Imaginative Broadway Show Albums - Shelly Manne, Andre Previn, Red Mitchell and Leroy Vinnegar

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Beginning in the last half of the decade of the 1950s, interpretations of Broadway shows became almost commonplace in the Jazz.

There were countless versions of Jazz musicians interpreting the music of Lerner and Lowe, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Frank Loesser, to name only a few of the composers and lyricists who dominated the Broadway stages for many years - not to mention innumerable interpretations of George Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess.

I was always particularly fond of the Contemporary Records Jazz albums featuring the music from My Fair Lady, Pal Joey*, The Bells are Ringing, Li'l Abner, Gigi *and West Side Story*, especially because this music was made by pianist Andre Previn and drummer Shelly Manne in the company of bassists Leroy Vinnegar or Red Mitchell. [The three LPs with an asterisk were made as Andre Previn and His Pals and the other three were issued as Shelly Manne and His Friends.]. The musicianship is of the highest level which becomes more evident with each listening. 

The late Les Koenig who produced these “imaginative Broadway show” recordings for his Contemporary label from 1956 to 1960 always maintained that the revenue that these albums generated made possible his investment in recordings by many, lesser known Jazz artists.

I thought it might be fun to put together a blog feature that highlights each of these recordings with excerpts from their liner notes. Collectively, the Previn - Manne collaboration is one of the more impressive in the recorded Jazz repertoire.

MY FAIR LADY - Shelly Manne and His Friends [M3527/S7527]

“GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, in Pygmalion, from which My Fair Lady is adapted, proved that the difference be­tween a Cockney girl and a fine lady was mainly one of pro­nunciation. In his fable, Henry Higgins teaches the girl to speak English, thereby working a startling transformation in her. Actually the language she speaks remains the same. The difference is almost entirely a matter of accent.

And coincidentally it is also largely a matter of accent by which the wonderfully original and entertaining score written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe for My Fair Lady has been transformed by Shelly Manne & His Friends to a wonder­fully original and entertaining modern jazz album. In the main, the melodies and the harmonies remain unchanged. But not the accent, the rhythm, the phrasing, the way the notes are attacked. It is still My Fair Lady, of course. But it is, at the same time, modern jazz at its best.

The sources of jazz have always been many and varied. The late Jelly Roll Morton claimed Tiger Rag was derived from an old French quadrille, so it should not be too surprising to find modern musicians finding jazz in Ascot Gavotte fifty years later. And in any case jazzmen have always turned to Broad­way. The sophisticated melodic and harmonic material in the works of the Gershwins, Cole Porter or Jerome Kern have always stimulated creative jazz musicians to improvise original, entertaining, and often moving performances. It usually takes a very long time, however, before jazzmen accept show tunes, and accord them the honor of a jazz treatment. "Jazz standards" are usually some time in the making. A case in point is Rodgers & Hart's My Funny Valentine which originally appeared in 1937 and had to wait over fifteen years before the modern jazz movement gave it new life in the '50s. And so it is a tribute to the My Fair Lady score that within a few months of the show's opening, such gifted  jazzmen  as Shelly  Manne, André Previn and Leroy Vinnegar were moved to play it.

Let André Previn explain the Friends' approach: ‘What Shelly, Leroy and I have attempted in this album is unusual insofar as we have taken almost the entire score of a musical, not just 'Gems from . . , have adapted it to the needs of the modern jazz musician and are playing it with just as much care and love as the Broadway cast. There has been no willful distortion of the tunes simply to be different, or to have a gimmick, or to provoke the saying 'Where's the melody?' We are all genuinely fond of every tune and have the greatest re­spect for the wonderful score in its original form, but we are paying our own sincere compliment to the show by playing the complete score in our own métier.’”

Li’l Abner - Shelly Manne and His Friends [M3527/S7527]

“Li'l Abner has had a fabulous career since 1934 when cartoonist Al Capp created him. During the past 23 years he has appeared in hundreds of newspapers, daily and on Sundays, to the delight of millions. Today at last count 700 papers carry the Cap strip, with an estimated 40 million readers. It was inevitable Li'l Abner would eventually, as they say in jazz, "make the Broadway scene." He did, in a hit musical which opened November 15. 1956 at the St. James Theatre in New York.

What seemed most unlikely was that he would make the jazz scene. Now even this has come to pass as a result of the ingenious transformation of nine tunes from the show's score into modern jazz performances by Shelly Manne and his Friends: Andre Previn and Leroy Vinnegar.

For the musical, producer-writers Norman Panama and Melvin Frank retained the basic situation of the comic strip: Daisy Mae's struggle to catch and marry Li'l Abner; but invented a new plot. The government declares Dog-patch, U.S.A. (the natural habitat of Li'l Abner, Daisy Mae, Earthquake McGoon, Marryin' Sam, the Yokums. etc.) the "most unnecessary" town in the whole country, and orders its denizens to leave so it can be a testing ground for atomic experiments. It's up to Li'l Abner to save the day. After a wild time in Washington and Dog-patch (Li'l Abner is almost trapped into marrying Appassionata Van Climax), things reach a frantic climax with a plane carrying an atom bomb on its way to Dogpatch while the wedding of Earthquake McGoon and Daisy Mae is about to take place. Li'l Abner does, natcher'ly, save the day.

The score for this bit of madness was written by Johnny Mercer (words) and Gene de Paul (music), and manages to combine the "down home" quality of the Dogpatch milieu with the inherent sophistication of the Al Capp point of view.

................The Friends here have a fine  time  in  the

wonderful world of Li'l Abner. The deft, light-hearted Mercer-dePaul score provided a provocative opportunity for Manne. Previn and Vinnegar to follow their highly-praised, best-selling My Fair Lady album with a similar treatment of a second current Broadway hit.

The Friends have proved to be one of the most felicitous combinations in recent jazz history. Andre's extraordinary piano technique and his gift for melodic and harmonic improvisation are complemented and enriched by Shelly’s inventiveness and feeling for time, and Leroy's walking, funky, full bodied sound. …”

PAL JOEY - André Previn and His Pals  [M3543/S7543]

“THERE IS A STORY, apocryphal perhaps, about John O'Hara, author of the original Pal Joey stories, and author of the book of the Broadway musical, who, when asked to describe the show, is said to have replied, "Well it ain't Blos­som Time." Those familiar with the sentimentality of the Sigmund Romberg musical should get a pretty fair idea of what Pal Joey is not, and possibly, by indirection, what it is. Incidentally, when Blossom Time appeared on Broadway in 1924, Mr. Romberg was the subject of much discussion for adapting various Schubert themes for his score, particularly for waltzing about with a section of the Unfinished Symphony.

In any case, André Previn and His Pals, who are noted for their transformations of Broadway scores into modern jazz, haven't as yet got around to Blossom Time, but they have most certainly applied their alchemy to Pal Joey, and again, in de­scribing the results, one is tempted to repeat Mr. O'Hara.

Pal Joey made his original appearance (in The New Yorker) as the semi-literate writer of a series of letters to his Pal Ted, a successful swing musician and band leader of the late 1930s. Joey was a singer and M.C. in a Chicago South Side club, too much on the make for success and girls, "mice" he called them. Not a pleasant character, but understandable, as John O'Hara drew him. In 1940, O'Hara went to work on the musical ver­sion of Joey with the late, great lyricist Larry Hart, and com­poser Richard Rodgers, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The show opened in New York, Christmas night 1940. For many of us then, it represented the coming of age of the Broadway musical which for the first time seemed to be "look­ing at the facts of life," as composer Richard Rodgers put it. Now, 17 years later, the movie version with Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak, introduces Joey to a new genera­tion, and it is good indeed to have Bewitched, I Could Write A Book, Zip and all the rest around again. Not the least attractive thing about the revival of Joey is the impetus it gave André, Shelly and Red for the present jazz version.

THE PALS' PERFORMANCES were completely improvised at the two recording sessions. Before doing each tune, André played it straight, and then the floor was thrown open for discussion. Various possible jazz versions were explored, and once the tempo and general approach were agreed upon, the actual recording was usually accomplished in one take. This technique relies heavily on free association and the artists' unconscious. With musicians of the Pals' caliber, it makes for an unusually fresh and original approach.”

GIGI - André Previn and His Pals [M3548/S3572]

“GIGI, BY FRENCH NOVELIST COLETTE, first appeared during the last war when the author was 70. She died in August, 1954, at the age of 81, after a small sip of champagne, having lived to see her slender story of a turn-of-the-century Paris adolescent, who had been trained to find a rich lover, but who falls in love and marries him instead, become the most successful work of her forty-four book career.

Gigi's phenom­enal public acceptance is remarkable when one considers the original is no more than an extended short story of some sixty-odd pages. It has been translated into many languages, was a French film starring Daniele Delorme in 1950, became a hit play in 1952, dramatized by Anita Loos and launching Audrey Hepburn, Colette's own discovery for the role of Gigi, as a great new star. Now, in 1958, it is a hit musical for MGM, starring Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, and Louis Jourdan; and by way of the score for the film, it provides Andre Previn and His Pals: Shelly Manne and Red Mitchell, with their latest modern jazz version of a current musical entertainment.

The score for Gigi is by lyricist Alan Jay Lerner (he also wrote the screenplay) and composer Frederick Loewe, who put their special brand of magic to work on their first project since My Fair Lady. And like My Fair Lady, it gives André a chance to apply his own magic to turning eight new Lerner-Loewe songs to modern jazz. As a matter of fact, the new fashion of doing jazz versions of Broadway and Hollywood musicals owes its existence to that now famous first My Fair Lady album (Contemporary C3527) recorded by Shelly Manne and His Friends: André Previn and Leroy Vinnegar in the Fall of 1956, and still heading the best-seller lists. The Friends followed Lady with Li'I Abner (Contemporary C3533). Then André Previn and His Pals: Shelly Manne and Red Mitchell made their best-selling version of Pal Joey (Contemporary C3543).

It was not surprising that André chose to record a jazz Gigi because, as musical director of the film, he supervised all of Gigi's music, adapting much of the Lerner-Loewe material for the background score, doing a number of the arrangements, and conducting the MGM studio orchestra. In truth, this album was projected even before Lerner and Loewe had written the score. They had been delighted with the Friends' Lady, and had a copy of it in their Paris hotel room when André joined them in the Summer of 1957 to begin work on pre-scoring Gigi. Then and there they insisted André do a jazz version.”

THE BELLS ARE RINGING - Shelly Manne and His Friends [M3559/S7559]

“FOR SOME UNACCOUNTABLE REASON, Bells Are Ringing has been singularly neglected by jazz. These days original cast albums of Broadway shows are immediately echoed by a host of jazz versions, often without regard for the show's musical values, or its success or failure. Yet Bells Are Ringing contains a score which lends itself admirably to jazz improvisation, and the show is a smash hit.

The book and lyrics of Bells are by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; the music is by Jule Styne. The show stars Judy Holliday as Ella Peterson, who works for a telephone answering service, gets involved with her unseen clients, and falls in love with one of them, writer Jeff Moss, played by Sydney Chaplin. The plot is complicated by a set of bookies who devise a clever code by which they can use the answering service to handle race-track bets.

SHELLY MANNE, IN RECENT YEARS, has been hailed as the outstanding jazz drummer of the modern era. Although he has been winning or placing high in the various popularity polls conducted by the jazz magazines since the late 1940s, his current popularity is reflected in the fact he made a clean sweep of all the major polls — Down Beat, Metronome and Playboy—for three successive years: 1956, 1957& 1958.

In many ways Shelly is representative of the "new jazzman." An inheritor of the tradition (he got his musical start in New York in the late 1930s when 52nd Street was the crossroads of the jazz world and he was able to meet and jam with the top players of the time), Shelly is constantly searching for new ways in which to make his drums more expressive and musically meaningful. His schedule is a busy one, with personal appearances, recording sessions, concerts, night club engagements, and coast-to-coast TV shows.

Yet he has never lost any of the enthusiasm and joy in playing he had as a teen-ager when he haunted 52nd Street for a chance to hear his idols. This delight is clearly apparent in the light-hearted, swinging collaboration with Andre Previn.

Red Mitchell was a member of Andre's Trio on the road during the latter part of 1958. He is one of the most prominent of today's jazz bassists, and has played with leading groups (Gerry Mulligan, Red Norvo, Hampton Hawes, etc.)

Of André performance of Beethoven's Archduke Trio, the Los Angeles Examiner said (February 26, 1959): "We hear young Previn on such conspicuous occasions as the exponent of modern music in the popular vein that sometimes we forget the intuition and the dignity that he can bring to the standard literature for the piano, . . Throughout the work . . . Previn coupled technical mastery with beautifully graduated dynamics, appropriate color and an unerring sense of adjustment with the other instruments." It is not a coincidence that jazz critics have been able to say the same sort of thing about Previn's performances in the Friends/Pals series — for Andre is a consistent musician who brings the wealth of his talent to whatever he does in music, whether it be film scoring, jazz or Beethoven.”

 WEST SIDE STORY - André Previn and His Pals [M3573/S3572]

WEST SIDE STORY is based on Romeo and Juliet, against a contemporary background of warring gangs on New York's West Side.   Unlike most musicals, this one deals with a real social problem in terms of tragic theater; yet the production is brilliantly realized in song and in dance with wit and tenderness as well as tense drama] The music by Leonard Bernstein is an integral part of the total conception, its unconventional song structures and harmonic progressions are not the kind which would seem to lend themselves readily to modern jazz treatment. Yet, possibly because of the challenge provided by the Bernstein material, André Previn, Shelly Manne and Red Mitchell have improvised on it brilliantly transforming it into one of their most imaginative show-Jazz albums.

This process of transformation is explained by André: “In my experience as a Jazz musician, I have grown more and more aware of the fact that a great tune within its original context [Broadway, show, film etc.] does not automatically make a great tune for Jazz improvisation. Therefore, it becomes necessary for the purpose of a Jazz performance to alter original versions of songs; mostly harmonic alterations but sometimes even alterations in construction. Being an admirer of countless song writers, I very often have guilt feelings about making such alterations, and in the case of Leonard Bernstein’s music, these guilt feelings are magnified a hundred-fold. I happen to be a member of one of the largest official music clubs in America, namely that of ‘unqualified admirers bordering-on-idolatry of Leonard Bernstein.’ If a man like Leonard Bernstein writes songs which defy the thirty-two bar length tradition, he must have an undeniable reason for it, and changing these songs into more commonplace constructions may seem at first glance as nothing short of criminal. However, I would like to refer to Leonard’s book The Joy of Music [New York: Simon and Schuster 1960].

The Bernstein statement to which André refers is quite unequivocal on this point: “A popular song doesn’t become Jazz until it’s improvised on, and there you have the real core of Jazz: improvisation. Remember, I said that Jazz was a player’s art not a composer’s. Well, this is the key to the whole problem. It is the player who, by improvising, makes Jazz. He uses the popular song as a kind of dummy to hang his notes on. So the pop tune in acquiring a new dress changes in personality completely, like many people who behave one way in blue jeans and a wholly different way in dinner clothes. Some of you may object to the dressing up. You say, ‘Let me hear the melody, not all this embroidery.’ But until you accept this principle of improvisation, you will not understand Jazz itself.”

“Previn’s hectic career,” said Time magazine, in April, 1959, “is sometimes likened to Leonard Bernstein’s, a comparison he modestly rejects. The record, though, is of a Jack-of-all-trades, and master of many.” In any event, the meeting up of Previn’s Jazz piano and Bernstein’s music is interesting because of how much they have in common. Each is precociously gifted, each wields an awesome command of almost every kind of music. Each seemed propelled by extraordinary energy.”