The following is excerpted from George’s aptly-titled autobiography Lullaby of Birdland [New York: Continuum Books, 2004].
“In 1952, Morris Levy, who owned Birdland, which had opened on the site of the Clique [on 52nd St.], came to me and said they were about to start a regular disc jockey show sponsored by the club.
Morris wanted me to record a theme, to be played every hour on the hour, and he sent the music to me. It wasn't much good.
Writing [an alternative] tune wasn't quite as straightforward as I had expected. I sat down and wrote something, but when I played it for my wife Trixie, she said, "This is terrible."
So for two days I thought the thing over. For some reason my mind went blank and although I wanted to write a song, I just couldn't think of anything. Finally I got to the point where I thought there was nothing for it but to send in the piece I'd written that Trixie reckoned was so awful.
That night, at our house in Old Tappan, New Jersey, where Trixie and I had moved not long before all this happened, I was sitting down to dinner, my favorite char-broiled steak. I'd just started to eat when I jumped up.
Trixie said, "What's wrong with it?" thinking there was something amiss with the food, because sometimes I would jump up with a yell if there was something on my food that was unexpected or which I didn't like.
That night there was nothing wrong with the food. I rushed over to the piano and said, "How's this?" I sat down and played right through Lullaby of Birdland. It just came to me, the whole thing, just like that. Within ten minutes I'd got the entire song worked out. Since then I've been back to the same butcher several times and asked him if he could manage a repetition of that steak. Actually quite a lot of my compositions have come this way — very slow going for a week or so, and then the finished piece comes together very rapidly, but as I say to those who criticize this method of working, it's not that I dash something off in ten minutes, it's ten minutes plus umpteen years in the business.
