged that one, too, also for THE Orchestra.

From video documentarian Bret Primack:

"I'm loving this series, Marc. I've always loved Johnny Mandel's music, but never knew his story. It's fascinating. And what a thrill for you to speak with him."

From reader Jim Wardrop:

"Fantastic job with the Johnny Mandel series!  Wonderful, down-to-earth, this-is-how-it-works stuff. As I keep saying, this is stuff you would never find in a magazine. Thank you for doing it."

Stan Getz. WFIU jazz radio historian David Brent Johnson came across a wonderful time capsule of a TV ad at YouTube featuring Edie Adams (who passed away October 15) and Stan Getz for Muriel Cigars. Adams, an actress, had been married to trumpeter Pete Candoli and appeared in a long string of TV series and movies. Her filmography includes The Apartment (1960) and Made in Paris (1966), which features a fabulous Nelson Riddle score. Go here to view the 1965 ad at David's Night Lights site. And for yet another '60s throwback ad for Muriels, featuring Edie and her sisters, go here.

JazzWax on the air. My monthly live JazzWax radio segment last week with Ralph Benmergui on Canada's leading jazz radio station JAZZ.FM91 focused on saxophonist-arranger-composer Benny Golson. To listen to the podcast, go here.

Mike Melito. So few hard bop albums today from up-and-coming jazz artists capture the true flavor of this mid-1950s genre. Hard bop isn't exclusively about blowing. It's a mix of instrument textures, earthy tones and edge, which many musicians somehow miss. So it was with great pleasure last week when I put on drummer Mike Melito's new album, In the Tradition.

What makes this hard bop album superb are the players and song choices. Which doesn't surprise me too much, considering Melito credits tenor saxophonist Joe Romano with personally helping to shape his approach. Romano was a mainstay in the post-1958 bands of Woody Herman, Buddy Rich, Louie Bellson and others. Taste tends to be taught and learned.

Joining Melito are Grant Stewart [pictured] on tenor sax, John Swana on trumpet, Paul Hofmann on piano, Neal Miner on bass and Rob Sneider on guitar. I've written about Grant in the past, and on this disc he continues to be among the leading contemporary voices on the instrument. Grant here displays a wonderful sense of jazz history in his playing and solos. Through enormous sensitivity, he modernizes classics without damaging the brickwork. Grant also knows that for a hard bop date, you have to farm the saxophone's lower register, and he does so fearlessly. Swana [pictured], for his part, has a terrific rapid-fire technique on the trumpet that complements Grant's tone and attack beautifully. Though this CD was recorded earlier this year, it sounds 50 years old, which is exactly how a hard bop album should feel.

The opening track, Junka, says it all. Only someone intimately familiar with hard bop would pick this offbeat Sonny Clark [pictured] composition, and the group executes perfectly. Also included on the album is The Dolphin, a rich showcase for Grant; Barry Harris' Bish Bash Bosh; Hank Mobley's Hankerin' and Tadd Dameron's Good Bait. And that's just part of the CD's tracklist.

What's interesting about the album is that drummer Melito [pictured] delivers the beat with stick-work that smartly allows the drumheads to be heard, which is rare today. Drums actually have a sound, and it takes a sensitive drummer to purposefully tease out the "skin" quality of the instrument. That requires a mind-shift by the artist from "Listen to me, I'm the man" to a more sensitive "I want to tell the listener something." As a result, I actually found myself paying attention and enjoying Melito's figures behind Grant and Swana. On piano, Hofmann's lines are delicate and knowing, allowing for space and message, while bassist Miner and guitarist Sneider keep things interesting. Pay particular attention to Sneider's solo on The Dolphin.

Melito's In the Tradition along with sample tracks can be found here.

Buddy Rich. While doing research for my Johnny Mandel interview series, I came across this page of video clips featuring the incomparable drummer. Scroll down slightly to the thumbnail boxes. But be warned. You'll start clicking on the clips, and the next thing you know a half-hour will have passed. Be sure to leave yourself plenty of time.

Interview: Johnny Mandel (Part 5)

Johnny Mandel has had an enviable career. In the 1940s, he was with bands led by Boyd Raeburn, Buddy Rich, Woody Herman and Artie Shaw. In 1950 and 1951, Johnny arranged for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, and in 1953-54 played in Count Basie's "New Testament" band. In the mid-1950s he arranged for Elliot Lawrence's band and wrote charts for albums recorded by Chet Baker and other jazz and pop artists. Then in 1958, Johnny scored the movie I Want to Live. [Pictured at top: Quincy Jones and Johnny Mandel in 2007; photo by Donna Zweig]

But Johnny's most successful years were yet to come. Over the next 12 years, he would go on to compose some of the most enduring movie themes and jazz standards of all time. These include Emily, The Shining Sea, You Are There, A Time for Love, The Shadow of Your Smile and Suicide is Painless.

In Part 5 of my interview series with the legendary composer-arranger, Johnny talks about I Want to Live, working with Frank Sinatra on Ring A Ding Ding and the stories behind three of Johnny's best-known compositions and melodies:

JazzWax: You wrote the score to I Want to Live in 1958. It was your first film. Were you back in L.A.?
Johnny Mandel: I moved back to California in 1958 to write the score. I had never done a picture before. I had ghosted for some people. They had given me the cues, and I orchestrated by doing the math—music against the clock. But I had never handled a film from start to finish on my own. So when I first got the project, I was scared.

JW: How did you get beyond your initial fear?
JM: I quickly realized I had already done a lot of stuff with sight cues, acts for dancers and for Sid Caesar on television. At the time of the movie assignment, I hadn't written many big band arrangements in some time because the era of the bands had passed. I had done plenty of nightclub revues and floorshows and things like that. I Want to Live was going to be a band album. Fortunately, I was used to catching sight cues for music in acts for dancers. So when I started on I Want to Live, I realized, heck, where have I been all my life? I’ve been writing and arranging by the clock and catching sight cues for dancers for years. I just put the two together and was able to do movies. I had the background and didn’t know it. [Pictured above, from left: Art Farmer, Gerry Mulligan and Bud Shank in I Want to Live]

JW: How was it working on that film?
JM: I had a wonderful director who didn’t get in my way. Robert Wise just wanted me to do my best. The people working on the film didn’t really know how to do authentic jazz for the movies so they left me alone. It was a great experience for me. All the stuff the musicians were playing in the film was written by me, except, of course, the solos. That was my introduction to film, and I found I loved working on movies.

JW: In 1960, Frank Sinatra chose you to arrange Ring A Ding Ding, the first recording date for his new Reprise label.
JM: I was writing Vic Damone’s act in Vegas at the time. Sinatra was at the Sands. I had done a lot of arrangements for Damone, and Sinatra wanted to know who wrote them. Someone told him.

JW: What happened?
JM: Bill Miller, Frank's piano player, called me, and we went out to meet Frank. He was working on the film, The Devil at 4 O'clock, at the Columbia Ranch, where they shot a lot of films. That was my first contact with Frank.

JW: How did it go?
JM: What struck me most when I first met him was how he looks at you. He looks right through you, man, with those blue eyes coming at you. He was 100% there with you when he was talking to you. He was very amped up about starting this new company. He said they were going to have vinyl records and all different colors. He’d fill the room, and the energy would come off of him.

JW: How was Frank to deal with?
JM: I was blown away to have the job. The only rough word I ever heard from him came when I called and asked him if he wanted me to treat the project like a Billy May or Nelson Riddle date. He said [imitating Frank's voice], “If I wanted them, I’d of called 'em.” I told myself, “OK, schmuck, shut up.” [Pictured: Frank Sinatra being led by director of Mervyn Leroy on the set of The Devil at 4 O'clock.]

JW: How did you work together on the music?
JM: He gave Bill Miller [pictured] his choice keys, and Bill gave them to me. Frank would never rehearse. Even if he did, he wouldn’t sound like Frank Sinatra. He’d sound like a nervous singer voicing his way through the arrangement. He could hear an arrangement down once and know it cold the second time. He was like that.

JW: Did he like what you did?
JM: You could tell how much he liked the charts by the way he was. I never had to redo any of them. I did run out of time on the project, though, because I was slow and there was little time to complete them all. So I had to farm out some of the charts.

JW: Which ones?
JM: I think I farmed out Be Careful It’s My Heart, I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm and When I Take My Sugar to Tea. The rest were mine.

JW: Who wrote the ones you just mentioned?
JM: I’d rather not name names. I didn’t like the charts. They were alright. But not great.

JW: How did you work with the ghost arrangers?
JM: I’d write an intro and maybe a modulation or something and that would be it. I’d have someone else do the rest. My favorite tracks of mine on the album were Ring A Ding Ding, The Coffee Song and In the Still of the Night.

JW: In 1964, The Americanization of Emily was released with your wonderful score and title song, which remains a jazz and pop classic.
JM: I had never written a song before Emily. Of course, I had written plenty of original instrumentals, you see, but not a so-called pop song with lyrics. My problem is I had spent too many nights in New York's Brill Building years earlier.

JW: What happened there?
JM: To get three or four arrangements done by the following day in the 1950s, I'd have to ask guys I knew who worked at the Brill Building to loan me their offices overnight. These arrangements often had to be recorded the next morning, and that kind of crap. While I was there in the evenings, I’d see songwriters with sheet music under their arms looking totally depressed. They'd be going from office to office begging publishers to play and buy their songs.

JW: What did you think?
JM: I’d say to myself, "Thank god I can arrange and don’t have to do that." When I started to write songs for the movies, it was hard for a while to get over those images. So I stuck to jazz and became the jazz film-score guy for a while. The old school film composers looked at me as if I was some sort of interloper. Many of those guys were doing movies and TV shows at that point.

JW: Why didn't you do more TV work?
JM: I hated writing for television. It was like doing movies, but for a third of the money and a third of time in which to do it. It was like factory work. You had to turn out episodes every week. I always thought of it as crap work. I did a few of shows but I didn’t like it. I loved doing movies, though. I did some TV movies and a few pictures in the early '60s I’d just soon forget, like The Lawbreakers, The 3d Voice and Drums of Africa with Frankie Avalon.

JW: How did The Americanization of Emily come about?
JM: I was lucky to get that job. I was asked to write a theme song. This was the beginning of the era of movie theme songs. So I wrote a melody that I felt fit Julie Andrews' character: an uptight English nurse who had no love for the Americans stationed in England during World War II. She was very Brit, and the English had been doing without for a long time over there before the Americans arrived. The theme I wrote was Emily. The studio liked it and said, "We'd like to make a song of it." I said, "OK, I’ll need a lyricist." They said, "Who do you want?" I said, "We may as well start at the top. How about Johnny Mercer?" So Johnny was brought on to write the lyrics. That experience changed my attitude toward songwriting quite a bit. The song, of course, was a hit.

JW: How did you work with Mercer?
JM: He just put lyrics to the theme I wrote. I had five weeks to score the movie. The song was just what I pictured for Julie Andrews, and it worked for the airport scene in the rain and when Julie and James Garner were getting it on.

JW: Emily is a beautiful waltz with a melody that moves in so many different directions.
JM: I've always loved key changes or lines and chords that sounded like key changes. That’s where my ear takes me when I’m writing a song. You have to push yourself to go somewhere else after eight bars. I was always doing that instrumentally.

JW: A year later, you wrote The Shadow of Your Smile for The Sandpiper.
JM: When I took on the project, I called Johnny Mercer right away. But after I played him the melody I had come up with, Johnny said, "I can’t write that song." I was stunned. I said, "Why not?" He said, "It’s a steal." I said, "My god, a steal from what?" He said, "From Hoagy's New Orleans."

JW: You must have flipped.
JM: When Johnny said that, I wanted to fall through the floor. I said, "Wait a minute, New Orleans is the last thing I'd think of." Whatever similarities exist were in other parts of the song and all that sort of thing. 

JW: Why did Johnny think it was a lift of New Orleans?
JM: It wasn't. But later I realized he was thinking like a songwriter when he heard it. The first thing a songwriter looks for in a melody is a title for the song [sings a few notes of New Orleans]. Well the first five notes may sound similar but they resolve completely different. That's what his ears were hearing, the title notes. It was really out of left field for me. Johnny said, "I can’t do this to Hoagy [pictured]." They had written quite a few things together.

JW: What was Johnny afraid of?
JM: Johnny feared Hoagy would get upset and angry if he wrote the lyrics to a song that sounded like one of his own. The two songs don't sound anything alike, but Johnny got hooked on that one series of notes, which weren't even an inspiration for me. Fortunately, he sent me to Paul Francis Webster [pictured], whom I had never met. Paul turned out to be a lovely guy.

JW: Given how massive The Shadow of Your Smile became, Johnny must have been kicking himself for years after taking a pass.
JM: Several years later, probably in the early 1970s, I ran into Johnny [pictured]. He told me a funny story. Johnny said he and Hoagy liked to drink together. One time in the late 1960s, they were at a bar and Hoagy asked him why he never wrote the lyrics to The Shadow of Your Smile. Hoagy said, "You had just written Emily with Johnny Mandel with great success." Johnny said he told Hoagy the story about fearing Hoagy would think the song was a steal of New Orleans. Johnny told me Hoagy paused and thought for a minute. Then Hoagy said, "I never even noticed." [laughs].

JW: Johnny must have groaned.
JM: Every time Johnny Mercer and I would meet, he'd hit himself on the head with his open palm and say, “I turned that song down, what a dummy.” [laughs]

JW: In 1970 you wrote Suicide is Painless for the movie M*A*S*H, another classic.
JM: Director Robert Altman [pictured] and I were friends. I had scored a picture for him a year earlier called That Cold Day in the Park, with Sandy Dennis. At that time, I was intrigued with music from the 19th century. You know, mechanical musical instruments, orchestrations, music boxes and so on. I scored most of Cold Day with a disc music box and wrote orchestral arrangements around it. Bob and I had gotten pretty friendly. We loved to hang out. So I got hired onto M*A*S*H.

JW: How did you work on the project?
JM: I was brought in before the movie was even shot, which was highly unusual. In most cases, you’re the last one in the line to see the film when scoring it. So Bob and I were sitting around getting rather ripped one night. Bob said to me, "You know, I need a song for the film. It’s that Last Supper scene, after the guy says he’d going to do himself with a pill because his life is over, because couldn’t get it up with the WAC the night before." I said, "A song for that?" He said, "Yeah, that Last Supper scene where the guy climbs into the casket and everybody walks around the box dropping in things like scotch, Playboy and other stuff to see him into the next world. There’s just dead air there."

JW: But if I recall, the scene features just a guy singing with an acoustic guitar.
JM: Right. Bob said, "We’ve got one guy in the shot who can sing and there's another guy who knows three chords on the guitar so we can’t use an orchestra." Bob also said the song had to be called Suicide Is Painless. "Since [Capt.] Painless commits suicide with a pill, that would be a good title," he said. Then he said, "It’s got to be the stupidest song ever written."

JW: What went through your mind?
JM: I said to myself, "Well I can do stupid." Bob was going to take a shot at the lyrics. But he came back two days later and said, "I’m sorry but there’s just too much stuff in this 45-year-old brain. I can’t write anything nearly as stupid as what we need."

JW: So who wrote the lyrics?
JM: Bob said, "All is not lost. I’ve got a 15-year-old kid who’s a total idiot." So Michael Altman, at age 15, wrote the lyrics, and then I wrote the music to them. It was the first scene in the movie that they were going to shoot. They had to have the song for it as a pre-record, so the actor could mouth the words, allowing for a dub later.

JW: So if you had seen the movie before composing Suicide, the song that has become so famous would likely have turned out quite differently, and perhaps not nearly as endearing.
JM: Oh sure, it's quite possible.

JW: When you gave them the song, what did Bob think?
JM: He loved it. In fact, he loved it so much that they started trying it over the title credits.

JW: What did you think?
JM: I said, "You guys are crazy. It doesn’t fit." You have these army medic helicopters flying in a war zone with this soft melody playing. It felt odd. But I wasn’t about to get into a fight over it. So I left the screening room. Sure enough, when I saw the film, the song was used over the opening credits. Then it was used on the TV series in 1972.

JW: Bill Evans recorded Suicide Is Painless, Emily and quite a few of your compositions. Did you ever talk to him about his interpretations?
JM: No, we never talked about them. He was always kind to me. I’m glad he liked Suicide Is Painless. Nobody could play like Bill.

Interview: Johnny Mandel (Part 4)

By the tail end of the 1940s, Johnny Mandel had dropped the trumpet and was playing trombone for leading big bands. He also was writing arrangements that had the energy of swing but the attitude of bop. As his reputation grew, so did the demand for his pen. After working in Alvino Rey's band, Johnny began devoting more time to arranging, which took some degree of courage. The competition was fierce. The swelling ranks of top-flight arrangers included Neal Hefti, Ralph Burns, Billy May, Eddie Sauter, Bill Finegan, Sy Oliver, Ernie Wilkins, Gene Roland, Gil Fuller, Paul Weston, Jimmy Mundy, George Handy, Gerry Mulligan, Gil Evans and so many others. And each was developing a following among bandleaders seeking a new, more modern sound.

Swing was out, bebop was in and dancing was less of a primary focus. Which meant that bandleaders needed arrangements that captured the new music's hip instrumental feel. Charts had to snap and explode with energy and excitement, and bands were in a constant battle for musicians who could read complex parts and improvise with a bop feel. [Pictured from bottom: Ralph Burns, Neal Hefti, Johnny Richards, George Handy, Ed Finckel and Eddie Sauter; Photo by William P. Gottlieb, 1947]

In Part 4 of my five-part interview with Johnny, the legendary arranger-composer talks about Artie Shaw, Johnny Bothwell, Count Basie, Hoagy Carmichael and writing for radio and television in the early 1950s:

JazzWax: You composed and arranged for Artie Shaw's great bop band of 1949. What was Artie like?
Johnny Mandel: If he liked you, musically, he had a great deal of respect for you. He left me alone. Unlike Benny Goodman, he didn’t pick on his players. Artie molded musicians and taught them how to play better. I don’t know what he saw in me. I suppose he liked what he heard. I never played with him. I’d write the charts and give them to his road manager, Lenny Lewis, who would give them to the copyist. Artie was always up at his Connecticut dairy farm. Lenny was a clarinetist, and he'd hire the band and rehearse it. Then Artie would come down from his farm and weed out the lesser players, some of whom were Lenny's pals. Artie's genius was he knew how to form a band and how to make the musicians play they way he wanted. He was a great bandleader. One of the best. And he could do it without beating up on the guys.

JW: You then were arranging for Elliot Lawrence's band in 1950.
JM: Elliot [pictured] was a nice guy to work for. He loved what the arrangers did and knew how to get great work out of everyone in the band. He wasn’t much of a piano player, and he didn't let the band ad lib. But he turned out to be a great conductor. Many of the original members of his band came from the Philadelphia area. He particularly liked Al Cohn, Gerry Mulligan and me. Harmonically, it was an adventurous band.

JW: You and saxophonist Hal McKusick worked in the Lawrence band of 1956 and 1957.
JM: Hal [pictured] and I were in quite a few bands together. Boyd Raeburn, Alvino Rey, Buddy Rich in 1948 and Elliot Lawrence. Hal's sound was something else. Did you ever hear how Hal joined Boyd Raeburn's band in 1944?

JW: How?
JM: Before Hal joined the band, Raeburn had in his reed section an alto saxophonist named Johnny Bothwell. He ran the section. Bothwell was a great player but a tyrant. He always found ways to bug the players about tuning up and things like that. Loved to get under the players' skin. In the band was Lenny Green, who also played alto and sat next to Johnny. Shortly after I came on at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, Lenny just snapped.

JW: What had happened?
JM: Whatever Bothwell was doing to him went too far. One night Lenny went out of his head and tried to kill Bothwell. Bothwell left the band in fear of his life. He took with him a lot of the lead alto parts; Claire Hogan, our singer and Bothwell's girlfriend who later became his wife; and the band boy, who looked after the band's equipment on the road. So the band was left without an alto. We had subs for a while but soon someone sent for Hal McKusick [pictured], who was playing with Johnny Otis in L.A. at the time and had already been in Boyd's band. Hal came up and joined the band. That was the first time I met him. We've known each other through the years. I did some arranging for him on his Jazz Workshop album in '56.

JW: How did you wind up in Count Basie's "New Testament" band in 1953?
JM: I got a call one day from Basie himself. He made all his own phone calls. That’s why I make my own calls in my bands today. I had already written a couple of things for Basie that he liked. He also knew I was a trombone player. When he called me, he said trombonist Jimmy Wilkins, Ernie’s brother, was leaving the band. Basie said Jimmy wanted to stay in St. Louis, where he was from. Basie said, "We’re playing in St. Louis. How would you like to join?”

JW: What did you think?
JM: I couldn’t believe it. I had adored that band since I was a kid. Actually, I first met Basie when I was still at the military academy and hung around the band whenever they came to New York. But playing in that Basie band was the greatest job I ever had. The band had been re-formed a year earlier, in '52. I was there in '53 and part of '54. There were three of us in the trombone section: Henry Coker, Benny Powell and me. I sat on the inside at the end, right next to Freddie Green. What an experience. Sometimes I played bass trumpet.

JW: Were you apprehensive at first?
JM: No. It felt like I should have always been there.

JW: How were Neal Hefti's charts?
JM: Great. Ernie [Wilkins] was writing too. Neal's Plymouth Rock and Cherry Point were terrific. So were Ernie's One O'clock Jump and Blues Go Away [scats a few bars]. I was playing bass trumpet on that one.

JW: In 1954, you stopped playing trombone entirely. Why?
JM: The last gig I played was when I was working with Zoot [Sims], Jimmy Rowles [pictured] and a bass player and drummer whose names I've forgotten. We were playing at the Haig in Los Angeles. At the time, I was writing more and more and playing less and less, and not practicing. So I was playing worse. I finally told myself that I can't do this anymore. Everyone in the arranging business had to give up something. Neal [Hefti] stopped playing trumpet. Billy Byers stopped playing the trombone. You had to. Al Cohn didn't play much when he was writing all the time. Eventually, his eye bothered him so much that he just decided to be a full-time sax player. And what a monster he became.

JW: Any exceptions to the rule?
JM: The only guy in the entire business who was able to come to the playing-writing crossroads and take both routes is Bobby Brookmeyer [pictured].

JW: Did composing and arranging for bands get easier at this point?
JM: Writing was always a struggle, particularly out in L.A. In New York, everything was easier because everyone was in contact at bars, on the streets and in clubs. The whole music world worked within two to three blocks of each other. So you were always at Charlie's Tavern, Junior's or another place where guys would hang out between gigs. You'd have a drink with musicians who were playing up to three recording dates a day. You'd hear what was going on, who needed arrangements and be motivated by the contact.

JW: And without cell phones—imagine that. How did everyone stay in touch in California?
JM: [laughs] Yes, before cell phones. Out in L.A., everybody lived in their cars. It was very hard for me to get started in California. There was no big break. I worked tirelessly writing for recording stars like Dave Pell, Chet Baker and others. I never did any movies until much later in the 1950s.

JW: So how did you keep up with people and stay in touch with them?
JM: You'd be on regular phones all the time or you were at clubs. That’s how you networked, as they say today. Everyone liked jazz more then, and I was taking all the work I could get, including writing acts for entertainers. I even moved to Las Vegas for a while in 1957 and wrote some of the floorshows. I’ve never been a fast writer, and I'm still not. I’m slow, to this day. But I've always worked hard and intensively. In many cases I'd have to work throughout the night to get my many projects completed.

JW: Was Hoagy Carmichael a song-writing mentor?
JM: No. I just arranged that Pacific Jazz album for him, Hoagy Plays Carmichael. We got along great. I had heard before meeting him that he could be prickly. But he wasn’t. He liked what I did for the recording session. We used to hang out together. He liked to party and drink and play piano. He loved music. He got me into ASCAP. The other guy who got me back into ASCAP after I left for BMI after BMI offered me a guarantee was Johnny Mercer. After I re-joined ASCAP in 1965, I realized I shouldn’t have been anywhere near BMI.

JW: Was Hoagy vocally comfortable with the arrangements?
JM: I liked Hoagy, and he liked what we did on that album. But he was a little out of his depth. I had beboppers on the date like Art Pepper, Joe Mondragon and others. But I also had [Harry] "Sweets" Edison. I think the modern feel was a little tough for him.

JW: Was Hoagy laid back?
JM: Not really. I had heard that if you wrote a song with him, he was like a Philadelphia lawyer, going over every single note. But I wasn’t even thinking about writing a pop song in those days. That would come later.

JW: How did you get your start writing for the movies?
JM: Andre Previn recommended me for a picture in 1958 called I Want to Live, directed by Robert Wise. Andre couldn’t do it because he had just taken on Porgy and Bess, a record project. Andre has always been a friend of mine. We both liked jazz, and I had done a couple of things for him. Andre liked the way I wrote, and we became real friends.

JW: Did you convince Robert Wise to use a jazz score?
JM: I didn't know this at the time but Susan Hayward [pictured], the film's star, was a huge Gerry Mulligan fan. Robert and Susan wanted to get him in the film. Gerry was very big at the time. That was my first movie score.

JW: But you must have arranged something for film before, no?
JM: I had done some radio in the early 1950s, before joining Basie. I worked at WMGM on Fifth Ave., one of the last of the independent broadcasters that was a wing of MGM Pictures. We had to score all those shows, like the MGM Theater of the Air and crap like that. There was a band there all the time, and my gig was to write a few arrangements a week for the band. So I had to learn how to write music by the clock, to coincide with the drama.

JW: You did no film at all?
JM: Well soon after working at WMGM, I went over to Sid Caesar's [pictured] Your Show of Shows for two years. Irwin Kostal [pictured, bottom] and I turned out all the music for that early TV show. And it was a lot. We were doing everything. No one involved in the show had a clue about what could or couldn't be done. We were putting on a 90-minute TV show each week. The process would start on Monday and end on Saturday night. A ton of music was needed. We’d do a segment from an opera, we’d do these long singing and dancing numbers, and so many others.

JW: Was it exciting?
JM: Somewhat, mostly because no one knew how to do a TV show then, so anything and everything was possible. Every week was another experiment. Boom mikes got into the line of the cameras all the time, or sets fell down while we were live on the air. It was the best training in the world. I never wanted to work on Broadway, but this was like that—except you didn’t take the show on the road. It was all live. There was no tape. And we had to do it 39 weeks a year. That experience taught me how to write music based on specific time slots. It's experience that came in handy when I was asked to do I Want to Live and in the next phases of my career in the 1960s and beyond.

Tomorrow, Johnny talks about scoring I Want to Live, composing Emily for The Americanization of Emily, why Johnny Mercer refused to write the lyrics to The Shadow of Your Smile, meeting Frank Sinatra before arranging Ring-a-Ding-Ding, and composing Suicide Is Painless for M*A*S*H.

Interview: Johnny Mandel (Part 3)

Johnny Mandel began his professional career in the early 1940s as a trumpet player. Unhappy with his playing, he switched to trombone. Meanwhile, arranging lessons with band legend Van Alexander gave Johnny an opportunity to realize his dream: to write for the big bands he heard on the radio. After a stint in Henry Jerome's band, which included tenor saxophonist Al Cohn and drummer Tiny Kahn, Johnny joined Boyd Raeburn's band in 1945. The orchestra was ahead of its time and put Johnny in contact with cutting-edge bop musicians of the time, including Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Pettiford, Lucky Thompson and Dodo Marmarosa. But while bop was increasingly popular among more skilled and hipper musicians, traditional bandleaders were still stuck in the swing era, often resulting in creative tensions.

In Part 3 of my interview with Johnny, the legendary arranger-composer talks about his experiences in the mid-to-late 1940s with Buddy Rich, Alvino Rey and Woody Herman, and shares Rich's early views on Charlie Parker and Max Roach:

JazzWax: Once you learned the fundamentals of arranging from Van Alexander, did you find you had a natural talent for it?
Johnny Mandel: I had a burning desire to arrange, that’s for sure. I figured I’d learn it and be good at it. I was driven. The first band I got to play one of my arrangements when I was still at the military academy was a nonunion group led by a guy named Paul Allen. Tenor saxophonist Al Cohn [pictured] was in there. But once the band played my arrangement, I realized the stuff I had written was all wrong. The trombones were off the charts. Everything was wrong. So I took it in and went on from there. You really learn to arrange by screwing up. You find something that sounds good and then think about moving it to a different section of the arrangement.

JW: What band did you join after leaving Boyd Raeburn in 1945?
JM: I joined Jimmy Dorsey for a short time, when it looked like Boyd’s band might break up.

JW: What was Jimmy Dorsey like?
JM: Jimmy Dorsey was a nice guy and a hell of an instrumentalist, but not much of a bandleader. He was a sideman at heart. I had never met Tommy Dorsey but I know he liked my arrangements. He died before I ever got to hook up with him. In Jimmy's band, I had to play the high trombone solos because the book for some reason was originally written for Tommy. Jimmy was a groove. He was a nice guy. I was there for just a few months.

JW: Why did you leave Boyd Raeburn's band for Buddy Rich in 1946?
JM: One of the musicians in Boyd's band went over to Buddy and took me with him. Buddy was a big name then. But all of a sudden playing music wasn’t fun. I was the first trombone in Buddy’s band, and it was dull.

JW: Why?
JM: In 1946, Buddy was still thinking in terms of swing. He liked Benny Goodman’s sound. Frankly, I can’t even imagine Benny and Buddy in the same room together. They had such different temperaments. When I’d play bop in Buddy's band, Buddy would pound me on the chest with his finger and say, “I hate bebop, I hate Charlie Parker.”

JW: But as we know, Rich would wind up playing with Parker.
JM: Yes. Buddy's change in thinking came sometime in 1947, I think, and probably was a result of survival. All of the big bands were adapting bop in their arrangements. Buddy eventually realized he could stick to swing and go out of business or get with what was happening. By the time I re-joined Buddy’s band in 1947 after playing with Alvino Rey, Buddy had changed, which is why I went back.

JW: What was Buddy's issue with bop in 1946?
JM: I don't know. He had just left Tommy Dorsey to go out on his own, and just as he did the music changed. I'm sure that was a part of it. No one who is on top like Buddy wants to hear that their approach is dated. Either way, he was an all-around drag in '46. Buddy's band then was like a pre-war swing band transported to a new era. Apart from having Earl Swope on trombone, Buddy's band that year wasn't a place where I enjoyed myself, which is why I left.

JW: Drumming was changing fast in 1946, wasn't it?
JM: Smaller bebop groups were suddenly getting a lot of attention. At this time, Buddy was fiercely jealous of Max Roach. All of sudden Max was the man and Buddy wasn’t. He hated that. As late as early 1947 Buddy was still trying to be a swing drummer with a swing band. Personally, I think Buddy always sounded better in other people’s bands than his own. All of that notwithstanding, I still think he’s the greatest big band drummer.

JW: When you were in Buddy Rich's band in 1946, Tadd Dameron was there, too. Did Tadd have an influence on you?
JM: Some, but not a lot. I was listening more to Jimmy Mundy, who I think wrote the best stuff for Benny Goodman; Benny Carter; Bill Finegan; Billy May, who made Glenn Miller's band come alive; Sy Oliver; Van Alexander; Duke Ellington and Count Basie. I quickly found I could take music off records and score the whole thing. All the arrangers then were in my thinking.

JW: How did you wind up with Alvino Rey in 1946, in between your Buddy Rich stints?
JM: After I left Buddy’s band, I continued playing in what was known then as “farm team” bands. These were bands from which the major bands recruited. For example, Buddy’s band and Georgie Auld's band were farm teams for Woody Herman's band. Alvino Rey was a farm team for Claude Thornhill.

JW: How did Rey's band differ?
JM: It was a gargantuan orchestra, upward of 30 musicians. There were six trumpets, five trombones, seven saxophones, that sort of thing. Billy May was writing for the band and dividing it up into two five-man brass sections. Based on the pictures I had seen in the magazines, I had always thought Rey was a short Spanish guy. It turns out he was tall and his real name was Alvin McBurney and that he was from Ohio. [laughs]

JW: Was he a nice guy?
JM: Rey was marvelous, a great guy to work for. Somebody told me when I joined, "Look, when you’re playing with Alvino, if someone grabs you by the shoulder from behind, don’t worry. It’s Alvino trying to learn to ride the unicycle."

JW: The unicycle?
JM: He was the kind of guy who wanted to learn to ride it so he could pedal up to the microphone with his guitar and announce numbers. That came to an end when he slipped a disc and couldn’t continue. But he was out there. That's how he was able to maintain such a large band. Audiences were entertained.

JW: Rey seemed to enjoy gimmicks.
JM: He did. He loved his technology. One of the musicians would stand backstage with a mike on his throat. The wire was attached to Alvino's steel guitar. The guy backstage would mouth words, and it would appear as if Alvino's guitar was playing the words. So Alvino would be playing as this guy backstage was saying, “Alvino Ray and his singing guitar.” It looked like the guitar was doing it.

JW: Why did you leave Rey?
JM: When I was with him in 1946, the whole band business caved in. Soldiers came home from the war and married girls they had been dancing with before the war. They bought houses and settled down, and started using their spare dollars to pay babysitters rather than going out to hear music or dance. We were playing to empty ballrooms by the end of that year. All the bands from Benny on down folded their bands in the last weeks of 1946.

JW: What did you do after you left?
JM: In 1947 I enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music in New York and did a summer session at Juilliard. I wasn’t happy back in school, but it was a good time to go back and fill in my musical gaps.

JW: In 1948 you returned briefly to Buddy Rich's band.
JM: Yes. By then, Buddy had fully embraced bop. He was actively looking for guys who played and wrote bop charts. He had to. All of the big bands were hipper. Audience tastes had changed slightly. Buddy had me write mostly ballads. Many people think I arranged Buddy's version of Oop Bop Sh'bam. I didn't, and I can't remember who did.

JW: By the end of 1948 you were arranging for Woody Herman.
JM: Yes, around that time I started thinking about moving to California again. I never liked New York except when I worked there as a musician. It was a great place to be to play and listen. So I moved back to Los Angeles. I had gone back to the West Coast one time with Buddy's band in 1946 to play the Hollywood Palladium for four weeks. Back then I stayed with Rob Swope and Ben Lary at a house down in Manhattan Beach. One of the guys, Jackie Carmen, had a car. So we'd drive up to the Palladium to play. I loved it out there. 

JW: But by the late 1940s, after the war, it wasn’t easy for a musician to just move to L.A. and get work, was it? 
JM: Right. I had to get a union card. A lot of guys wanted to live in California and not have to hack the winters back East. The biggest businesses in California back then were oil and the movies, and all the studios had staff orchestras. The work and weather were big draws for musicians. So the union cracked down on easy transfers into Local 47 from other union branches. If you wanted a union card there, you had to work doing something else for six months. This was to prove you were committed to residing there and not just jumping in to work, take some other local musician's job and return to New York or wherever when it was convenient or times changed for you.

JW: What did you do?
JM: I knew I’d have to live there for six months to work off my union card. So I worked as a shipping clerk downtown. When Woody’s "Four Brothers" band came to town with all my friends in it, I couldn't play with the band. But under union rules, I could arrange. So I started writing for Woody in 1948.

JW: How was that band?
JM: Unbelievable. I wrote Not Really the Blues in 1948. The title came from a book clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow had written called Really the Blues. In the book, Mez said that anything other than Dixieland was a bunch of crap. I wrote this chart that started out as a blues but turned into a 32-bar song. So I called it Not Really the Blues. Woody and the band liked it very much. But they didn’t’ play it at first because trombonist Bill Harris felt it was too much for the trombones to play. But they started to play it after a while and recorded it in 1949.

JW: Your signature arrangements back then opened instantly with high energy and a ton of brass.
JM: Traditionally, when a band played theaters, you’d always open with something very fast. That's because we'd be coming up from the orchestra pit on those lifts, which audiences loved. It was very dramatic. The point was to wake up the people who had gone to sleep watching the movie, especially in early shows. I remember with Buddy's band, I had written Fine and Dandy with the intention of it being a pit opener. Not Really the Blues also was designed to be an opener. In fact, the original recording for Woody was too slow. I played it with my own band much faster.

JW: That arrangement starts the way gates snap open at the racetrack.
JM: Exactly. That’s a perfect simile.

JW: That's also true of your arrangement of Krazy Kat for Artie Shaw's bop band of 1949.
JM: Wow, what a band. Artie picked a bad time to start a band. He had been out of the business for quite a few years. He said that his 1949 band was the best one he ever had. Tadd wrote some of the charts. So did George Russell. I wrote some ballads for him. Gene Roland was writing great stuff for that band, too.

JW: The reeds weren't half bad either.
JM: The saxophones were incredible. Zoot [Sims], Al [Cohn] Herbie Steward, Frankie Socolow and Danny Bank. Jimmy Raney was on guitar. Don Fagerquist was on trumpet. Wow, what a player. And Sonny Russo. If I recall, some of the older-sounding arrangements were by Ray Conniff and Roger Segure.

Tomorrow, Johnny talks about playing in Count Basie's "New Testament" band in 1953, why he stopped playing trombone, what Hoagy Carmichael taught him and how he learned to write for the movies.

Interview: Johnny Mandel (Part 2)

Bundled off to a series of boarding schools after his father's death in 1937, Johnny Mandel threw himself into jazz and the trumpet. Transfixed by the radio and the excitement of live big band remotes from hotel ballrooms, Johnny soon began trying to write arrangements. Listening intently to different bands, Johnny decided to devote himself to writing the kind of explosive charts that were making names for big bands nationwide. [Oil painting of Johnny Mandel by Merryl Jaye]

In Part 2 of my five-part interview with Johnny, the legendary composer and arranger talks about learning how to arrange from band legend Van Alexander, playing bebop with Alan Greenspan and Leonard Garment, switching from trumpet to trombone and joining Boyd Raeburn's groundbreaking band of 1944:

JazzWax: I can understand your ambition as a teen to play trumpet in a band. But to become an arranger?
Johnny Mandel: In those days, I was like any other kid. You grew up glued to the radio. I knew I wanted to become a musician. There were bands everywhere, and the cheapest form of entertainment was listening to live remotes of the different bands from the big hotels. Everything sounded so exciting, especially live from those hotels. But I was captivated by the songs as much as the bands.

JW: Why the songs?
JM: The culture was different then. Everything in music back in the late 1930s was based on the songs, their melodies and how those melodies were interpreted by different band arrangers. To stand out, most bands just recorded the songs that had already landed on the Hit Parade. That was the list of best-selling records in the country. Songs that made the Hit Parade were proven winners. So song-pluggers like Jack Robbins, who lived in our hotel when we moved to New York, were always in the clubs trying to get bands to play their songs so they'd be heard on the radio. That's how they sold sheet music and records. As a song publisher, if a band turned a song you licensed into a hit on the radio, you made a ton of money.

JW: So the Hit Parade was everything?
JM: Yes, that's why so many bands played the same 10 songs on there. That was the business then. Music publishers ran it. In order to get better bookings, bands always wanted to get a radio wire where they were playing. It was the fastest way to get exposure. Lying in bed with my ear glued to the radio listening to bands playing the same songs, I said to myself about the arrangements, "What’s the big deal?" Those broadcasts were like a laboratory for me. It took a couple of weeks of listening when I was a kid before the light bulb went off. It wasn’t about the songs. It was about how the band interpreted the song. But there were no books on how to arrange for big bands back then.

JW: So what did you do?
JM: When I was still attending the New York State Military Academy in the early 1940s, I saw an ad in Down Beat that said Van Alexander was taking on students. Van and his wife had had their first baby, so he needed more income. Van wrote Chick Webb's hit, A-Tisket, A-Tasket and many other big band arrangements.

JW: Did your mother know?
JM: Of course. I asked her, and she said OK. So I'd go down to New York on the train and go up to Van’s apartment. The first time I went there, I couldn’t believe it. Here was the guy from Down Beat. He was famous.

JW: How did it go?
JM: When I got to Van’s, I told him I wanted to do what he was doing. He said fine and went over to a closet where he had a big stack of music. He pulled off a few sheets of yellow paper he had used to arrange a song. He showed it to me and told me that what I saw was called a score. I asked him what that meant. He said that a score is a snapshot of what everyone in the band is playing and that each sheet held eight measures. I looked at all the different parts and said, "This is what they’re doing all at one time?" "Yes," he said, "for eight bars." Then I noticed that everything was in different keys. Van told me that many of the instruments' notes had to be transposed so everyone played in the same key. I picked all that up pretty quickly.

JW: What happened next?
JM: As I looked at the score, I told him that the trombones seemed as though they were playing kind of high for their range. He said that’s the way he had chosen to write for them.

JW: Did he have you write something?
JM: Not just yet. He said, “Now that you’ve seen what it looks like, you have to hear what it looks like.” He unwrapped one of his records and put it on a windup phonograph.

JW: What was the record? Do you remember?
JM: Yes, wait a second. It was Hooray for Spinach, by Harry Warren's band. We went through the whole thing, listening to the music and following the arrangement on the score Van had written. I couldn’t believe it. Back then, all songs used to have the singer in the middle of the tune, after the second chorus. I asked Van why he had changed keys. “That’s the key the girl in the band sings in,” he said. “The band has to modulate to her key so she’s comfortable singing the lyrics in her range.”

JW: What happened next?
JM: Van said to me, “You’ve seen what a song looks and sounds like. Now you have to put the two together. If you’re thinking of a sound, you have to realize what it’s going to look like on paper.” He said the final step takes a long time to do, but that when the two things were put together—hearing something great and writing it down—I’ll have it made. Van said, “What you have to do is learn to see with your ears and hear with your eyes.” I never forgot that line. Van told me to listen to everything I could get my hands on. He gave me some blank score paper and told me to write something.

JW: What did you do?
JM: I went home and wrote something. [laughs] Van said the most important thing an arranger needs are guys to play what he writes, no matter how good or bad the scores are. "Otherwise, you’ll never know what you wrote," he said, “You need an idea of what you did and what you wished you had done.”

JW: How did you meet Alan Greenspan?
JM: When I got out of the New York State Military Academy in 1944, I was with Billie Rogers’ band for a few months until the band broke up. Then I joined trumpeter Henry Jerome [pictured] and his Stepping Tones. Lenny Garment and Alan Greenspan played tenor saxophones in that band and were already there a couple of years before I had joined. Henry had a society band, but Lenny decided Henry should have a bebop group within the band. So I wrote some charts for the group. [Leonard Garment would become special counsel to President Nixon and Alan Greenspan would become Federal Reserve chief.]

JW: What was Alan Greenspan like back then?
JM: Alan was very bookish and a nice guy. He also did the payroll, so we always got paid on time. [laughs] Alan was going to NYU and Lenny to Columbia. We made an air check at this huge barn of a place under New York’s Paramount Theater called Child’s Paramount. I think it's on a CD.

JW: Not long afterward you took up the trombone. Why the change?
JM: When I was playing in Billie Rogers' band, I realized I had accumulated some bad playing habits on trumpet. I wasn’t playing in tune, even though I had perfect pitch. I decided trombone might be a better fit for me. I had doubled on it at the military academy because there weren’t enough trombone players in the dance band. By the time I was with Henry Jerome, I had stopped playing trumpet regularly.

JW: How did you learn to play trombone so quickly?
JM: I thought of the trombone as a big trumpet. I learned all the positions. I was ambitious. That’s all I thought about.

JW: You also were writing and arranging, too?
JM: Yes. I had heard about Al Cohn's [pictured] arranging skills when I had come into New York from the military academy to study with Van Alexander. I was a big fan of Al's. He was one guy whose approval I always wanted. I’d listen to what Al was doing, remember it, and write it for my own band up at the academy. [laughs] I don't think I ever told Al that. Al and I played together in the Henry Jerome bop group with Lenny and Alan. Al Cohn and Bob Vitale were the other two saxes.

JW: In 1944 you joined Boyd Raeburn’s band. How were you brought in?
JM: I can't recall. David Allyn was singing with Henry Jerome at the time. He and I moved over to Raeburn’s band together. I was playing lead trombone then because I could play in the high register.

JW: Was Boyd’s band as amazing and as ahead of its time as it sounds?
JM: Yes, it was. Boyd [pictured] had a solid swing band at the time. I can't recall who recommended me but I was able to come in and replace Trummy Young. Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Pettiford were doing record dates with us, but they weren’t officially part of the band. Quite a few guys in there had been in Van Alexander’s band. We toured across the country playing army bases and flying in army planes. How Deep Is the Ocean and Eagle Flies were my arrangements. I was 19 years old.

JazzWax tracks: Johnny Mandel's bop band arrangements can be heard on the CD, The Henry Jerome Orchestra: 1944-45 (The First Band Ever to Play BeBop). The band included Jack Eagle and Manny Fox (trumpets), Johnny Mandel (bass trumpet), Bill Vitale, Alan Greenspan, Len Garment and Al Cohn (saxes), Gene di Novi (piano) Tiny Kahn (drums).

Johnny's arrangements for Eagle Flies and How Deep Is the Ocean were recorded in December 1945 and can be downloaded from Boyd Raeburn: Body and Soul at iTunes or Amazon. The personnel: Tommy Allison, Alan Jeffreys, Johnny Napton and Dale Pearce (trumpets) Jack Carman, Ollie Wilson and Si Zentner (trombones), Leonard Green and Hal McKusick (alto saxes) Stuart Anderson and Frank Socolow (tenor saxes), Guy McReynolds (baritone sax), Boyd Raeburn (bass sax), George Handy (piano), Hayden Causey (guitar), Ed Mihelich (bass) and Jackie Mills (drums).