A Merry Mancini Christmas and More

This post presents Henry Mancini's well-known holiday LP A Merry Mancini Christmas, along with other seasonal favorites by the great composer and arranger. This is a joint post with Christmas music maestro Ernie.

To the LP we've added five songs from the Mancini catalog along with three voice tracks from the man himself (Hank, not Ernie).

Note that Mancini made a great many recordings, so I may have missed some seasonal items. Let me know if anything comes to mind. Also note that there are a few deliberate omissions, which are explained at the end of the post.

A Merry Mancini Christmas

Despite what the cover photo may suggest, this is not a familial enterprise a la The Sinatra Family Wish You a Merry Christmas, even though both Henry's wife Ginny O'Connor Mancini and his daughter Monica (at right) were singers. No, it's the usual orchestral and choral effort you might expect from Hank.

Most of the LP is standard fare - "The Little Drummer Boy," "The Christmas Song," "White Christmas" and a medley of "Jingle Bells" and "Sleigh Ride" on side one, and three carol medleys on the other side. 

The one exception is a Mancini instrumental called "Carol for Another Christmas," whose ambiguous title is perhaps appropriate to a diffident melody that never achieves Mancini levels of memorability. The melody comes from a 1964 Rod Serling-scripted television film of that name, which was an updating of Dickens' A Christmas Carol for the age of nuclear weapons. Mancini wrote the score.

All in all, the LP makes for pleasant listening, but does not entirely fulfill the high expectations of the Mancini fan who happens to be writing these words. That said, it's a favorite of many people.

More Songs and Voice Tracks

The extra items start with a short Christmas greeting from Mancini, courtesy Ernie, followed by Hank's excellent version of Claude Thornhill's "Snowfall," which he makes sound new, partially by taking the ostinato away from the piano and giving it to Bob Bain's guitar. This selection comes from the terrific 1959 LP The Mancini Touch.

The composer returned to the winter theme in his fantastic score for the 1963 film Charade. This is in the form of his "Latin Snowfall," which is unrelated to Thornhill's tune.

"Latin Snowfall" is an Ernie contribution, as are all the following items. First we have the old favorite "Baby, It's Cold Outside." It always sounds strange to me sung by a group as it is here, but Mancini makes it work. This is from his 1966 set The Academy Award Songs. (Frank Loesser won an Oscar for the song's use in 1949's Neptune's Daughter, even though he wrote the song five years earlier.)

At right is the Army Reserve promo cover

Next we have a minute-long holiday greeting that Hank taped for the US Army Reserve in 1976. Mancini was a polished presenter, particularly considering that this was likely a cold reading.

The two final songs come from one of the Goodyear's final promotional Christmas LPs - Henry Mancini Selects Great Songs of Christmas by Great Artists of Our Time, from 1975. Hank anointed himself as one of the great artists and who can blame him?

The Goodyear promo

Mancini's numbers lead off the LP and close it. They are "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" and "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve? / Auld Lang Syne." You can tell these arrangements are from that era because of the prominent electric bass line throughout. The album also include a Mancini recording of "White Christmas," but this is taken from A Merry Mancini Christmas.

To end the set, we have New Year's greetings from Hank. This comes from the same circa 1965 promo record that also contained the Christmas greetings mentioned above.

Omissions

Ernie reminded me that Mancini's score for the film Gaily, Gaily includes a number called "Christmas Eve on Skid Row," which is in the form of a wrenching soliloquy by Melina Mercouri that ends in death. We left it out.

Also, he notes that Mancini wrote the score for Santa Claus: the Movie in 1985, with songs by Leslie Bricusse. It's so much later than these other materials that it's not included here.

Thanks again to Ernie for his sterling contributions and good cheer, and be sure to join him on his blog for his traditional onslaught of Christmas audio goodies. Also, if you are interested in collecting the Goodyear Christmas LPs, Ernie has a checklist available on Discogs.

LINK

Anita Kerr Sings Mancini and Bacharach-David

After presenting Anita Kerr's two earliest albums a short time ago, I wanted to do a follow up of two of her best albums from the 1960s.

The first, devoted to the music of Henry Mancini, is with her Nashville group and was made shortly before she moved to Los Angeles in 1965. The second, with her new West Coast ensemble, comes from 1969 and is her take on the songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David.

We Dig Mancini

Throughout the first half of the 1960s, Kerr worked for RCA Victor as a singer, ensemble leader and producer.

For this excellent LP of Mancini's compositions, she worked with her long-time Nashville associates. From left on the cover above, they are Gil Wright, Kerr, Dottie Dillard and Louis Nunley.

The material is generally selected from among Mancini's greatest hits at the time - such songs as "Charade," "Baby Elephant Walk," "The Days of Wine and Roses" and "Moon River" from films, and selections from the television shows Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky.

Some of the most interesting items are those that are lesser known - the theme from the Richard Boone television show, "Too Little Time" from The Glenn Miller Story (the oldest item in the batch, dating from 1954) and "The Sweetheart Tree" from The Great Race.

In this set, the group (identified here as the Anita Kerr Quartet) have assimilated some jazz influences - even resorting to some arranged scat singing - and at points can sound a bit like their contemporaries The Swingle Singers.

It's quite a good record, and well recorded in London (not sure why there) by the young Glyn Johns, who was just then coming into his own as the Rolling Stones' engineer.

The Anita Kerr Singers Reflect on the Hits of Burt Bacharach and Hal David

Kerr moved to Los Angeles because it was the center of the recording universe, so it offered her more opportunities to work as an orchestral arranger as well as a vocal group leader.

And soon she was doing so, working on many albums with the immensely popular Rod McKuen, providing backdrops to his poetizing with the San Sebastian Strings.

Anita Kerr conducts at a recording session

Meanwhile for her own LPs, she would sing with her new group, provide all arrangements and conduct. She worked throughout the late 1960s with studio singers Gene Merlino and Bob Tebow, and one or the other of B.J. Baker and Jackie Ward.

Ward, who performs on this record, was also known as Robin Ward, and had enjoyed a hit record in 1963 with "Wonderful Summer." Baker was an experienced singer (who parenthetically was at various times married to Mickey Rooney and guitarist Barney Kessel).

Gene Merlino, Anita Kerr, Jackie Ward, Bob Tebow

For me, this record encapsulates the "Kerr sound" because it represents the period during which I began to hear her work. Her sophisticated yet understated arrangements are particularly well suited to the songs of Bacharach and David, with Bacharach's complex rhythmic patterns and lovely melodies allied to the frequently rueful or melancholy lyrics of Hal David. This shows particularly on the lesser known songs, such as "The Windows of the World," "In Between the Heartaches," the wonderful, a capella "A House Is Not a Home" and Promises, Promises' "Whoever You Are, I Love You." The latter has some gorgeous interplay between Kerr and Ward.

In 1970, Kerr was off to Europe and more successes - but she perhaps never surpassed her work in the 1960s.

These recordings come from my collection. The sound is excellent. 

Summer Love

Summer Love is one of the earlier and more obscure Henry Mancini scores on record. By 1958, when Summer Love came out, he had already scored dozens of films, but it wasn't until that year that he began achieving renown for his work - on Touch of Evil, and especially for his wildly popular Peter Gunn theme.

Summer Love is a sequel to a 1956 film called Rock Pretty Baby. Both were early examples of the rock and roll film, although neither actually featured any rock and roll musicians. Both movies revolved around a faux band called Jimmy Daley and the Ding-A-Lings, a curiously improbable name, certainly not designed to impress. "Hey, why don't you come out and hear my band?" "Yeah, which band is that?" "Jimmy Daley and The Ding-A-Lings." It's embarrassing.

Jimmy Daley himself is played by John Saxon, and the closest the film comes to using an actual rock and roll musician is to dub Saxon's vocal on the title tune with Kip Tyler, an obscure rockabilly singer. Also in the Ding-A-Lings is Rod McKuen, cast as Ox (speaking of improbable names). In the film, Rod sings a calypso song that he wrote, and it isn't bad! This was when Rod was putting out records of ballads and folk songs for Decca and making movies like this. It was several years before his maudlin poetry became popular.

Also making an appearance is wide-eyed country singer Molly Bee, who was on American television at the time. I have to admit that I was impressed by her - she has a very good set of pipes. Molly duets with Rod on To Know You Is to Love You. This isn't the Phil Spector tune; it was written by Mancini with lyricist Bill Carey (You've Changed). Molly also does a song called the Magic Penny (here called Love Is Something), one of the best-known works by folksinger Malvina Reynolds (Little Boxes) and one of its earliest recordings.

Malvina Reynolds, Rod McKuen, Molly Bee . . . certainly no rock and roll there. A Mancini studio group does provide some ersatz rock on several other numbers. Jazz musicians attempting to rock is like dogs trying to walk on their hind legs.

Mancini's rock simulations generally sound like big band charts reconfigured for guitars and sax. One even is reminiscent of Intermission Riff. The studio group is most convincing when an anonymous honkin' sax puts out some 50s-style r&b.

Mancini also throws in a stroll, and a few Shearing-esque numbers. He gets closest to the familiar Mancini sound on such numbers as Theme for a Crazy Chick and Kool Breeze, which would not be out of place on his more popular LPs of the next few years.

As a rock LP, this is a complete washout, but it does have its high points otherwise and the material is surprisingly varied.

Written on the Wind; Four Girls in Town

One more in our ongoing series of Hollywood soundtracks from the 1950s on 12-inch LPs. This one brings together several of the biggest names in film scoring.

The music for Written on the Wind seems to have been written by committee. The main theme, here in a pseudoemotive version by the Four Aces, is by Victor Young, with words from that lyric machine Sammy Cahn. The "background music," which presumably means everything else, is by Frank Skinner. Everything, that is, except for the Nacio Herb Brown standard Temptation, which gets inserted here and there.

The real attraction, at least for me, is the other side of the record, which contains a composition called Rhapsody for Four Girls in Town, based on Alex North's music for the movie. The sleeve gives an orchestration credit to the young composer Henry Mancini. Playing the piano is yet another notable, Andre Previn. The music has echoes of everything from Bernstein's West Side Story music to Copland and Gershwin, all in the characteristic Mancini sound of the period. Most enjoyable.

Short technical note: this record says it was processed with the RIAA curve. True on the first side, but not on the second. That side sounds shrill when you play it back that way. I have corrected for that anomaly - clever, eh?

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