Andre Previn was right about the deluge that followed Samuel Goldwyn’s 1959 release of his film version of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.
It seems as though every Jazz group had a recorded version of it and each of these had a different “take” on the tunes that made up Gershwin’s memorable score.
Actually, I rather liked the outpouring. It was wonderful to hear so many unique adaptations of these timeless Gershwin melodies.”
Over the years, however, one of these adaptations have remained my favorite - The Bill Potts Big Band: The Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess. It was originally issued as a United Artist LP and subsequently as a Capitol Records CD [CDP 7 95132 2].
Many of the aspects that make Bill Potts an arranger of singular style and substance are detailed in the following CD insert notes by Andre Previn.
“In the musical history of the twentieth century there have been a shamefully large number of instances wherein a noteworthy musical work has been acclaimed at its premiere and has subsequently, through either public apathy or a lack of performances, declined into near oblivion.
George Gershwin's opera, Porgy and Bess, is an encouraging example of the reversal of this procedure. When it was first heard in 1935 there was quite some dissension among the critics about its lasting values, and although it was heralded as something of a milestone by much of the audience, it certainly did not create a national furore at the time.
Since then, each subsequent revival has brought it greater acclaim and greater popularity until now, in 1959, it has become a staple in the repertoire of almost every country in the world. Road companies have taken it to the four corners of the earth, symphonic suites are played by orchestras everywhere, countless recordings have been distributed, and surely every singer of great or little note has programmed its highlights.
Nonetheless, it seems as though the next few years will bring about an undreamed-of amount of hearing for the music of "Porgy." Samuel Goldwyn's motion picture production of the opera was premiered in June, 1959 and since it was one of the most widely publicized and heralded pictures in many years, it prompted practically every recording artist in the business to bring forth an album of selections from the score. Apart from the movie soundtrack version there will be literally dozens of vocal albums, symphonic syntheses, reissues of the various Broadway casts, dance bands, choral arrangements, novelty groups, and jazz versions.
Now, just within the framework of the last-mentioned category; never before have so many jazz artists of so many divergent styles attempted interpretations of the same music. The range covers the entire compass of jazz from the excellent to the indifferent to the downright pointless; many of them attempting to the best of their musical ethics to say something interesting and important and many, alas, simply cashing in on what looks like a sure thing. Since this plethora of recordings was well known in advance by all recording artists, it became a matter of courage for Jack Lewis to join the pack with an album led by a relatively unknown musical personality, realizing that every giant in jazz would be recording the score. The man he chose to lead and orchestrate the score was a man whose musical personality has unfortunately hitherto been unknown to the general public, namely: Bill Potts.
The term, "musician's musician," is an overworked one but nonetheless very true in Bill's case. His name has cropped up innumerable times in musicians' discussions of their favorite arrangers. This alone is quite notable, since Bill has chosen up to now to remain in the Washington, D.C. area for all of his productive life. He was the head arranger for Willis Conover's "The Orchestra," an organization which, in the opinion of visiting musicians, rivalled the Washington Monument and the National Art Gallery as one of the indispensable attractions in the Capital. Since the unfortunate demise of "The Orchestra," Bill has contributed scores to a great many bands, but it is only with this album that he is presented fully and correctly.
In the fall of 1958 I was one of the aforementioned visiting musicians in Washington; it was at that time that I first met him. He is a young man of Dickensian proportions with added touches of Peter Ustinov and Captain Ahab. This imposing structure, however, houses one of the most soft-spoken and self-effacing gentlemen I have ever met. His musical curiosity is insatiable; he is willing to talk music until six in the morning, pause for coffee, then start over again.
Generally, it was Bill's habit to begin these musical discussions with me while seated in his small open sports car and considering that I, as a Californian, have grown more and more thin-blooded, I can think of no greater compliment to Bill's opinions and ideas than to say that I hardly noticed the cold. At the time I was halfway through my assignment as the musical director of the film version of Porgy and Bess and Bill was in the process of writing his jazz version of the score.
With typical candor he made what seemed like an amazing and somewhat apprehensive confession to me; the fact that he had never before been called upon to arrange and orchestrate another composer's music, but had restricted himself solely to his own originals. Now, half a year later, after hearing the results of his labors, I can only say that he never should have wasted a moment worrying about it.
One of the most difficult attributes to come by in today's jazz scene is originality. By that I don't necessarily mean a "far-out" method of playing or writing but rather an immediately recognizable personal imprint upon the music rendered. This is, God knows, as true of arrangers as it is of performers. Too many gifted facile writers pattern themselves wholly or in part after the few innovators. The Basie school of writing currently has the largest following, closely followed by the imitators of Ellington, Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, Bill Holman, John Lewis, etc. Bill Potts is an originator in the truest and best sense of that word. It is impossible to hear more than eight bars of any of his arrangements without recognizing the man behind the pencil.
His style is made up of many things: there is an ever-present aura of strength and vitality, an awareness of all the possible dynamic shadings from pp to ff, a rare concern for voice-leading, and a strong preference for ensembles rather than interludes between solos.
His arrangements have a wonderfully timeless quality about them; he is not concerned with the fad of the moment or of the year, nor does he strive for orchestral effects simply for the sake of the effects. The orchestrations are sensible and mature, while creating the same feeling of freedom and spontaneity usually found in a solo voice. And over all they swing from bar one right through to the end of the coda.
It is my personal opinion that the detailed analyses of record albums, section by section, solo by solo should be separate from the notes. That's why I will not go into them here. The personnel of the orchestra conducted by Bill Potts is indeed a gleaming one, as can be gathered by the listing qf its members, and the band plays with an esprit and a precision hardly ever encountered in a "one-time-together" studio ensemble. …
Having worked on the film version of "Porgy" for a period covering six months; having been exposed to the music of the score innumerable times; having written some two and a half hours worth of orchestrations of the score—I'm sure it would be natural for me to be practically immune to further versions of it; proof of the strength of the music and of Bill Potts' unique creativity is that I found myself listening to this album with the attentiveness and pleasure of a premiere performance.
The Musician's Union requires by law that arrangers be paid a certain amount per page of four bars each; if that law were changed to read that arrangers be paid per each new idea, Bill Potts could retire today a rich man.”
—ANDRE PREVIN May 12,1959
The following video features Bill Potts’ arrangement of Bess, You Is My Woman with solos by Phil Woods on alto saxophone and Charlie Shavers on muted trumpet.
“An enigmatic fellow, Andre Previn. Intensely private, yet given to scandal and something of a showman...., one of the most thoughtful and sensitive classical conductors of his day yet widely assumed to be a sell-out populist, the finest interpreter of Gershwin's piano music with orchestra, and yet almost completely forgotten for his first love ... jazz.
A concentrated period of activity for Contemporary Records in the 1950s, and whal a gift he must have been for the label, turning up immaculately rehearsed, straight, clean, unimpeachably professional, and then laying down first-take performances one after the other. One suspects there never will be a box of Andre Previn out-takes and alternatives, and yet there's nothing unswinging or unspontaneous about any of these performances.
The label quickly cottoned on to the show-based and songbook approaches as quick and effective ways of selecting and theming material. Gigi is predictably skittish and playful, though not without its moments of tenderness. Pal Joey offers more of real musical substance, including the deathless 'I Could Write A Book' and the less well -known 'What Is A Man?'. The Plays Songs by Vernon Duke portfolio is the only one on which the pianist's classical training becomes evident, turning 'Cabin In The Sky' and 'Autumn In New York' into tiny symphonic statements and 'April In Paris' into an elegant, impressionistic tone-poem. Double Play! cast him in a more straight-ahead formula and repertoire, and in retrospect it almost seems the best of the bunch, because the most uncomplicatedly jazz-driven.
Previn's renaissance as a jazz pianist [in the 1990s] was hailed as a return to an old love, but it was also, of course, the resort of a man who had been bruised by orchestral politics more subtly cut-throat than anything the Medicis would have dared. These don't quite have the bounce and the freshness of old and very quickly sound formulaic….
We Got Rhythm: A Gershwin Songbook [Deutsche Grammophon] date is interesting in that it followed an all-Mozart programme Previn was conducting at Tanglewood. The next day he and that fine bassist David Finck simply wandered down to the Florence Gould Auditorium in Seiji Ozawa Hall, Lenox, Massachusetts, got up a pot of coffee and started running through some tunes. Here and there Previn doesn't sound note-perfect, but he has the musical nous to profit from occasional slips, and the best of these tracks are quite exceptional. Edward Jablonski's liner-notes on the individual songs are an added plus (little details like the three-limes failure of The Man I Love, the best track here, but a flop initially and canned from Lady Be Good! and Strike Up The Band), but the real delight is the simple lyricism and creative sophistication Previn brings to a composer whose work he seems to understand with his very nerve-ends. His obvious delight in the closing take of I Got Rhythm is so infectious most listeners will recue the track and hear it through again. Splendid stuff from a born-again jazzman.”
- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.
“When critics had a go at André Previn in his heyday, the word “showman” was an easy gibe. The maestro seemed bigger than the music, and that was no surprise. After all, his background was in Hollywood scores, turning out reams of stuff for Lassie to bark at or Debbie Reynolds to talk over. Some of that glitz and schmaltz seemed to hang around in his gentle American voice, as well as in his soft spot for Rachmaninov and the too-lush sound of his string sections. In his spare time, for many years, he played jazz with his own trio in smoky dives. He liked television and was often on it in Britain in the 1970s, presenting orchestral music as light entertainment and even as comedy. The conductor at various times of several of the world’s great orchestras, the London Symphony, the London Philharmonic, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Vienna Philharmonic, took a lifetime to shed that label of lightweight Los Angeles Romanticism.
It clung to him well before he arrived in London in 1968, with his dark mop of hair, mandarin jackets, Swinging Sixties ways and the air of a casual, if reserved, film star. He had been fired as music director of the Houston Symphony partly for parading round town in blue jeans with Mia Farrow, an elfin actress who became his third wife, while he was still married to his second, Dory, who poured out desperate songs about him. There were more wives, many flings. For years the press swarmed after him like flies.
Yet he was more than capable of defending himself. On the subject of the women, they were all the best of friends. On taking classical music downmarket, the figures spoke for themselves. When he conducted the Houston Symphony in its dollar concerts at the Sam Houston Coliseum, he would pack 12,000 in. Each time he hosted “André Previn’s Music Night” on the BBC, chatting informally to the audience since he was sitting in their living rooms, he probably drew in more people in a week than the LSO, his chief orchestra, had managed in 65 years of performances. And when he appeared on “Morecambe and Wise” with the LSO as “Andrew Preview”, letting Eric Morecambe lift him by the lapels for questioning the comedian’s “playing” of Grieg’s Piano Concerto, he made the orchestra so famous that it was saved from bankruptcy, and himself so instantly recognisable that taxi drivers hailed him with “Hallo, Mr Preview!”. This made him very happy.
As for Hollywood, he had loved it. His Jewish family had fled to Los Angeles from Berlin, via Paris, in 1938 when he was ten; Hollywood was where he plunged into life. Who wouldn’t like to go to work each day in glorious sunshine, with all those pretty girls, and noodle a little Jerome Kern at parties? When he was 17 Ava Gardner tried to seduce him; two years later, he was confident enough to try the same with her. (Result, zero.) He won four Oscars for his film music, which included “Gigi” and “My Fair Lady”, and was nominated for nine more. If he could have kept laughing at the idiocies of producers who demanded, like Irving Thalberg, that “no music in an MGM film is to contain a minor chord”, he could have spent the rest of his career in that swimming-pool life.
And it could never have satisfied him. For under that peripheral glamour he was deeply committed to music for its own sake, a commitment he entered into at five, by asking his father for piano lessons. At six, he was in the Conservatory. Piano remained the deepest part of his multi-layered career, with recordings of the Mozart and Ravel concertos as well as chamber works by Brahms, Prokofiev, Gershwin and Barber, to name a few. His playing too was nurtured in Los Angeles by the many European émigrés, refugees from great orchestras, who relieved their boredom with film music by playing chamber music in abandoned school halls. It was there he discovered, through the violinist Joseph Szigeti, the trios of Beethoven and Schubert, and formed a classical trio himself. He played for Schoenberg and Stravinsky and, among the émigrés, began to feel the power of a baton in his hand. Meanwhile he went on joyously with jazz, again in his own trio. His intricate “games” with them sold hundreds of thousands of records.
The definite shift to conducting came in 1968, at 39, when the LSO recruited him for a spell that lasted 11 years. He accepted so fast that it shocked him, but his boyhood passion had been to see the hills that inspired Vaughan Williams and the sea that pulsed through Britten’s “Peter Grimes”. These composers, as well as Elgar and Walton, who wanted to dedicate his never-written third symphony to him, now became favourites in his repertoire. (He recorded all nine symphonies of Vaughan Williams, rapturously confessing that he really was a romantic.) Conducting required an even more serious approach, though he remained good at cloaking it with soft-spoken jokiness: massive amounts of research and rehearsal time, especially for pieces the players thought they knew.
But music directing too had its infuriating sides: politicking and socialising, ladies’ committees, truculent boards, shop stewards. None of that had anything to do with the music, which always stayed several steps ahead of him. He could spend his life chasing a great symphony, and never catch up. No performance could ever be as good as the work itself. Straggling behind, he composed many pieces of his own: sonatas, trios and songs, with a violin concerto for his fifth wife, the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. In older age, as in his Hollywood film-score years, he would pick up his pencil every day. It was not a question of waiting for the muse to kiss him, though that would have been nice. He wanted to understand the engineering of perfection: how Debussy could write “L’après midi d’un faune” without a single note put in for show; how the beginning of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony could reduce him to tears; how the unsurpassable serenity of the second movement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto could change the way he saw the world. Before something as beautiful and frightening as music, he could only efface himself.”
This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition of The Economist, March 7, 2019 under the headline "Maestro and music"
I recently came across a copy of the 1996 Ballads CD that André Previn made for Angel Records and from which the above photograph by Joanne O’Brien is taken.
The CD was nestled right next to a slew of solo piano and trio recordings that André had made for Les Koenig’s Contemporary Records label, primarily in the 1950s and 60s.
André plays beautiful, solo piano on the Ballads disc and while wondering how I came to know about the recording in the first place, I found a post-it note affixed to the CD insert booklet that referred me to an article in the late Gene Lees’ Jazzletter, a self-owned, monthly publication that Gene authored for almost thirty years until his passing in April/2010.
Friends since 1959, Gene shared this background about André in the introduction to his essay entitled The Courage of Your Tastes: Reflection on André Previn:
“In 1950, while he was in the army (along with Chet Baker) and stationed in San Francisco, André studied conducting with Pierre Monteux. He returned to Los Angeles and played with, among other groups, the Jazz at the Philharmonic All-Stars. His collaboration with drummer Shelly Manne on a jazz LP of music from My Fair Lady in 1956 set a fashion for such recordings based on Broadway musicals.
One of his albums, a lush recording of piano with orchestra and his arrangements, came to a crisis on the date: it was a few minutes short. André went off somewhere and wrote a string chart for some blues, went back into the studio, improvised a theme over it and got a huge hit on Like Young.” [Jazzletter, April 1998, Vol. 17 No. 4, p. 1]
Later in his piece on André, Gene offers this description of Previn’s playing including comments about it in relationship to the Jazz piano wizardry of Phineas Newborn, Jr. and Art Tatum:
“André really bothered the jazz establishment. He wrote movie scores! How degrading! And he dared to make jazz albums, including some with Shelly Manne that were among the best-selling in jazz history.
He was consistently trashed by the critics. The same thing happened to Phineas Newborn. There was an enormous suspicion in the jazz critical establishment of high skill. So vicious was this that, in Oscar Peterson's opinion, it drove Phineas Newborn mad. He said to Oscar, in tears, "Oscar, what am I doing wrong?' Nothing. He just had more technique as a pianist than the jazz critics, most of them, had as writers. And criticism is always an act of projected self-justification.
Thus those writers who lacked facility in their own work made much of "soul" and operated on the fatuous premise that high skill precluded it. You will not encounter this attitude in those who really know music and can really write. It is too often overlooked that Charlie Parker and Bill Evans had electrifying technique. But both men were heroin addicts, which fact enables that covert self-congratulation that is an essential ingredient of pity — as opposed to the nobility of true compassion — and in turn permits a patronizing praise.
André immensely successful, suffered from the judgment of jazz critics. The 1988 New Grove Dictionary of Jazz concludes a shortish entry on him with: "Although he is not an innovator, Previn is a technically fluent and musical jazz pianist." That takes care of that. Dismissed. The entry also describes Andre" as "influenced by Art Tatum." This egregious bit of stupidity almost always recurs in discussions of jazz pianists with well-developed technique, no one more than Oscar Peterson. When I was working on my biography of Oscar, I said to André "I don't hear much of Tatum in Oscar." André said, "I don't hear any."
Nor do I, nor did I ever, in André work. He uses none of Tatum's runs, none of his licks, none of his methods. This sort of comment by jazz critics almost invariably is a manifestation of deep ignorance of classical piano training and literature, which demand utter fluency in scales and arpeggios.
If you really want to hear the scope of André piano technique, listen to his 1992 RCA recording with violinist Julie Rosenfeld and cellist Gary Hoffman of the diabolically difficult Ravel Trio and the Debussy Trio No. 1 in G. If you do, observe the difference in sonority he educes from the piano for these often-linked but disparate composers.” [Ibid, p.3, paragraphing modified]
And Gene had this to say about André’s playing on some of the Jazz recordings that he made later in his career including his work on Ballads:
“… what struck me most was the growth in André’s playing. …. And André’s facility was no longer his enemy. He was using his remarkable skills as a pianist to dig in. His playing was far more reflective and certainly more emotional than in the years of his early prominence. It was deeper, darker than I had ever heard it; and yet at the same time the quicksilver tone had become more scintillant than ever. And oh! has he got chops. All kinds of chops: phenomenal speed, an exquisite illusion of legato in slow chordal passages, balance, and more. He has a subtle control of dynamics that at least equals that of Bill Evans. Bill's dynamics, however, were — deliberately; it was an element of his style — within a comparatively small range. Bill rarely took a whacking good thump at the piano, and André does. In this, then, his dynamic scope is broader than Bill's.
I realize with something of a start that a man who is (if Mel Powell was right) our greatest symphony conductor was also one of our greatest jazz pianists. What? Yeah. …
André told me at that time that he was thinking of making a solo piano album, all ballads. I told him I hoped that he would, and forgot about it. Then Alan Bergman, the great (with his wife, Marilyn) lyricist, told me on the phone that I just had to hear an album by André’ simply called Ballads. …
Reflective and soft, harmonically urbane, it became instantly one of my favorite albums, one that I will listen to often ova the years. It comprises all standards, except for two tunes by André, In Our Little Boat and Dance of Life. The latter is one he wrote for a show he did with Johnny Mercer in London, The Good Companions. These two tunes, along with one that is in the What Headphones? album, titled Outside the Cafe, would convince a statue of General Grant of Andres brilliance as a composer. …
Listening closely to the Ballads album, one learns something about his work as a symphony conductor. André has an uncanny control of dynamics in his solo piano. He can go loud-soft more suddenly and subtly than anyone I know. And his rubato is always true rubato: the time that is "robbed" (which is what the word means) here is replaced there. And no matter how slow the tempo, if you find the center of it and start tapping your foot you will find that his time is immovably there.
And this is true of his conducting. He uses, indeed, both of these abilities. And now, having listened so closely to the Ballads album, and then revisiting some of my favorites among his symphonic albums, I am beginning to see what Mel Powell meant; I think I am reaching the point where I might be able to spot a Previn recording of a symphony just by its sound, for he uses dynamics and rubato like no conductor I have ever heard. What André is, then, is a shaper of time, a sculptor of sound. …
A genius, a word I never use lightly, is itinerant among us.” [Ibid., excerpts from pp. 4-6]
To conclude this piece on the genius that is André George Previn, KBE, here are the introductory portions of Les Koenig’s liner notes to his Contemporary LPs My Fair Lady, Pal Joey and Gigi followed by a video tribute to André which uses as its soundtrack, Previn’s performance of Zip from Pal Joey as accompanied by Red Mitchell on bass and Shelly Manne on drums.
MY FAIR LADY
“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.’”
PAL JOEY
“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, ICould 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
“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.”
Jazz interpretations of Broadway shows were commonplace at one time. There must be 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 whose dominated the Broadway stages for many years. I was always particularly fond of pianist Andre Previn's Jazz albums featuring the music from My Fair Lady, Pal Joey, The Bells are Ringing, L'il Abner, et al. especially because he made most of this music in the company of bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Shelly Manne.
The late Les Koenig who produced Andre's Broadway show recordings for his Contemporary label always maintained that the revenue that Andre generated made possible his investment in recordings by many, lesser known Jazz artists. On the following video tribute to him, Andre and his pals Red and Shelly performZip fromPal Joey.
André George Previn KBE – Pianist, Composer, Conductor – GENIUS
