Further Definitions by Benny Carter

This immediately sounded great — huge, clean sound. It’s one of the very first pressing Impulses (and one of their first releases, with the glossy Am-Par label, and an RVG etching). A mono copy. I bought it from Jazz House yonks ago (August 2012) — where good old Alan had correctly listed it as a first pressing. It cost the princely sum of eight quid. 

This copy has a sticker which declares it comes from the ‘Jones Collection’ (‘Mr/Mrs Robert E. Jones' followed by a Dorset address). There was a track on Side 1 which I would swear was from Finian’s Rainbow, but no, apparently not. Still, great stuff. And stellar audio quality. It sounds like the horns are in the room with me. This could be an audiophile demonstration record. 

I wonder if I got any other records from Mr and Mrs Robert E. Jones? They seem to have owned some winners. An amazing record, a steal of a deal and almost perfect. This still looks grubby. Let’s clean it again. And again, if necessary. A wonderful record and worth the effort.
 
What strikes me on a second listening — after a second cleaning — is the immense richness of the musical tapestry here. Benny, you’re my hero! The track that sounds like something out of Finian’s Rainbow is ‘The Midnight Sun Will Never Set’ which is reminiscent — to me — of ‘How Are Things in Glocca Morra?’ 

Such lovely rich big ensemble sound. Carter, you’re a genius! This album is a towering classic. What were the earlier definitions, and where can I get the first album? Well, having looked, it turns out that this is the first album, and the follow up is Additions to Further Definitions (1966). 

Apparently this one is a follow up in some senses, too, though — to a 1937 session in Paris with Coleman Hawkins and Django Reinhardt, which echoed the instrumentation here, and also some of the songs. Learn more here. Those four 1937 tracks are on the Coleman Hawkins All Stars 10 inch album. Oh my god, I have got a copy of it on my shelf! Well, that’s next on the turntable. Back to Further Definitions. 
 
Great, graceful, beautifully contoured sheets and slopes of sound. A phenomenal gem of an album.

Benny Carter and His Orchestra
Further Definitions (Impulse A-12)

(Image credits: All are from Discogs. I could only find a shot of the stereo label. Mine is mono.)

Blade Runner by Vangelis

For years, those of us who loved the music Blade Runner were baffled by the refusal of its composer Vangelis (Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou) to allow his music to be issued as an LP (as was then the dominant music format). But commerce deplores a vacuum, so a Blade Runner soundtrack album did appear, but it wasn't the original version of music on the film, and Vangelis himself didn't play on.

Fast forward to the age of CD and finally there was a release of the Vangelis score. But those of us who love vinyl still had a void in our hearts, because we wanted an LP version of the music. That dream came true in spades when Audio Fidelity released a beautiful audiophile record of the soundtrack. 

It was on 180 gram high quality vinyl, and red to boot, housed in a handsome gatefold sleeve. It was also — more importantly — remastered by a respected audio engineer, Kevin Gray. I bought a copy with the usual doubt and suspicion. Not because of Kevin Gray's credentials, which are exemplary, but because in my experience most modern audiophile pressings, especially American ones, are usually pressed on noisy recycled vinyl (whatever they claim) or, much more commonly, come with scratches added at the factory to destroy your listening pleasure.
 
But I'm delighted to report my copy of Blade Runner was fine. It sounds great and this is almost a perfect version of Vangelis's music, at last. It is almost entirely a synthesiser score — except for the wonderful presence of Dick Morrissey playing the ravishing sax solo on the love theme. (Oddly enough, Morrissey lived in the small town in Kent where I grew up. I kind of wish I'd known that, so I could have stalked him)


So the sound quality will never be that of a recording of acoustic (or indeed electric) instruments recorded in a a real environment, with air around them. Indeed, in terms of sound quality (though certainly not musically), the best track on Blade Runner may be 'One More Kiss, Dear' sung by Don Percival. But that's the inherent limitation of any electronic score and I'm not grousing about it. This is very nearly the ideal Blade Runner soundtrack.

So what is stopping it short of perfection? The inclusion of three segments of dialogue. Why do people insist on doing this? If I want dialogue or sound effects I will watch the movie on any of the myriad formats available. When I play the soundtrack album, all I want is the music.
 
I know other people feel differently, but I believe the inclusion of dialogue and effects on this otherwise magnificent record was a ludicrous blunder and represent a tragically missed opportunity.

(Image credits: All from Discogs, who did me proud, except the pack shot which is from Audio Fidelity, who made the record.)

Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis & Gil Evans (RSD Mono)

I previously wrote a post about the Dutch Fontana pressing of this classic of big band jazz. The music itself, of course, is stellar. But it is instructive — and fun — to search for the best possible rendering of it on vinyl. 

So I decided to compare my recently acquired 1960 Fontana with this Record Store Day 180g reissue from 2013, which was mono. I am a bit dubious about these RSD mono Miles Davis records... I strove like hell to get ahold of their Kind of Blue, only to open my sealed copy and discover that the first track on Side 1 had a nasty factory scratch on it. Have these paragons never heard of quality control? It wasn't cheap, either.

But this Sketches of Spain was unscratched. And it sounded very nice — though of course  it is mono, so there is no exact comparison between it and the stereo Dutch Fontana.  However, compared to that Fontana, which was over half a century older, I felt Miles’s trumpet had lost presence here. 

It was rather soft and soggy by comparison to the 1960 Fontana. What Gil Evans called his “melancholy cry” had been blunted and tamed. Unkind words like “flabby” come to mind. The trumpet still has a harsh, sour quality, but without the fine grained detailed or clean-cut precision that distinguished it on the Fontana. 

The orchestra perhaps sound a little more integrated, but I suspect that’s just because it’s mono.

Miles Davis, arranged and conducted by Gil Evans. Sketches of Spain (Columbia CL 1480; Record Store Day 180g mono reissue, individual number 2957.)

(Image credits: the album cover, front and back, come from Northern Volume. The label shots, which are actually from an original copy rather than the RSD reissue, are from Discogs.)

Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis & Gil Evans (Dutch Fontana)

I picked this up at a boot fair in a posh London suburb. It wasn’t the original US Columbia release. Rather, it was on Fontana, the European label which handled Columbia’s Miles Davis catalogue in this period. 

And it was the Dutch rather than the British pressing. Which is all to the good, because the Fontana records were manufactured by Phillips, who were based in Holland. They made excellent pressings. 

Crucially, this was a first pressing and, what’s more, a factory test record — which meant it was one of the first off the stamper (which equates to the highest audio quality — the more the stamper is used, the more worn and less precise it becomes). A stereo copy, too. Something of a holy grail, then. I spent £25 on it (haggled down from a sticker price of £35). 

A few years ago this would have been an unthinkable sum, and even now it seems like a big investment... 

After a tense, paranoid first listening, I began to relax — the record plays fine. Now I'm beginning to appreciate how Gil Evans makes the whole big combo swing like a single bright, sharp edged metallic construction on a pendulum, absolutely unified, with Miles’s trumpet in the lead. (Miles said, “He made that orchestra sound like one big guitar.”) 

There is a brooding, measured, industrial quality to the sound… with an unsettling tone hovering in the background at the threshold of hearing, not resolving and not ceasing, like the hum of a menacing machine. 

The tuba player, Bill Barber, had worked with Evans ever since his days in the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, when Evans first added tuba to the ensemble. (Jimmy McAllister also plays tuba on the Sketches of Spain sessions.) Gil Evans, and Thornhill, were partial to French horns. And Johnny Carisi says “In a sense… a tuba is like a big French horn.” 

The fascinating thing is that Gil Evans uses the orchestra the way Miles Davis plays his trumpet. This shared vision of music is why they got together in the first place.

This is a great record, and a wonderful pressing — I could feel the exciting shock of the impact of the low frequencies. I must compare it to the recent mono Record Store Day reissue. 

(I have quoted from an essay about Gil Evans from Gene Lees magnificent book about arrangers.)
 
Miles Davis, arranged and conducted by Gil Evans. Sketches of Spain (Fontana 885 122 TY)

(Image credits: the cover — which as you can see weirdly re-uses the photo from Kind of Blue — and the label are from Discogs. The cover of Gene Lees' Arranging the Score is from Amazon.)

Checkmate by Shelly Manne

Purchased from the excellent Jazz House Records, this looks gorgeous, clean, almost new. It's a 1962 British mono pressing of a US Contemporary album which is legendary for its sound quality, and is also sought after (by me) for the John Williams TV score it contains (yes, that John Williams). Beautifully quiet run in groove... 

The LP was recorded by Howard Holzer not Roy DuNann,who was the famed Contemporary recording engineer — sort of a West Coast Rudy Van Gelder. But “Howard Holzer was a genius, too,” according to Lester Koenig’s son. (Lester Koenig ran Contemporary.) Apparently Holzer was mentored by DuNann. 
 
I love the sax, which turns out be be Richie Kamuca (“one of the most overlooked of the Lester Young disciples to emerge in the fifties” — Mosaic newsletter). Russ Freeman’s piano is delicate and adroit. Kamuca does a lot of work — and great work — here. He gives a small combo a big band sound.  Kamuca has a huge sound. 

This is a terrific record. Sharp, fresh, keening trumpet — Miles Davis influenced —  by Conte Candoli. Wonderful sound quality. Kamuca is gorgeous. Some very interesting drumming, which isn’t surprising. And moody bass by Chuck Berghofer —also propulsively rhythmic. A real winner.

Shelly Manne and His Men  Play the Music of John Williams from the TV Series
Checkmate (Vogue LAC 12315 — originally on Contemporary)

(Image credits: the cover is from EIL, the labels from Discogs. The labels don't actually represent the British Vogue pressing, annoyingly, but images of these are not to be found on the internet. Yet.)

The Man from O.R.G.A.N. by Dick Hyman

I saw this on Dusty Groove in their bachelor pad/space age section (called Now Sound) and then tracked down an eBay copy from a Danish seller which was in better shape than the Dusty Groove one (sorry, boys) — it's also a white label promo copy, so an early pressing and therefore more sought after. (Early copies off the stamper should sound better.) 

The album is on the Command label, famed for both their wacky abstract cover art (Mike Gething of Little Amber Fish is a big fan) and their high tech stereo sound — "Command Records will delight the most discriminating audiophile." There is a reassuring block of text on the back cover detailing Technical Data. Telefunken microphones, check; Ampex tape recorder, check; Westrex cutter, check; Scully lathe, check. On to the music... 

Hyman, a well-known keyboard wizard, plays the Lowrey electric organ here. The album opens with a superlative version of Schifrin's 'The Liquidator'. 

Less welcome is 'The Third Man Theme'. I've always hated that £*%^@ zither atrocity, and it's no better here with the zither absent (I say this in the full knowledge that it is a beloved classic and has sold gazillions of copies). 

The title track is an improvement, though it's a bit of a country & western oddity. 'Honey West', with its noirish slant is much superior. 'I Spy' is a sort of a sound drama with snatches of dialogue and traffic effects. Indeed Hyman subtitled the arrangement 'Tone Poem of a New York Traffic Jam'. It doesn't have the fluidity and appeal of comparable efforts by Kenyon Hopkins or Roland Shaw, who can make sound clips seem part of the music rather than jarring interpolations. 'I Spy' still has a pulsing appeal, though it sounds to me like the fade out was cut off by some ham fisted chump. All the Telefunkens and Ampexs in the world won't save you from clumsy human intervention. 
 
'Man Alone' by John Barry from The Ipcress File is lovely, displaying some particularly nice guitar by Tony Mottola with a bossa feel. 

If not for the Third @£$$%^ Man this would be wall to wall high quality spy music. 'Thunderball' has a galloping, almost Spaghetti Western feel (more guitar, this time by Al Casamenti) with some wailing high pitched sputnik electric organ — apparently achieved by using the "piccolo attachment." 

The third Barry track, 'Mister Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' is another highlight, with the whispered accompaniment more effective than the intrusions on 'I Spy'. Schifrin's 'The Cat — Theme from Joy House' isn't about to supplant Jimmy Smith's take, but it has a pleasant 1960s science fiction feel. 

'Agent Double-O Soul' is equipped with some nicely groovy female vocals. You can almost see the singers gyrating in their giant giant birdcages, mini-dresses lit up by the psychedelic colour splashes of the oil lamp. Again with the abrupt cut-off, though. 

There is the occasional bit of very light noise on my LP — some tics deep in the grooves. And the vinyl has a tiny warp. But this copy is probably as good as it gets. A keeper.

Dick Hyman The Man from O.R.G.A.N.(Command RS 891 SD)

(Image credits: all from Discogs. Thank god this isn't my copy with the grubby labels.)

Choo Choo Ch'Boogie by Louis Jordan

A 1982 compilation. One of ten LPs I bought (a quid each or ten for a fiver) from Keith's record shop in Kingston. It was a Music For Pleasure pressing and the cover was so tacky I hesitated, but it was mono, had some proper liner notes and — crucially — had a track called 'Inflation Blues' ("Hey Pres, please cut the price of sugar so I can make my coffee sweet"). So I risked my 50p. 

It actually sounds great, is immaculate and unplayed, and the music is catchy and intoxicating. Smashing snarky sax. And it includes 'Caldonia', which featured so memorably in the James Brown biopic Get On Up. There is a bit of odd crackling echo and the occasional spitting snapping on some tracks — dramatic but very brief distortion. I wondered if it was the system (the valve amps about to explode) but I think it must just be this pressing, or maybe just some tiny specks of crud... 

The informative liner notes, by Bill Williams, make the interesting point that this style of music underwent a revival (including the release of the album in hand, presumably) after Joe Jackson's 1981 LP Jumpin' Jive. 

A highly catchy standout on this excellent compilation is 'Open the Door, Richard'. Apparently 'Tamburitza Boogie' (aka simply 'Tamburitza') features the organ playing of Bill Doggett who would be a major instrumentalist of the rock and roll era. Williams observes that Jordan was a huge influence on the rock and rollers. In fact he left his label Decca just a few months before his producer Milt Gabler 'masterminded' Bill Haley's 'Rock Around the Clock' session. How interesting... Nice album. Good find.

Louis Jordan, Choo Choo Ch'Boogie (Music For Pleasure MFP 50557)

(Image credits: all from Discogs.)

Cop Show Themes by Henry Mancini

On Dusty Groove this is considered something of a holy grail, so when a sealed original pressing turned up (for $40, ouch), I took the plunge. 

It's a sealed, mint copy all right (a cut-out which would originally have been remaindered for a buck or two), but it has a serious and dramatic edge warp at the outer perimeter of the record. Like it's been exposed to heat. 

Oh Christ. (Did I mention the $40?) But the beginning of Side 1 plays perfectly — and the beginning of the record is where the warp lies. Fingers crossed for Side 2. 

Now, the music. I had a CD of this and I'd listened to it and never understood what the fuss was about. Well, the cause of the fuss is immediately evident from the vinyl version. Even though this is flimsy seventies vinyl (1976 to be exact) — probably the cause of the warp — it is sonically splendid. It seems the folks at RCA hadn't forgotten how to make records since the days of Living Stereo. Magnificent clean, open sound. 

The spacey, wailing, soaring electric organ on Mancini's own 'Mystery Movie Theme' by Clare Fischer no doubt appeals to hipsters (it certainly appeals to me) but the loping country music beat of this tune takes a bit of getting used to. The insouciant, scampering electric piano solo by Artie Kane on 'The Streets of San Francisco' is another highlight. In fact 'The Streets of San Francisco' (composed by Patrick Williams) is an odyssey of immense musical virtuosity. My god, it's good. 

And then there's Ronnie Kane's alto sax on 'Bumper's Theme' (from a TV movie of The Blue Knight, based on Joseph Wambaugh's novel) which also has some tasty trumpet and flugelhorn from Graham Young. 'Bumper's Theme' is something of a throwback to the slinky jazz of Mancini's own Peter Gunn, and indeed it's a Mancini composition. Graham Young has a piercing, Mexican sounding solo on 'Kojak'. 

The guitar solo on 'S.W.A.T.' (a Barry DeVorzon composition) by Lee Ritenour is tremendous, reminiscent of his heyday on Steely Dan. 

And since it's a ludicrously short record (about 12 minutes a side!) I don't have to wait too long to find about the effect of the warp on Side 2. It plays fine. There's a bit of surface noise here, but it doesn't seem to be related to the warp. Phew. 

Other solo highlights include the harpsichord (Artie Kane, again) and Don Menza's tenor sax, both on Mike Post's 'The Rockford Files'. It's beginning to seem I'm just listing the soloists who are (helpfully) credited on the back of the album cover, but their contributions really are outstanding. 

What a magnificent record. It just sounds wonderful, even though the sight of this poor mangled piece of vinyl rotating on my turntable is equal measures pitiful and laughable. I'm chuffed that the album also includes a version of Morton Stevens's 'Hawaii Five-O', one of my favourite TV themes of all time. And dig the Roy Lichtenstein-style cover art. 

If like me, you had only previously heard this in digital versions you must seek out the vinyl. It's a revelation.

Henry Mancini, The Cop Show Themes (RCA AFL1-1896)

(Image credits: all from the incredibly useful Discogs.)

RCA's Classic Film Scores

Thank heavens for car boot sales (in America the equivalent would, I suppose, be swap meets). This year I attended the grand local annual event and came back with a bag of 19 LPs (and also a CD, but we'll pretend that didn't happen).

Amongst the treasures on vinyl was this soundtrack album. Ignore the slightly dodgy cover; it's a masterpiece. More importantly, it's one of a series of masterpieces. The music is by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, drawn from various classic movies.

These are not the original original soundtrack recordings. In other words, they're not the music which was originally attached to the print of the film. They are re-recordings. This is almost always the case with so-called "original" soundtrack recordings. But these are great re-recordings, and part of a magnificent series of 15 LPs (some sources say 14) issued by RCA in the early  1970s.

The project was the brainchild of Charles Gerhardt, who conducted the National Philharmonic Orchestra on the recordings. They featured music by Hollywood greats such as Korngold, Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman. The music was superb, the performances were magnificent and the recordings and pressings outstanding — this was the last hurrah of quality vinyl before things went digital.

Elizabeth and Essex is splendid, particularly the Sea Wolf score which features gorgeous use of harmonica. But if you are into the golden age of film music, then really any of these Gerhardt RCAs are worth seeking out. They're well worth hearing on CD, but it's the vinyl you really want, if you can find it.

(Image credits: the LP cover is from the reliable Soundtrack Collector. The photo of Gerhardt at the piano, baton in mouth, is from Classical CD Review.)

Roland Kirk Meets Cy Coleman

One good thing about that fascinating little vixen of an American jazz singer I once knew (Hi, Kat!) was that she introduced me to the music of Cy Coleman. Coleman was an irresistible jazz pianist and a distinguished composer of popular songs and Broadway shows. He's probably best known for classics like Big Spender, Witchcraft, When in Rome and The Best is Yet to Come. Oh yes, and the Playboy Theme.

I just love his stuff, but he is definitely what you'd call mainstream, so I was astonished to discover that Roland Kirk, the mad genius of avant-garde jazz, had recorded a beautiful version of a Cy Coleman song. I only know this thanks to a recent episode of the excellent Radio 3 program Geoffrey Smith's Jazz devoted to Roland Kirk. The song in question is I've Got Your Number and it is just dynamite. 

As soon as I heard it, I had to have it. And when I saw what the cover of the relevant album looked like — a brilliant black and white caricature by Desző Csanàdy — I was totally lost. (Here's another great piece of art by Csanàdy, a pyschedelic book cover.)

Picture me hunched over the computer, after midnight, looking for this LP. I found one in a few minutes and ordered it. A very nice UK flipback copy.

This is a stupendous album, an irresistible blend of the far out and the popular — as exemplified both by the choice of songs (besides the wonderful Coleman composition there is also a lovely cover of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square) and the presence of the Benny Golson Orchestra — hilariously listed on the Radio 3 Geoffrey Smith website as the Benny Goodman Orchestra. 

Now, that really would have been strange bedfellows.

This album is a revelation, and well worth seeking out.

(Image credits: The beautiful cartoon cover on the US LP is from Collector's Frenzy. The British version — the copy I own — is from the Ian Gourlay listing on Gemm, where I bought it (thank you, Ian!). The slightly less wonderful photographic cover is from Music Stack.)

Temptation by Piero Piccioni

Kronos Records is an excellent boutique record label based in Malta who specialise in issuing CDs of rare film scores and other sought after music, most of which have never previously been available in any form. They are run by Godwin Borg, who is an eminently nice guy (Hi, Godwin!). I first got in touch with Kronos when I was in search of some choice items by Piero Umiliani. I bought these and soon began exploring other treats and treasures available from Kronos.

One of the most surprising was by another great Italian composer called Piero — Piero Piccioni. It's a soundtrack for an obscure 1968 film called Temptation. It's a beautiful, jazzy, bossa-influenced score and cut from the same cloth as Piccioni masterpieces like The Tenth Victim, particularly in its use of swirling electric organ and sensual saxophone. Utterly delightful and irresistible. Perfect music for a laid back dinner party, or enlightened easy listening.

On the same CD, which weighs in at a generous 74 minutes, is a TV score for La Figlia del Capitano (The Captain's Daughter) which is a very contrasting piece — bleak, classical and reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann, notably Herrmann's work in his CBS era, such as the Walt Whitman Suite.

Godwin regularly holds sales when selected CDs — such as this one — are offered at tremendous bargain prices. So you should sign up for email updates. And you can also follow Kronos on Facebook.

(Image credits: The CD cover is from the Kronos catalogue. The moody photo of Piccioni is from the Kronos biography page. Thanks, Godwin.)

The Good, the Bad and the Record Store Day

Every year on Record Store Day all sorts of wonderful limited edition albums are released on vinyl. They're available briefly, first come first served, and then they're gone... Unless you're willing to buy them from the profiteers — the "flippers" who buy low and sell high on eBay.

This year I had a list of records I wanted to obtain, and high on that list was the reissue of Ennio Morricone's milestone score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It came with a special illustrated insert sheet featuring different versions of the movie posters from all over the world and was pressed on transparent green vinyl.

I was all set to line up before opening time at my local record store (Banquet in Kingston — hi chaps!). But events conspired to keep me away. (My cat was fatally injured. I spent the day at the vets and sitting beside the phone waiting for the bad news. Not fun.)

But I managed to pick up this Morricone LP at a not-unreasonable price from a decent sort of flipper and I've now had the chance to listen to it. And I'm seriously impressed. And very surprised.

Often records which are pressed on coloured vinyl sound terrible. (Remind me to tell you about the orange Bride of Frankenstein some time.) So I'm always wary of anything that isn't plain old black. But this Record Store Day Morricone sounds terrific.

Indeed, I'm hearing details on here I've never noticed before. So much so that I'm wondering if they used alternate versions of some of the tracks. I'm going to do a comparison listening with other releases of the LP which I've got, and I shall report back. 

But in the meantime, this is well worth getting hold of, if you can find a copy at a reasonable price. (It originally retailed for about £30 in the UK and $30 in the USA.)

(Image credits: the cover shot is from groovy little Dusty Groove. My favourite record store in the whole world — sorry, Sister Ray! the Japanese movie poster is from Illustraction Gallery. The Italian one is from the Movie Poster Shop.)

A Ligeti Odyssey

Like virtually everyone else of my generation I first became aware of the extraordinary music of György Ligeti — pronounced "Jurge" (rhymes with "surge") "Liggetty" (rhymes with higgetty-piggetty) — through Kubrick's use of it in 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

Ligeti wasn't entirely pleased by this exposure or, some say, by the fact that his music had been distorted in the film. 

You can read more about that here, but in the end Kubrick and Ligeti settled out of court and Ligeti came to be pleased by the association of his music with 2001. Kubrick, for his part, would return to Ligeti's music for The Shining.

These observations have been prompted by an excellent documentary on BBC Radio 3 about the life and work of Ligeti. It's fascinating and informative and Ligeti comes across as charmingly unpretentious. 

He describes how the Fourth Movement of his Piano Concerto, sometimes called The Fractal Movement was actually inspired by a Marx Brothers movie.

In Night at the Opera, Groucho packs his tiny ship's cabin with visitors, including a stream of waiters bringing him boiled eggs. The room rapidly fills to bursting point, just as the sparse sound world of the Fourth Movement begins steadily more dense. "It's not the Fractal Movement," said Ligeti with amusement. "It's the Boiled Egg Movement."

Even more appealing to me, it reveals that Ligeti admired the work of Henry Mancini and was influenced by him, consulting Mancini's book on orchestration and studying works like the Pink Panther Theme. Suddenly György Ligeti doesn't seem such a daunting, austere or formidable figure, but an approachable musician of genius.

There was also a first rate program of music accompanying the documentary on Radio 3, though by the time you read this it will probably have expired. The documentary however, looks like it will be available indefinitely. Have a listen.

(Image credits: The 2001 cover is from Amazon. The LP of the Shining, with great cover are by Saul Bass — and a surprisingly rare album — is from Flickr courtesy of William Creswell. The Pink Panther is from Jazz dot Com. Thank you all.)

Finian’s Rainbow

I'm not normally a fan of Broadway musicals. To be frank I often find them too screamingly camp. Some I cotton to immediately — the noirish and sexy classics directed by Bob Fosse, like Cabaret and Chicago (both of which had songs by Kander and Ebb) are just great. But, as a rule, most Broadway songs need to be put through the purifying charcoal filter of jazz before I can endure them.

On the other hand, I love the songs of lyricist Yip Harburg. His left wing masterpieces like Buddy Can You Spare a Dime and, especially, Dusty Shoes seem to me powerful, moving and relevant. Not to mention brilliantly written. My admiration for E.Y. Harburg ('Yip' is a nickname, Yiddish for squirrel, given to him when he was a skinny redheaded kid dashing everywhere) has even led me to reassess The Wizard of Oz (yes, he's the guy who penned those blood-chilling words, "Somewhere over the rainbow...").

The one Yip Harburg musical I really wanted to catch was Finian's Rainbow (Music by Burton Lane, lyrics by Harburg, book by Harburg and Fred Saidy). I used to assume this was some kind of cod Irish nonsense about Leprechauns and crocks of gold. Well, it does feature both of those items, but it's set in the deep south of the USA and wrestles with issues of racism and hostility to immigrants. It features this great one-liner: "My family has been having trouble with immigrants ever since we came to this country."

It also features some truly classic songs, including Old Devil Moon. So when an acclaimed production turned up at the Charing Cross Theatre I zipped along to see it like an eager squirrel. Smart move. It was an outstanding production with a notably jazzy score played by some gifted pit musicians. And Christina Bennington was a knockout in the role of Sharon.

If you get a chance to see this production — adapted by Charlotte Moore, directed by Phil Willmott — drop everything and rush along. In the meantime you can listen to the superb (and jazzy) version recorded in 1963 by the Reprise Musical Repertory Theatre, Frank Sinatra's record label, which turned me on to the glories of these songs in the first place.

(Image credits: The poster for the production I saw is from West End Whingers. The Reprise LP cover is from EIL.)

Moira Stuart on Sunday Nights

I used to have a Sunday night ritual. I'd retire to bed early, set the sleep timer on my radio and drift off listening to the best music show of the week. This was on Radio 2 and it was the Russell Davies Song Show. It was magnificent — erudite, informative and full of good music. Occasionally it veered down musical byways which were not my ways. My kind of music is jazz, big band and swing and what they did to the great American (and occasionally British) songbook. But even on the oddest tangents, the huge charm and intelligence of Russell Davies kept me interested and listening.

And then, just like that, the Russell Davies Song Show was gone. 

Some mad axeman at the BBC simply decided to get rid of it. It was too good to be allowed to live. I was bereft — and furious. Cue a cutting letter to the Radio Times. (They didn't publish it, of course.) 

But things change. And on Sunday nights on Radio 2, things kept on changing. After Russell Davies's departure there were further alterations to the schedule. And Don Black's late night (11pm) show has now given way to Moira Stuart.

And Moira Stuart is just wonderful. She did a fine, short, series of programs about great jazzmen for Radio 2 last year, and that has now paved the way to her regular slot. I love Moira Stuart's show. It's described in the schedules as "the best in easy listening and timeless standards." 

But it's much more heavy on the jazz than that suggests — last week she played Mark Murphy, Ramsey Lewis, Mel Tormé, Julie London and Count Basie, in addition to the Hi-Lo's and Nelson Riddle. Or how about the week before — Blossom Dearie, Carmen McRae, Horace Silver, Oscar Peterson, Georgie Fame, Billie Holiday and Joni Mitchell.

Moira Stuart has great, eclectic taste, playing famous performers alongside rarities like the Italian singer Mario Biondi or Brazil's Elis Regina. And she has introduced me to people I'd never heard of before, treasures like the Dutch chanteuse Trijntje Oosterhuis. 

Moira's knowledgeable, crediting the great jazz photographer Pete Turner with the classic cover for Wes Monrgomery's Road Song. 

She's perceptive, pointing out how Lalo Schifrin's composition 'The Wave' was a precursor of his unforgettable theme for Mission Impossible. 
 
And she's witty, remarking after a space age Esquivel exotica track, "You can almost see the flying saucers landing."

A wonderful show. Check it out here.

(Image credits. The LP cover images are all from the BBC web pages for various episodes of the show. Like this one. And this one. And this one. Yawn, and this one... And so is the shot of Moira herself.)

Star Trek by Gerald Fried et al

I've recently had a run of buying soundtrack music from TV shows of the 1960s and 70s and it's providing a lot of pleasurable listening. There's a wealth of wonderful material lying more or less forgotten in the studio vaults. So when I saw a bargain copy of a 3 CD set of vintage Star Trek scores, I thought about it for a split second and then scooped it up.

The deciding factor for me was the presence in this collection of Gerald Fried. Fried is an intriguing composer. He was a friend of Stanley Kubrick and got his start on Kubrick's first feature Fear and Desire. The groovy label Film Score Monthly have released an excellent 2 CD set of Fried's obscure horror scores which provide an excellent starting point for any acquaintance with his work.

The Star Trek set consists of the music from six episodes, two of them by Fried, three by Alexander Courage  and one by Sol Kaplan. When I started listening to the discs, naturally enough I was mostly concentrating on Fried's compositions. Yet Alexander Courage also immediately made an impression. 

Courage wrote the famed Star Trek main title theme which begins with Jerry Goldsmith-style Americana horns and then transforms into Les Baxter-style exotica female voices. For some reason I thought his music for the series would alll sound the same, but it's spiritedly diverse, evoking everything from crime jazz to electronic sonar noises.

But it was Gerald Fried who is the hero of this week's post, particularly his music for the episode Amok Time. This lovely score is distinguished by the unexpected presence of an electric bass guitar, an inspired choice and an unexpected one in a richly orchestral science fiction context. The bass guitar features strongly on the theme Contrary Order, with mysterioso strings. That electric bass creeps back in, giving a Spaghetti Western feel after some beautifully angular Hebraic strings, on Marriage Council. And the bass is back on Processional, twanging fatly in a track that sounds like a stripped down version of a march from Rozsa's Ben Hur, with ram horns that call to mind Jerry Goldsmith's Planet of the Apes themes. Meanwhile, The Ritual, another stand out track, is also reminiscent of Alex North's Cleopatra.

In fact, this cue The Ritual (full title The Ritual/Ancient Battle/2nd Kroykah) has achieved legendary status among fans, known simply as the 'Star Trek Fight Music'. It has appeared in the movie Cable Guy and the TV cartoons Futurama and The Simpsons. These links, showing the various uses of the music were helpfully listed in Wikipedia's Gerald Fried entry.

If you only listen to one of these Star Trek CDs I recommend the one featuring this music from Fried's Amok Time and Sol Kaplan's Doomsday Machine. But I suspect any of the releases will repay your attention. This is wonderful stuff and it emphasises the point that I'm coming to realise: vintage TV music is a treasure trove. 

(Image credits: The cover shot of the boxed set is from Zyx Music. The individual CD covers are all from the extremely useful Soundtrack Collector.)