Elliot Lawrence

Elliot Lawrence started at the top as a Broadway conductor. His first show as music director was Bye, Bye Birdie, and he won a Tony for his second - How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. But before director Gower Champion chose him for Birdie, the 35-year-old Lawrence had already spent 15 years as a bandleader.

Lawrence died early this month at age 96. To celebrate his life, this post will present his first-ever LP, dating from 1950, back when he was one of the most popular bandleaders on the nation's campuses and in its ballrooms. Then I will point you to the singles blog, where I am uploading a few of his 1951 records for King, where he surprisingly recorded a cover of "Sixty Minute Man" and a country tune with Cowboy Copas. 

You can find my earlier posts of Lawrence's music here, and a remembrance on this site.

College Prom

One of my earlier Lawrence offerings involved his Decca album Moonlight on the Campus. It was actually the bandleader's second release for that label; the first was today's subject, the 10-inch College Prom LP.

Johnny Mandel

It's quickly apparent from listening as to why Lawrence was a campus favorite. It's hard to imagine smoother, more danceable music. The arrangements are by another notable and long-lived musician, Johnny Mandel, who died just last year. (My tribute to Mandel and an upload of his The Americanization of Emily score is here.)

Mandel spent few years as Lawrence's staff arranger after several years as a trombonist in the bands of the time. Even then he was composing; his composition "Hershey Bar" was recorded by Stan Getz, also in 1950.

The College Prom music is not jazz, although Lawrence's band included such musicians as Herbie Steward, Phil Urso and Ollie Wilson. That said, you can hear Steward's obbligatos in some songs, and Lawrence solos on piano throughout - politely, of course. Mandel does manage to work some boppish turns of phase into "I Can't Get Started."

Rosalind Patton

Vocalist Rosalind Patton, who had been with Lawrence since his high school band, can be heard on five of the eight songs. She was a good singer, although her phrasing here was not without some of the affectations of the time.

The LP, which comes from my collection, is very well recorded.

Singles on King

Following his two Decca LPs - and singles drawn from their contents - Lawrence moved on to the King label, mainly known for country and R&B fare. And perhaps predictably, the king of King Syd Nathan had him cross over into those styles.

More about those records on the singles blog.

Elliot Lawrence leads the band, circa 1950

Opening Night at 'Promises, Promises'

Burt Bacharach and Hal David

Burt Bacharach and Hal David were the pre-eminent songwriters of the 1960s, but they were neophytes on Broadway when their Promises, Promises opened in late 1968.

That debut was highly anticipated and did not disappoint, with reviews that ranged from respectful to ecstatic, and a subsequent run that lasted for more than three years. Even so, Promises, Promises did not win the 1969 Tony for Best Musical - that honor went to 1776, with a score by Sherman Edwards, another Brill Building veteran who had written songs with Hal David. 

Promises, Promises was a hot property, so an original cast album was rushed to market by United Artists Records. That company also sent well-known disk jockey Fred Robbins to the opening night and the cast party to interview the production principals and theatre nobility who turned out for the occasion. The result was a one-hour promotional LP sent out to DJs around the country. 

This post combines the original cast album and that promotional album, adding the demo tracks that Bacharach and studio vocalists recorded in advance of the production.

The Cast Album

While I love the score and the performers immoderately, I have to admit that I've never seen Promises, Promises on stage, nor have I watched the Billy Wilder-I.A.L. Diamond film The Apartment, which formed the basis of Neil Simon's Promises, Promises book.

Jerry Orbach

Going on the aural evidence, the musical was well cast, starting with Jerry Orbach as protagonist Chuck Baxter. Orbach made his name in the enormously long-running off-Broadway musical, The Fantasticks, where in 1960 he introduced Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt's "Try to Remember." He had recently finished a long run in Bruce Jay Friedman's off-Broadway comedy Scuba Duba. 

Some critics complained about Orbach's singing in Promises, Promises, and in truth it is not note-perfect. Bacharach's music is not easy to sing - even the supposedly folk-style "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" (which is actually a straightforward pop song).

Orbach did have a strong, appealing voice, and more importantly he was experienced in comedy and could make sympathetic the morally-ambiguous character of Chuck Baxter. This everyman quality was to become his most famous attribute later in life in his role as Detective Lennie Briscoe on the long-running television program Law & Order.

In contrast, the excellent actor Edward Winter played the all-too-caddish J.D. Sheldrake, whose own self-doubts are only revealed in the superb song "Wanting Things." Winter, too, was a fallible singer, but emotion is key to his performance, and he is skillful in that regard.

Edward Winter and Jill O'Hara

Female lead Jill O'Hara, who played Fran Kubelik, was a strong singer who made her name in the landmark off-Broadway production of Hair. Like Orbach, she had introduced an iconic song: "Good Morning, Starshine." In Promises, Promises she sings two of the finest numbers, both sadly overlooked these days - "Whoever You Are (I Love You)" and "Knowing When to Leave." Her powerful and passionate singing is immensely appealing. Painfully shy, O'Hara later withdrew from the Broadway stage into regional theatre and cabaret performances. Her older sister Jenny, in contrast, has been a consistently busy actor - including as a successor to Jill in the original run of Promises, Promises.

Promises, Promises was the first big success for the 25-year-old choreographer Michael Bennett, one of the most important figures in the musical theatre of the time. Fortunately, his frenetic staging of the song "Turkey Lurkey Time" was reproduced for the 1969 Tony Award show and can be seen on YouTube, as danced by Baayork Lee, Julane Stites and the illustrious Donna McKechnie, who was later briefly married to Bennett.

Turkey Lurkey Time

The download includes the Playbill from the original production, several reviews of both the staging and the cast album and many additional production photos. There also is a fascinating article about how Bacharach recording engineer Phil Ramone reproduced the sound of the composer's recordings in the theater. Considering how meticulous Bacharach is about sound, it's surprising that one of the more recent reissues of this recording went so far as to correct the pitch of some vocal passages. I wonder if that was necessary. Bacharach himself is hardly a virtuoso vocalist. He perhaps is more concerned with feeling than accuracy.  

The young Jonathan Tunick is credited with the orchestrations for the show, which ate similar to the ones that Bacharach himself produced for his pop recordings. Tunick of course later went on to a distinguished career, including a close association with Stephen Sondheim.

Jerry Orbach, Jill O'Hara, director Robert Moore, Neil Simon, producer David Merrick, Edward Winter with Burt Bacharach at the piano

Opening Night at the Shubert Theater

Fred Robbins

The promotional LP, Opening Night at the Shubert Theatre, was primarily taped at the cast party held at the El Morocco night club on the East side of Manhattan. Longtime disc jockey Fred Robbins interviewed the celebrities on hand, who apparently were exclusively friends of the principals, along with Bacharach's parents and then-wife, actor Angie Dickinson.

Three of the interviewees were identified with Hello, Dolly!, producer David Merrick's greatest hit: the original Dolly Levi, Carol Channing, her successor, Pearl Bailey, and Cab Calloway, who had taken over the role of Horace Vandergelder.

El Morocco

Also caught on mic were Neil Simon, Herb Alpert, Milton Berle, director Sidney Lumet, columnist Leonard Lyons, and actors George Segal and Ben Gazzara.

In sending the record to radio stations, United Artists hoped they would play it as an hour-long special. The download includes the instructions to program directors as to how this could be accomplished, along with timings of the various interview blocks and excerpts from the cast album.

My copy of the promo LP was apparently unplayed, but still had a few pressing faults that I hope won't be too distracting.

The download also includes an article on the musical's opening night and cast party.

The Demo Recordings

In June 1968, Bacharach engaged several of the best studio vocalists to make demo recordings of his Promises, Promises score. The resulting 10-song set is particularly interesting because it includes three numbers that did not make it into the Broadway production. Two were cut in the out-of-town tryouts: "Tick Tock Goes The Clock" and "What Am I Doing Here?" Another was not used at all: the curiously odious "Let's Pretend We're Grown Up."

Kenny Karen

Two of the singers have appeared on this blog before, if tangentially: Rose Mary Jun and Bernie Knee. Both are fine talents, and Jun is very convincing in "Whoever You Are (I Love You)." The other principal vocalist is the young Kenny Karen, later a prolific singer of ad jingles. When you listen to Karen, you may notice pre-echoes of B.J. Thomas' vocal approach on the slightly later Bacharach hit, "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head."

The vocal sound is good, but the piano is not in great shape and is too loud.

Burt on Stage

Considering the immense success of Promises, Promises, it may be surprising that Bacharach has never attempted another Broadway book musical - although there have been revues using his songs, including a planned musical staging of My Best Friend's Wedding. He and Hal David did compose the songs for the 1973 film musical of Lost Horizon, a failure that broke up Bacharach and David's partnership. (You can read Roger Ebert's evisceration of the film here.) 

But then, it may have been difficult to reproduce Promises' success, considering that the talents working on that production were among the best the theatre had to offer. We can be grateful that they did come together for this one notable achievement.

More on the Matt Dennis Transcriptions

My friend and occasional collaborator John Morris has come up with a discography of Matt Dennis' MacGregor transcriptions. This allows me to shed some light on the recording dates (years, at least) for the various songs in my recent post, and provides information on other recordings that have yet to come to light.

Here is a listing of all Dennis' transcriptions. The items included in my post are in blue boldface. Note that as I speculated, these recordings all date from the 1940s. "Angel Eyes" was recorded in 1946, soon after it was written.

1945

Matt Dennis/Eddie Skrivanek: Will You Still Be Mine/ Everything Happens to Me/ Let's Get Away From It All/ The Night We Called It a Day

1946

Matt Dennis: Angel Eyes/ Hitch Up the Sleigh/ Tonight Is Ours/ Natch/ I Haven't the Heart

October 1947

Matt Dennis: Lazy Countryside/ A Fellow Needs a Girl/ Saturday Date/ White Christmas/ I Still Get Jealous

November 1947

Matt Dennis: Rock Me to Sleep/ True/ Penthouse Serenade (When We're Alone)/ They Can't Take that Away from Me/ Can't We Be Friends?

January 1948

Matt Dennis: You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me/ Street of Dreams/ Easy to Love/ Things that Couldn't Happen/ Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

April 1948 (?)

Matt Dennis Trio: Sheik of Araby/ Little Kiss Each Morning/ On Revival Day/ I Only Have Eyes for You/ ’Way Down Yonder in New Orleans

Matt Dennis Trio: Riders in the Sky/ Don't Blame Me/ By the Bend of the River/ I'm Through with Love/ Sometimes I'm Happy.

Note: Birth of the Blues and Yes Sir, That's My Baby with Eddie Skrivanek's Sextette from Hunger apparently come from commercial issues, presumably from the same period.

Nikolai Sokoloff Conducts

Three music directors preceded George Szell to the Cleveland Orchestra podium. Two - Artur Rodziński and Erich Leinsdorf - have been represented here, but founding music director Nikolai Sokoloff has not. He is something of a forgotten figure, but the aural evidence is that he was a very good musician who quickly built the orchestra into a polished ensemble.

Today's program includes several of the recordings he made in Cleveland in 1924-28, along with one of the two LPs he produced with his La Jolla orchestra early in the 1950s.

Sokoloff in Cleveland

Sokoloff (1886-1965) was born in Kiev but resident in the US from his early teens. He studied at Yale and with Charles Martin Loeffler and Vincent d'Indy. In 1917, he was conducting San Francisco People’s Philharmonic Orchestra when Cleveland's Adella Prentiss Hughes came to call. Not long after, he became the founding director of the Cleveland Orchestra. Its first concert was in late 1918.

Nikolai Sokoloff and Adella Prentiss Hughes with an early example of a favorite publicity pose: "admiring the new record," in this case the 1812 Overture

It wasn't long before Brunswick records signed the orchestra. Its first effort - and the first recording in our set - was an abridged acoustic version of the "1812 Overture," made in New York in January 1924. It's a credible performance and well recorded for the time. Even then Sokoloff had developed a reputation for emotional performances, but this one is restrained, without the cannon blasts or other embellishments that have found their way onto later records. The orchestra is already a disciplined ensemble, as best as one can tell from the acoustic recording and altered instrumentation.

1926 ad

This impression is borne out by out next record - the Act III Prelude and Bridal Chorus from Wagner's Lohengrin. By this time (May 1926), Brunswick had moved on to electrical recording. It had, however, adopted the so-called GE "Light-Ray" method, which was inferior to the Western Electric process used by other companies. Mark Obert-Thorn, who has produced an edition of all Sokoloff's Cleveland recordings, wrote of the GE system, "At lower volume levels, the results could be acceptable; however, anything forte and above came out congested and harshly distorted." Actually, the sound on the Wagner discs is not nearly as bad as this might suggest, although inferior to other recordings of the time.

Also from these May 1926 sessions came Halvorsen's "Entry March of the Boyars." The sessions were held in the still-existing Masonic Auditorium, the orchestra's usual site in those pre-Severance Hall days. It was a good place for recording, also used by Decca-London for its Cleveland recordings during the Lorin Maazel years.

Masonic Auditorium

In November 1926, the orchestra became a pioneer in radio broadcasting with the first in a series of programs transmitted by Cleveland station WTAM and sponsored by the Medusa Cement Corp., both still in existence. While the broadcast is lost to time, I've included its program in the download.

Sokoloff's final Brunswick session, held in New York on May 8, 1928, was devoted to Sibelius' "Valse Triste" and the "Polovtsian Dances" from Borodin's Prince Igor. The Sibelius and one of the two Borodin discs are in the download.

Sokoloff's downfall in Cleveland was rooted both in music and manners. This selection of recordings demonstrate that he was a talented conductor and orchestra builder. He was, however, most inclined to the Romantic and contemporary composers. The latter put off the paying customers; his indulgent approach to the classicists and even Romantics tested the patience of some critics.

Meanwhile, relations with at least some members of the orchestra were strained. The download includes an 1926 Associated Press article reporting on an orchestra petition "charging Sokoloff with conduct unbecoming a gentleman." Such conduct apparently involved insulting the abilities and intelligence of some of the musicians. For his part, Sokoloff blandly observed, "The artists' contracts say they must do as I tell them."

These dust-ups apparently continued until the orchestra trustees didn't renew his contract in 1933.

Sokoloff's achievements in Cleveland are undeniable, however. Obert-Thorn has written that, "What we hear on these recordings is an ensemble that already sounds superior to most of its European counterparts at the time, save perhaps for Mengelberg’s Concertgebouw Orchestra." That is remarkable for an orchestra founded less than a decade before.

The download includes label scans and other ephemera, plus Obert-Thorn's discography of Sokoloff's recordings with the ensemble. 

Most of these recordings were remastered from lossless originals on Internet Archive, some of which have noisy surfaces. The 1812 Overture comes from a 1970s Cleveland Orchestra promotional LP.

You can find all Sokoloff's Brunswicks in Obert-Thorn's transfers on the Pristine Classical site. They include the first recording of Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2.

Editorial cartoon, circa 1926

New Music in La Jolla

Perhaps strangely, Sokoloff's next post after Cleveland was as the director of the New Deal's Federal Music Project. He then led the Seattle Symphony for a few years, and finally founded the Orchestra of the Musical Arts Society of La Jolla, in Southern California. There, he made his final recordings, for the small Alco company, of contemporary pieces by Norman Dello Joio, Benjamin Britten and Bohuslav Martinů.

Alice Mock in 1927

I've included his Britten-Martinů disc, recorded in 1950. The Martinů work is his delightful "Sinfonietta La Jolla," written for the ensemble and beautifully performed by its members. The Britten work is his settings of Rimbaud called "Les Illuminations." Here the work is sung by the little known but excellent Alice Mock, with sensitive backing by Sokoloff's orchestra. This may have been the first recording of the Britten.

Alco's recording quality is vivid, except for some strange balances and a cramped quality, both likely the fault of a too-small studio. The download includes complete scans and reviews from the New York Times, Saturday Review, High Fidelity, the American Record Guide and The New Records. I've also included texts and translations of the Rimbaud poetry.

The Matt Dennis Transcriptions, Plus a Bonus

Nearly a decade ago, I posted a set of 12 transcriptions that singer-songwriter-pianist Matt Dennis made for the C.P. MacGregor company circa 1947. They were derived from a Tops budget LP from the 1950s.

Today I am revisiting those 12 songs and adding 11 more from the same source. Nine of the new items came from a Glendale LP from the 1970s; two are from a MacGregor 78 that I cleaned up from a lossless post on the Internet Archive.

As I wrote on the occasion of another Dennis post (a compilation of his six Capitol singles), "These days, Matt Dennis is mostly known for his compositions - 'Angel Eyes,' 'Violets for Your Furs,' 'The Night We Called It a Day,' 'Everything Happens to Me,' all available in superb Sinatra renditions - but he also was one of the finest singers of the post-war era."

For today's post, in addition to this augmented Dennis collection, we have a new compilation from David Federman, "It's a Great Life If You Don't Weaken." More about both sets below.

The Matt Dennis Transcriptions

Dennis had the good fortune of working with the Tommy Dorsey band relatively early in his career. A young singer named Sinatra also was in residence there, and it so happened that Dennis' songs were perfectly suited to The Voice. For Frank, Dennis wrote "Everything Happens to Me," "Violets for Your Furs," "Let's Get Away from It All," "In the Blue of Evening" and "There's No You." Meanwhile, Connie Haines had a hit with his "Will You Still Be Mine."

Matt Dennis

This successful interlude was interrupted by World War II and the armed services. At the end of the war, Dennis became a single act. His first recordings - dating from mid-1946 to mid-1947 - were with Paul Weston for the Capitol label, as noted above.

At about the same time, Dennis recorded at least 23 songs for MacGregor transcriptions, one of the outfits that supplied recorded music to radio stations. I haven't been able to find a MacGregor discography, so I don't know exactly how many songs Dennis did for them.

Whatever the total, I suspect all the recordings date from about 1947. In this collection, two of the songs were introduced in that year: "A Fellow Needs a Girl" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's show Allegro and "Lazy Countryside" from Disney's film Fun and Fancy Free. Author Will Friedwald has speculates that some of the recordings may come from the 1950s, because Dennis' "Angel Eyes" wasn't introduced until the 1953 film Jennifer. However, the song was actually written in 1946 or 1947 (sources differ), so I believe the MacGregor version included here comes from that period.

Beside "Angel Eyes," this transcription collection includes Dennis' "Everything Happens to Me" and "The Night We Called It a Day," among the songs previously mentioned. Also from his pen are "Natch," "Tonight Is Ours" and the excellent seasonal composition "Hitch Up the Sleigh."

Dennis wrote "Tonight Is Ours" with Eddie Skrivanek, whom  Friedwald identifies as a MacGregor bandleader. Presumably Skrivanek conducts the orchestra that is heard on a few cuts. He also was responsible for the final two songs, "Birth of the Blues" and "Yes Sir, That's My Baby," interpreted by his "Sextette from Hunger" Dixieland ensemble with vocals by Dennis.

Dennis performs the other songs solo or with a rhythm section. The sound on these sides is at least serviceable. The best are the Sextette recordings, which came directly from the 78 transcriptions. The worst are a few songs from the Tops LP that have had reverb added.

The Sextette from Hunger, Skrivanek at center

Bonus: 'It's a Great Life If You Don't Weaken'

David Federman's latest compilation takes its title from a 1930 George Olsen record, one of the 32 in this set. Included are many of my favorite artists - Duke Ellington, Sue Raney, Mildred Bailey, Jack Teagarden, Jackie Paris, Buddy Clark, Chet Baker among them.

David writes, "This is an unapologetic exercise in optimism that celebrates the merriment to be found in the monastic lives we've been forced to live the last 15 months and may resume if deviant Covid strains start counterpunching the vaccines we've developed to fight them. In short, the purpose of this 32-song mix is to savor the moment and various forms of relief for doing so." And that it does very well.