© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all
rights reserved.
“Manne’s men do the Peter Gunn music with a kind of
tough-guy cartoon expression, but this was a great combo anyway and Candoli and
Geller seldom knew how to be boring.”
- Richard Cook & Brian Morton, The
Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.
Traditionally,
Monday nights were a “dark night” for gigging musicians.
There were
exceptions, of course. One example that
comes to mind is the Terry Gibbs Dream Band which was made up of studio
musicians who played local gigs around Hollywood
Probably the most
famous, let alone most enduring, Monday off-night gig was the one involving New
York City studio musicians and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra at the
Village Vanguard, a tradition which continues to this very day.
But for me and
many other musicians, one benefit of being off on Mondays was that for a few
years, we all got to catch Peter Gunn when it premiered from 9:00 to 9:30 on Monday nights, on NBC-TV.
It starred Craig
Stevens as Peter Gunn and also starred Lola Albright as his girl, Edie Hart;
Herschel Bernardi as Lt. Jacoby; Hope Emerson as Mother, at whose nightclub
Edie sings. The program was created and directed by Blake Edwards who, in a
stroke of genius, tapped Henry Mancini as its Musical Director. The Executive
Producer was Gordon Oliver, the sponsor was Bristol-Myers and filming was done
at Universal-International Studios in Hollywood
The bonanza of Jazz-on-Television the program launched is described in the following excerpt from Lester Koenig’s insert notes to Shelly
Manne & His Men Play Peter Gunn [Contemporary S 75-60/OJCCD 946-2]:
Peter Gunn is an
adult mystery with a different kind of hero: a private eye who is literate,
suave, well-groomed, and—digs jazz. The weekly show hit the NBC-TV network September
22,1958 , and
zoomed to a success which is, in part, the result of its jazz score, composed
and arranged by Henry Mancini, known as Hank to the leading jazz stars in the Los Angeles
Aside from its own
considerable merits, the fact that a jazz score has created so much attention
is a reflection of the staying power of the new marriage of jazz and TV, a
nuptial which seems to have eclipsed the short-lived, annulled wedding of jazz
and poetry. Jazz has taken an increasing part in the everyday living of the
nation, and a summation of jazz in 1958 reveals, as leading critic Leonard
Feather points out in the February 1959 issue of Playboy:
‘... Jazz — both modern and traditional—filled video screens... CBS'
hour-long show, The Sound of Jazz... the first Timex all-star jazz show, emceed
by Steve Allen, was seen on NBC... a unique effort to offer it on an
educational level was undertaken when NBC launched a 13-week series, The
Subject Is Jazz... Bobby Troup's Stars of Jazz was projected to the full ABC
network,.. Disc jockey Art Ford kicked off his own weekly show on New
York Chicago
Other examples
come to mind. In September a Westinghouse spectacular featured Benny Goodman,
Andre Previn, Shelly Manne, and Red Mitchell. Previn also made a guest
appearance on the Steve Allen show. And jazz as part of the score for dramatic
pictures and TV shows made a tremendous impact when Walter Wanger engaged
Johnny Mandel to write a jazz score for I Want to Live (which featured
Shelly Manne); when Revue Productions' Stan Wilson used a jazz group for the
score of the weekly M Squad; and when Spartan Productions engaged Hank Mancini
as Musical Director for Peter Gunn.”
Pete Rugolo’s Jazz
scores for Thriller and Richard Diamond, Elmer Bernstein’s
for Johnny
Staccato and Lalo Schifrin’s for Mannix would also come into focus,
but as Jazz fans everywhere know, this abundance of TV Jazz scores would wane
and be pretty much gone by the close of the decade of the 1960’s.
Les Koenig, who
owned Contemporary Records, took great care to create a studio atmosphere which
took into consideration these factors:
“For jazz musicians to be free to express
themselves, and to make personal statements, they need the kind of relaxed
atmosphere not commonly found in recording studios. The average record date
takes only three hours. But, like a barbecue fire which always seems to be
glowing at its best after you've removed the steaks, jazz record dates usually
begin to develop a 'feeling' just as the three-hour time limit is up.
At Contemporary we've tried to break this
time barrier by scheduling sessions of at least six or nine hours. In the case
of Peter Gunn we took four three-hour sessions and as a result an exceptionally
close rapport was achieved; each musician felt free to contribute his ideas and
suggestions came so thick and fast Shelly was often in the position of a
moderator at a heated Town Hall session.
That The Men were able to approach each of
Mancini's pieces with a fresh, spontaneous, and valid conception is a tribute
to their outstanding talents, as well as to the vitality of Mancini's
provocative new jazz themes.”
—LESTER KOENIG
January 1959
These notes
appeared on the original album liner.
Orrin Keepnews
made these comments about Shelly Manne and His Men Play Peter Gunn [Contemporary
S 75-60/OJCCD 946-2] when it was released as a CD:
“For the most part, television music was a
vast jazz wasteland before the Peter Gunn series debuted in the fall of 1958.
The show's score both made a name for composer Henry Mancini and changed the
sound of televised drama. It was inevitable that Shelly Manne, Hollywood studio
mainstay and a proven champion at jazz interpretations of Broadway shows,
would give Mancini's music a more expansive blowing treatment, and the
resulting album reminds us that there was more to Peter Gunn than its dramatic
theme and the classic ballad "Dreamsville." Fans of Manne's Men should
note that the album was taped during the brief tenure of alto saxophonist Herb
Geller, and that it makes winning use of the vibes and marimba of added starter
Victor Feldman, whose piano would shortly be heard to superb advantage on the
band's Blackhawk recordings (OJCs 656-660).”
We've selected A Profound Gass by Shelly and The Men and coupled it with a montage on "beatniks" as our video tribute to Peter Gunn TV series and its era.
