Kenny, Tippi and Chuck

This past week in The Wall Street Journal, I interviewed Kenny Rogers and Don Schlitz on The Gambler for my "Anatomy of a Song" column (go here). Don wrote the song and Kenny recorded it in 1978, sending The Gambler to #1 on Billboard's country chart and to #16 on the pop chart. Both Kenny and Don won Grammy Awards for the song.

Here's Kenny on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in September 1978, months before the album and single were released...

Also in the WSJ, I interviewed film legend Tippi Hedren on growing up near Minneapolis, her early modeling career and her interactions with director Alfred Hitchcock on The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). Here are Tippi's screen tests for The Birds. Clearly the camera loved her...

Nutcracker 1. Following my post on Shorty Rogers's Swingin' Nutcracker, bassist and composer-arranger Chuck Israels, sent along an email [photo above of Chuck Israels and Bill Evans]:

"Marc, form my perspective, this hardly holds a candle to Dave Berger’s completion of Duke Ellington’s Harlem Nutcracker. I just discovered that the whole production (with Donald Byrd’s brilliant choreography) is suddenly available on Vimeo. Nothing but the one-minute teaser has been available for years. This is among my favorite musical experiences. I played the show for five weeks while Dave’s regular bassist was unavailable. It was the outstanding theatrical experience of my life. David Berger is an unconscionably overlooked composer-arranger while dozens of people of lesser accomplishments are lauded. And Donald Byrd is an extraordinary artist. This was an expensive production, and I think it may have lost money during its run some years ago. David and Donald have made efforts to revive it, so far unsuccessfully." Here's The Harlem Nutcracker...

Nutcracker 2. Nelson Combs sent along the following...

"Marc, add another performance of The Nutcracker to your list. Spike Jones released a children's rendition on RCA Victor in December 1945." Here it is...

J.J. Johnson. Following my post on trombonist J.J. Johnson's Broadway Express (1965), Chuck Israels sent along a few observations about J.J.'s Broadway, a show-tune album from 1963...

 

"Hi Marc, I was on some of the sessions for JJ's Broadway, and they were memorable. The experience demonstrated how inadequately most recordings represent the real sound of music played by fine musicians and experienced by listeners in the same space. Those five great trombonists, JJ, Urbie Green, Lou McGarrity, Dick Hixon, and Paul Faulise made an overwhelmingly rich and powerful sound in the studio. We recorded at the old A&R Studio above Jim and Andys on 48th Street. It was loud and beautiful, perfectly balanced, in tune and rhythmically coordinated. You not only heard it with your ears, you could feel it on your body.

 

"But when we heard the playbacks, I was deeply disappointed. Little of the experience carried over into the recording, and the lush, deep and powerful blend of sound, the humanity of it, was rendered thinner and more brassy after being processed through a reverb system that the engineer, Phil Ramone, had installed in the building’s stairwell. When I hear the recording now, I enjoy it. JJ’s arrangements and the performances are all fine. The sound is good by most standards. But it’s a fraction of how the music sounded in the room.

"My friend, Jerry Rosen, former associate concertmaster and later pianist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, says listening to music on recordings is like getting kissed over the telephone. Another friend, pianist and composer-arranger Bill Dobbins, says it’s like eating a picture of food. I’m still glad we have recordings."

At the keys: Here's pianist Joe Alterman with bassist Kevin Smith and drummer Justin Chesarek playing Time After Time...

Oddball album cover of the week.

Our model seems to be taking the album's title literally. "Where did you say you dropped that silver lining?"