© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
The following is excerpted from the JOHNNY MANDEL [1925-2020] NEA Jazz Master (2011) interview that was conducted by Bill Kirchner on April 20-21, 1995 in New York City. The 179 page transcript is in the Archives Center, National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian which can be reached at www.archivescenter@si.edu.
This part of the interview talks about his work with Frank Sinatra, Shirley Horn and other vocalists and is very revealing in terms of Johnny’s ability to adapt his composing and arranging skills to a wide variety of both personal and professional situations and requirements.
This adaptability, one that plays to an artist’s strengths while offsetting their weaknesses, was one of the main reasons for Johnny’s enduring success in the business of commercial and popular music.
As with the previous postings, please be patient as Bill and Johnny have a tendency to wander all over the place during the course of the interview. And be sure to stick around for the planned Mandel & Miles collaboration.
“Kirchner: Let's talk a bit more about the Sinatra album.
Mandel: Okay.
Kirchner: One thing that struck me as it being a particularly difficult assignment is there were no tunes that were ballads, there were no tunes that were really up, the most they seem to be medium slow to medium and it struck me it must've been a really hard assignment to write say ten or twelve charts all at approximately the same tempo.
Mandel: Yeah, there were a few charts in there that I did not write.
Kirchner: Oh really?
Mandel: Yeah.
Kirchner: Which ones?
Mandel: I didn't have time. Oh, I didn't write, "Be Careful, It's My Heart,' didn't write... I wrote only parts of some charts. I didn't write, "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm," I don't think, oh I wrote some parts of it, you can recognize what I did, and what I didn't, I think if you're familiar with. When I'd really get in a hurry and I was so slow because Sinatra quite frankly had me psyching myself out because I wanted to do that job so right so badly that I took about three, four times as long on a chart as I should've and I ran into a lot of difficulty. And as a result some of it I had to farm out at the last minute just to get it on the stands and…
Kirchner: How did you get the call for it in the first place?
Mandel: Oh, he'd heard some stuff I'd done for Vic Damone, he'd heard stuff for David Allyn, you know he'd heard about me. He'd go into nightclubs and wanted to know who wrote those charts and they'd be me, that kind of stuff,
Kirchner: He's one of the few singers I’ve ever heard in concert who announces the names of all the arrangers.
Mandel: Yeah, what a gentleman, God bless him because nobody does, does Mel Torme? Does he announce himself?
[They both laugh]
Mandel: You're right, nobody does, even Tony [Bennett] I don't think does as a rule.
Kirchner: No.
Mandel: No. I think Nat Cole did, you know as they say, "It don't cost you nothing," and it'd be really nice if more people would.
Kirchner: It's just a gracious gesture.
Mandel: It is, you'd think Natalie [Cole] would've listened to her old man but no. But she sure can sing.
Kirchner: How did you collaborate with Sinatra on getting the album together? Did...
Mandel: Oh, he told me what tunes he wanted to do, we picked out keys, he didn't like to rehearse, ever, he hates rehearsing. And it went like clockwork you know, I found him very easy and I found him to be a total gentleman all the way through.
Kirchner: Does he want to do complete takes or does he...
Mandel: Yes.
Kirchner: No splices?
Mandel: The only problem we ever had with each other was when I made him do, "You and the Night and the Music," over. He wanted to go home, it was the last tune of the date and there was a huge fat clam in the trumpets, in fact [Conrad] Gozzo [lead trumpet] made it. And...
Kirchner: So you couldn't hide it?
Mandel: I couldn't let it go and he already had two girls on each arm he's like, "Hey, come on let's go home and boogie, let's get out of here Charlie," and I said, "Ah-ah," and he didn't like that at all. He had to stay and do another take because - he didn't like it, because he puts all his energy into that previous take you know. He's a kamikaze singer, he can't really - he hates to rehearse because there's no pressure on him, he needs to have the entourage, not because he needs the entourage he just likes to have a lot of people really scrutinizing him on dates, he needs a crowd to work to. He sounds like a different singer when you've got him alone in the room and he's uncomfortable singing, it's almost like he doesn't really enjoy singing often, for its own sake. But when he gets up in front of an audience it's such a challenge that he mentally just makes it happen, you know, he's got that strong a mind that he could make the whole thing take place. You know only in the last several years or ten years or so, since the instrument's been failing him can't he do it, but you know he'd be in bad shape, hoarse and all that kind of thing and he'd get out there and sounded wonderfully and you knew it was strictly through mental control that he'd do it. And Streisand has much the same approach to singing in that way, they don't sing anything alike but she's just that strong, she's that strongly fixed mentally, she makes it happen.
Kirchner: Although ironically she got intense stage fright and didn't perform in public for twenty years.
Mandel: That's right.
Kirchner: That's the big difference between her and Sinatra.
Mandel: Well, that's true.
Kirchner: But as far as the mental processes that sounds very plausible with both of them.
Mandel: Um-hm, this happens to singers you know, one very fine singer who is very underrated because of the image that she cultivated was Doris Day, who got so paranoid about performing she used to — you know I knew her in the bands [laughs] it reminds me of a great line Oscar Levant used to use, "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin."
[They both laugh]
Mandel: And she was really a nice girl and a wonderful singer but she got so paranoid, you know every night she'd sing in front of bands, in front of all kinds of people and was totally uninhibited but something happened along the way to where she got so she wouldn't even sing with the band on record dates. She used to, as soon as they allowed overdubbing she would send everybody home and then do her vocals by herself and never performed in person. You never saw her going to Vegas and anything like that and she always could sing, she was very much of an Ella Fitzgerald type of clone. In fact Natalie sounds amazing like her at times, Natalie Cole.
Kirchner: Interesting.
Mandel: We made a record of, "The Christmas Song," and she sounds like Doris Day on that thing.
Kirchner: Would this be an appropriate time to just talk about who your favorite singers are, you've been mentioning a few.
Mandel: Oh yeah, Peggy Lee for openers. Shirley Horn, I like singers that sound like they are singing in your ear. I don't like belters, particularly - that's a personal... but I can admire belters, I just don't like being yelled at, especially in love songs.
Kirchner: They're not much fun to write for either.
Mandel: Some are better than others but I don't see how anybody can get any intimacy when they're singing that loud, it's an old tradition of singing, hit the fourth balcony type of singing. And some people think that's a great thing to do, well it's an endurance contest that's for sure, it's hard on the instrument. But I always like the Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee, Carmen McRae, good straight-forward singers that are very musical, Jeri Southern, I mean these are the kinds of singers that personally I like the best. Sinatra I don't think has ever had a peer, nobody even comes close. Sinatra, Tony, Bing Crosby was wonderful in his own way, he actually blazed the trail, he was the first really good microphone singer.
Kirchner: Now you were talking about Shirley Horn, you came - Shirley is a relatively recent collaboration of yours so I'd like to talk about that a bit.
Mandel: Okay, we're getting ahead of ourselves but that's all right.
Kirchner: Well we seem to be skipping around a bit...
Mandel: Sure.
Kirchner: But as long as I keep my druthers and cover what...
Mandel: Okay.
Kirchner: Should be covered, I don't mind if you don't.
Mandel: I don't mind. Shirley was as recently as 1990,I think.
Kirchner: '90, '91 I believe.
Mandel: Yeah probably and I'd gladly do it again and so would she.
Kirchner: It's just that Verve [Records] has to come up with the appropriate budget of course.
Mandel: Yeah.
Kirchner: But I think the record you did for her, Here's to Life, if she never does anything else like it, that's the record that's going to be what she's remembered for more than anything.
Mandel: I'd like to think so, I'd love to think so, although she's made many wonderful records. I love the I Thought About You: Live at Vine St. record.
Kirchner: Yeah.
Mandel: Shirley is so special, you know you just, I don't see how you could do... well you could do her badly but I sure wouldn't want to.
[They both laugh]
Kirchner: Most of that was done with her laying down trio tracks and you writing right?
Mandel: Oh yeah, because she can't really divorce herself from the piano. We did two tracks without her playing and she's never recorded like that, except back in the early days when Quincy recorded her, he didn't let her play. And God anybody who doesn't let her play is a... well anyway when she did these two tunes, "Here's to Life," and, "Where do You Start," she didn't know what to do with her hands. She wears these little gloves that she plays with and she kept taking them off and putting them on, and she went crazy trying to not play and to sing [laughs] so all the other tracks on that album she did lay down her tracks and then I just took the orchestra and went everywhere that she wasn't, is the best way I can describe the technique I used for writing that. Stuff that would work against what she did but complement it.
Kirchner: And according to Joel Siegel's liner notes you had given her the tape, the Mike Lang tape that goes with your songbook.
Mandel: Yeah.
Kirchner: So that she knew the voicing's that you wanted on your tunes.
Mandel: Not particularly, well I gave her the songbook.
Kirchner: Yeah,
Mandel: No, not particularly, besides Shirley has her own ideas, very firm ideas about chords herself. We just happen to fortunately think quite alike when it comes to voicing but we disagreed quite a few times on chord choices but she is unswayable, you go with her. And it's right for her, if it's right for her it's right for me is how I feel about it. With some people I'll fight about things like that, with Shirley I won't because her instincts are so sound.
Kirchner: So she recorded as I recall what, three of your tunes, she did on that particular record...
Mandel: On that one, yeah.
Kirchner: "A Time for Love", "Where do you Start?" and my all time favorite version of, "Quietly There."
Mandel: Yeah, yeah.
Kirchner: Now as I recall Miles was supposed to play on that album but died before the date, right?
Mandel: That's right, he was supposed to play on, "A Time for Love," he was supposed to play all the places that Wynton ended up playing on, Wynton Marsalis.
Kirchner: So, that would have been your chance, the chance that you never had to work with Miles.
Mandel: Well Miles and I were going to do an album too.
Kirchner: Really?
Mandel: Yeah.
Kirchner: When?
Mandel: Just shortly before he died.
Kirchner: How much...
Mandel: We were finally getting together.
Kirchner: Really?
Mandel: Yeah, and it just never happened just like this never happened.
Kirchner: But tell me more.
Mandel: Well... it was gonna be another one of the type of Gil Evans type things that he had done and I was gonna be very careful that I wouldn't be the E-Flat Gil Evans you know, you don't want to, that's somebody... following Gil Evans you gotta be very careful because it was done right the first time, [laughs] And I wouldn't try to really do that, we weren't gonna remake any of that stuff, it was gonna do new stuff, it was gonna be a whole project unto itself.
Kirchner: What kind of material would you have done?
Mandel: Hadn't gotten that far.
Kirchner: It's interesting that he wanted to do, I mean at the time he was in the late 80s he was pretty much wrapped up with pop, with pop funk things.
Mandel: Well Miles as a person if you look at his career, he would go through a period, like he had the small band quintet, then he went through the Gil Evans period with large orchestras, then he went into more funk type quintet's later on and then you know into the Coltrane era and all that kind of thing and then got into the Bitches Brew period and in other words Miles never liked to repeat himself or do anything again. But finally towards the end of his life even though we didn't realize it he was starting to - Quincy kept bugging him about this 'cause it was gonna be on Qwest and wanted to get Miles to — you know and Miles just never liked to look back, he wasn't that kind of a guy and that's why he shied away from doing things he had done before not because he didn't think there were valid he just liked doing new things. He was similar to Gil that way, to Gil Evans.
Kirchner: Now did you talk with Miles directly about this project.
Mandel: Really only had one conversation, it was over the phone, but we agreed, we wanted to do it.
Kirchner: When was this around 1990 or so?
Mandel: Yeah, right about.
Kirchner: Oh, that's...
Mandel: I really wished we had done it,
Kirchner: That's tragic that that didn't happen.
Mandel: Well it is, but it didn't happen, so you know.
Kirchner: An unfair but interesting question, what kind of instrumentation do you think you would have used, would you use strings, what would you have used?
Mandel: It would have been dictated by what kind of material we did, what I wrote and all that. That would have dictated it. Yeah, chances are I would have used strings, might have used a similar type of instrumentation to what I used in The Sandpiper, or possibly on the Sanborn [David] album [Pearls] but it would have been a totally different kind of album. Probably a lot more esoteric, I'm not sure where it would have gone, which is why I can't say what instruments I'd have used. It's too early in the game when you don't even have your material to try and decide what kind of a setting you're gonna use for it.
Kirchner: Of course. Well speaking of The Sandpiper, why don't we jump back to say the early 60s.
Mandel: 1964.
Kirchner: Yes.
Mandel: Alright.
Kirchner: Or, in fairness that you said after you'd done, I Want to Live! you had done TV writing, you had done a couple of B movies.
Mandel: I did a lot of vocal albums.
Kirchner: And we've discussed those.
Mandel: And really... then did the Andy Williams, I was gonna say Andy Warhol, Andy Williams and right after the Andy Williams thing, I really got connected up with Filmways [Production Company] and got a shot to do The Americanization of Emily, a very good picture, a chance to write a song, something I hadn't foreseen. And my first song of any consequence, even though when I look back now I had written songs that could've been songs. But I never thought of myself as a songwriter.
Kirchner: "Just a Child," goes under that category doesn't it?
Mandel: Yeah, and stuff from, I Want to Live!, "Barbara's theme,'" you know several themes that could've taken lyrics.
Kirchner: Oh, that reminds me...
Mandel: "Black Nightgown," a lot of those could've taken lyrics.
Kirchner: Three of those tunes, "Barbara's Theme," and, "Black Nightgown," and the theme from, “I Want to Live!” you did charts for Gerry Mulligan on.
Mandel: Yeah.
Kirchner: That Mulligan recorded with a concert jazz band.
Mandel: Yeah, I think so, right, yeah.
Kirchner: So basically, he just called you and said I like all these tunes that I played on the score or heard on the score and I'd like you to do charts for my band?
Mandel: Yeah, it was it, and I was around New York at that time, so I went and rehearsed the band and all that stuff.
Kirchner: Apparently he brought Holman east to work in New York...
Mandel: That's right; Bill was with us at the same time.
Kirchner: So you just did those three charts then? You didn't do anything else?
Mandel: Yeah, that's all 'cause I'd left New York after that, went back home to California.
Kirchner: But he recorded all three of them.
Mandel: Um-hm.
Kirchner: And they all sounded terrific.
Mandel: Great, well with those players, good God, you could've written stuff that wasn't very good and it would've sounded terrific.
Kirchner: Yeah, Stan Getz later recorded, "Barbara's Theme."
Mandel: That's another thing I didn't know, you have to watch Stan Getz at all times or he's libel to record something of yours.
[They both laugh]
Kirchner: Have you heard that record?
Mandel: No, I haven't.
Kirchner: It's going to be reissued shortly; it was on an album called, Voices, that was done with a rhythm section with Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter and Grady Tate.
Mandel: Oh, I'd like to have heard that combination.
Kirchner: And a chorus with Claus Ogerman arrangements.
Mandel: I'd really like to have heard that, a chorus and Claus plus strings?
Kirchner: No, no strings, just a chorus and rhythm section.
Mandel: Well if Claus wrote the vocal parts I would've liked it.
Kirchner: Yeah it'll be out in June.
Mandel: Sounds like a Creed Taylor production.
Kirchner: Definitely. From the mid-60s and as a matter of fact, what the only...
Mandel: Was it like a Blossom Dearie type chorus?
Kirchner: No it's...
Mandel: 'Cause she was very good at choruses, you remember she had the Blue Keys over in Paris.
Kirchner: Um-hm.
Mandel: She knew how to write for voices.
Kirchner: Yeah, it was Hipper than say a Ray Conniff type concept, or something like that,,,
Mandel: Oh, oh, well, you know...
Kirchner: And they did some good tunes, well they did, "Barbara's Theme," although they mistitled it, "I Want to Live," but they did that, they did, "Where Flamingos Fly," the John Benson Brooks tune.
Mandel: Oh yeah...
Kirchner: "I Didn't Know What Time it Was."
Mandel: The one Gil Evans made such a magnificent record with Jimmy Knepper.
Kirchner: Yeah.
Mandel: Yeah.
Kirchner: And one before that with Helen Merrill that he did.
Mandel: Oh yeah, Helen Merrill I was in love with, not -I didn't know her but just her singing. That's another singer I used to love. Her, Jeri Southern, you know the kind of singer, Julie London in her day, I like those kinds of singers, the understated ones.
Kirchner: That's a dying art it would seem,
Mandel: You know, what amazes me is, I hear a singer like Sade, she does - if you look at the pop market, she does everything wrong. Have you ever listened to her particularly?
Kirchner: Yes.
Mandel: She's a jazz singer, although nobody will call her that. She does everything, she sings like that, I like that kind of a singer. And for some reason she's a huge hit and I don't understand it, because a lot of other singers get out there and try and do that and fall flat. And yet she resorts to
no kind of theatrics, she just sings like that. You know the records aren't really great.
Kirchner: The material isn't that great.”
To be continued.
