Nat Pierce - Big Band University

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

If there’s anyone who was more beloved in Jazz big band circles in the second half of the 20th century than pianist, composer-arranger and band leader Nat Pierce [1925 - 1992], I’ve yet to meet them.

Nat seemed to have reached his majority as a fully formed big band disciple when he began working professionally in 1943, mainly with big bands in Boston, including one led by trumpeter, Shorty Sherock.

Following a stint with Larry Clinton’s big band in 1948, he commenced a long association with Woody Herman in 1951 as pianist, arranger and even road manager that lasted well into the 1960s.

During that same time, Nat directed his own big band which was based in Boston, co-led a group with trumpeter Dick Collins [1954] and worked as an arranger for Quincy Jones, Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald.

Nat was the principal arranger for the landmark 1957 television show - The Sound of Jazz - and his own composition Open All Night served as the opening theme for the show and was performed by an all-star band under Count Basie’s direction.

Pierce moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s and was active as an arranger for Earl Hines, Carmen McRae and Anita O’Day; took on a great deal of freelance work; tour and made recording with drummer Louie Bellson’s Orchestra; took part in Woody Herman big band reunions until Woody’s death in 1987.

In 1975, along with drummer Frankie Capp, Nat formed the Capp-Pierce Juggernaut Orchestra which he co-led until his death in 1992.

During the 1970s and 1980 he Nat was a regular fixture on Concord Jazz recordings as his ability to propel a rhythm section from the piano bench, a skill he learned from his idol, Count Basie, was much sought after by many of the horn players who recorded for the label during this period.

Because of his long and distinguished career in the company of many Jazz notables, Nat’s early days as a leader of his own big band are often overlooked.

This period is very well-covered in Richard Vacca’s The Boston Jazz Chronicles: Faces, Places and Nightlife, 1937-1962 [Troy Street Publishing]. We wrote to Richard and asked his permission to share this segment of his unique book and he has graciously allowed us to do so with this blog feature.

The images that populate this piece and not part of the original publication.

© -  Richard Vacca, copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.

“The Nat Pierce Orchestra

Nathaniel Pierce Blish, known to the jazz world as Nat Pierce, was born in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1925. Pierce attended the New England Conservatory briefly and started playing piano professionally at 17. In the mid-1940s, he jammed in sessions at the Ken, worked at the Silver Dollar Bar with Nick Jerret, and played in a trio at Izzy Ort's with drummer Marquis Foster. Then he played and arranged for the Boston bands of Pete Chase and Carl Nappi, and did a turn with Shorty Sherock's big band, where he first met his longtime colleagues Mert Goodspeed and drummer Joe MacDonald.

In 1947 Pierce joined the Ray Borden Orchestra. Borden was a trumpeter who organized his first Boston band in 1941. That one fizzled, and Borden spent the next five years working for a string of big bands, including those of Bobby Sherwood and Jack Teagarden, but the most significant one from a musical development point of view was that of Stan Kenton, in 1942-1944. In 1946 he joined a band led by Whitney Cronin, a bassist and guitarist from Boston. Eventually Borden assumed leadership of the band, and Pierce came on as pianist and arranger. Over time they were joined by Charlie Mariano, trumpeters Gait Preddy and Nick Capezuto, and the aforementioned Goodspeed and MacDonald. The band recorded six sides for Manny Koppelman's Crystal-Tone Records in 1947, under the guidance of Reuben Moulds, who was either handling publicity for Borden or doing legwork for Koppelman, or both.

Borden's was a good band. Their Crystal-Tone sides wear well and have been reissued more than once. They were well rehearsed and well played, the soloists were first-rate (listen to Charlie Mariano on "What's New?"), and Pierce's up-tempo arrangements already showed the rhythmic drive that would mark his best work. But Borden was not cut out to be a bandleader. ("He was a screw-up" was the uncharitable opinion of one musician.) Personal differences were compounded by financial problems, and in July 1 948 the band members fired Borden and selected Pierce to replace him because, as Goodspeed recalled, Nat captured the spirit of the band. But Pierce couldn't find work, and he disbanded in November. In early 1949 Pierce and five band mates hit the road as members of the new Larry Clinton Orchestra.

Pierce regrouped for another try in the spring of 1949, and in April the band recorded its first sides for the new Motif label, "Autumn in New York" and "Goodbye Mr. Chops." The 1949 recording of "Autumn in New York" featured the alto saxophone of Charlie Mariano, whom Nat Hentoff called the best local man on that instrument since Johnny Hodges. The flip side was "Goodbye Mr. Chops," the recording debut of vocalist Teddi King, and a record she never particularly liked. Mariano, who had joined Ray Borden's band in 1947, was the best-known and most highly regarded member of the Pierce orchestra, and a real catalyst for the growth and acceptance of modern jazz in Boston.

The recordings of 1949 are still gems. Mariano was already playing with great feeling on his Hodges-influenced "What's New" with Borden, and again on "Autumn in New York" with Pierce. "King Edward the Flatted Fifth," recorded for Motif with a Ralph Burns/Serge Chaloff septet, and "Sheba," with his own sextet, show the Parker influence. These recordings marked Mariano as a special talent. He remained with the Pierce orchestra until its demise in 1951.

Brockton-born trombonist Mert Goodspeed entered a diploma program at Bentley College following his wartime army service, "but that's when I was really getting into music — in fact I missed my graduation ceremony because I had a gig that night." He worked with Johnny Bothwell and Shorty Sherock before joining the Ray Borden band, and he was one of the group who wanted Pierce to lead it. When Pierce disbanded in 1948, Goodspeed joined Pierce with Larry Clinton.

Goodspeed made the rounds in Boston, jamming at the Ken Club with Pee Wee Russell and Vic Dickenson, and playing in a group at Izzy Ort's with Charlie Hooks and Marquis Foster. He was accomplished enough to work with Sabby Lewis and Phil Edmunds. When Pierce reformed his band in 1949, Goodspeed and Sonny Truitt formed a dynamic duo in the trombone section, where Goodspeed remained until 1950.

Sumner "Sonny" Truitt arrived in Boston after his wartime navy service to study at Schillinger House, and in late 1947 he too was in the Borden band. Truitt was another multi-instrumentalists who could seemingly play anything. Primarily known as a trombonist, he also played piano, tenor sax, clarinet, and even bassoon. He composed and arranged, and despite the fact he was a stutterer, he was a fine singer as soon as he got on the bandstand.

Although Truitt stayed with Pierce until the band broke up in 1951, its frequent downtime gave him time for other projects. In 1949 he was a regular at the Hi-Hat as a pianist and trombonist, and while Pierce was on the road with Larry Clinton in 1949, Truitt joined another Boston contingent, which included trumpeter Don Stratton, trombonist Joe Ciavardone, and pianist Roy Frazee, on the road with Tommy Reynolds, who had rehearsed his New Sound band in Boston. Said Stratton of Sonny Truitt:

Sonny Truitt played everything well, and I never thought the trombone was his best instrument. With Reynolds he was playing a two-piano thing with Roy Frazee. I think he was getting an extra $5 a week for writing arrangements—and that was lousy money then, too. But he arranged the music we played between the juggler and the balloonist in the floor shows.

Metronome reviewed all the Pierce Motif recordings, but it was an octet date released under Mariano's name that drew the highest praise. "Babylon" earned a grade of B in May 1950: "Boston baked bop, clean and clever in a Miles Davis mold, with only a tuba missing to make Miles's sound really stick. The leaders alto, Mert Goodspeed’s trombone, Don Stratton's trumpet, and Nat Pierces piano deserve recognition; the ensemble is unusually precise for their kind of skipping line."

The Pierce band rehearsed before a live audience, albeit a motley one, at Philip Amaru's Mardi Gras, a bar at 863 Washington Street, in 1949-1950. Numerous young musicians would fall by for the late afternoon sessions to listen, but the regular daytime crowd was attracted by the 15-cent beers and couldn't have cared less about jazz.

Trumpeter Don Stratton remembered the scene at the Mardi Gras:

For us, the Mardi Gras was an important place. The Pierce band rehearsed there in the afternoons for close to two years. And the owner let us play there for nothing. Well, not quite nothing, he did ask us to play for his daughter’s wedding. An Italian guy. Imagine, here's this bunch of young guys with a bebop band playing for a traditional wedding in the North End!

When we started playing in the late afternoons at the Mardi Gras, there wouldn't be many customers, a few drunks at the bar, rhe regulars, and we'd start to play and they would get upset with it, didn't like it. And Nat, he went out and got an arrangement of a polka, the "Beer Barrel Polka" or something, and we'd play that and they would cheer us on. So that was Nat, playing something for the regulars.

They did have shows at the Mardi Gras, and they did have good jazz players at night there, like Bill Wellington playing saxophone and Danny Kent on piano. It was a gay bar, and the band was in there playing for the show, and the main attraction was a guy, Alan Vey, and he was up there in a wig and makeup. This was Boston and it was tame stuff compared to what I saw in New York working in gay bars a few years later.

Part-time jazz bar and full-time dive, the Mardi Gras was a key location for the Pierce band and the development of modern jazz in Boston, but it's been gone for 40 years. The building was demolished around 1970 to make way for the New England Medical Center.

Spring 1950 brought the group its most consistent work. Charlie Shribman hired the Pierce band to work two nights per week for 12 weeks at the Symphony Ballroom, the spot known as the Play-Mor back in the Ballroom District days. George Shearing heard the band and liked it. He hired Teddi King to sing with his celebrated Quintet, the only singer ever to do so. Basie heard the band and liked it. He turned his piano over to Nat Pierce for last set chores on his subsequent trips to Boston, and the two began a musical relationship that lasted more than 30 years, until Basie's death. Woody Herman heard the band and liked it. After the Pierce band’s 1951 breakup, he hired a half-dozen of its members, including Nat himself.

Pierce’s band earned an invitation to the Local 535 Musician's Ball in May 1950, at the Red Roof in Revere, where Eddy Petty in the Chronicle noted they acquitted themselves well:

Nat Pierce and his 15 piece band and girl singer opened their phase of the program with one of their own compositions, titled "Spirit of 1950" (which you will soon hear on record) and rocked the joint from top to bottom. Charlie Mariano, Mert Goodspeed and Joe MacDonald gave out with the good feature work. Ruth Mann, the vocalist with the band, gave a splendid rendition of Ellington's "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good." This band was definitely the greatest band to hit the stage that night, and their music was what the crowd begged to hear more of.

The mystery of this night is the band that failed to show. Jimmie Martin and his band were scheduled, and their vocalist for the evening, Barbara Jai, was backstage and waiting. But the Martin band didn't show, and it is possible that some of the band members did not want to share the stage with a white band at a function staged by the black local. Instead Pierce's band ruled the roost...but what a night it would have been for a battle of music!

Looking Back on the Pierce Orchestra

Working sporadically, the Pierce band grew in reputation but not in financial security. If there was one guy who had no illusions about the band, it was Pierce himself. Talking with Les Tompkins in 1966, Pierce played down his band's significance:

Most of the guys were all single, like I say, in those days. We didn't have a dime, we couldn't care about making money — as long as we had enough to exist on. So we had a very good thing going there. We had a certain amount of professionalism. I guess when I listen back to some of those records now, they sound kinda trite — with all the so-called bebop licks that we wrote into the arrangements. Double-time trumpet figures and everything — it was kinda patterned after Woody's band at the time.

We made one record date, to which a lot of the guys from Woody's band showed up — Lou Levy, Earl Swope, Zoot, Serge and so on. They all came around to help us on our way. It was nice. It was a very friendly situation up there in Boston at that time. So my direction was towards the Herman noise. It was a little cruder then, though. Some of the voicings were strange, and then we wrote too many notes. We did things that were completely uncomfortable to play. In fact, we couldn't even play 'em!

I don't think this band or any other could play some of the things we played up in Boston. We just killed ourselves, trying to get these things down, you know — for no reason at all. It was just a lot of flash. But we thought we were doing something that was good. Most young people do play many extra notes. It takes many years to learn what to leave out.

One of those kill-the-band numbers was among the last pieces the Pierce band recorded, an ambitious Ralph Burns composition, "Red Hills and Green Barns." Scored for two pianos, played by Burns and Pierce, it was recorded at an overnight session in the studios of WCOP radio in December 1950. Longtime band members MacDonald, Mariano, Stratton, and Truitt were present. The band broke up before a record could be made, and it was 25 years before "Red Hills and Green Barns" was finally released.

Lack of steady work doomed the Pierce Orchestra. Nat Hentoff reported in Down Beat in October 1951 that Nat Pierce, "leader of the city's most musically advanced and most thoroughly unemployed band, has left town to take over the piano chair with Woody Herman." (He took Dave McKenna's place.) A weary Hentoff closed his article with, "Unless you have a boom-chick beat and a 1924 mind, this is no town for a progressive local jazzman."

Pierce of course went on to a long, stellar career in jazz. He arranged and played piano for Woody Herman for five years, freelanced for five, then went back to Herman for five more. Pierce arranged the music for the landmark 1957 television program The Sound of Jazz, filled in for Count Basie on many occasions, recorded prolifically as leader and sideman, and finally formed another big band, Juggernaut, in 1975 with drummer Frank Capp. Although he experimented with bebop with his own Boston orchestra, over time he settled into a swing-oriented groove — but it was swing chipped off the same block as Basie's and Hermans. Nat Pierce died in Los Angeles in June 1992.

The Pierce band scattered to the wind, some going on to long careers in music and others leaving the field completely. Of the former, saxophonist and arranger Dave Figg must have set a road warrior record, as between 1950 and 1964 he was with the big bands of Louis Prima, Tony Pastor, Ray McKinley, Claude Thornhill, Hal Mclntyre, Thornhill again, Billy May, Sam Donahue, Jimmy Dorsey, Buddy Morrow, and Woody Herman.

Four other members of Pierce's 1951 band followed him to Herman's: saxophonist Art Pirie, trumpeters Roy Caton and Dud Harvey, and bassist Frank Gallagher.

Don Stratton went with Buddy Morrow, Claude Thornhill, Tony Pastor, and Elliot Lawrence before settling in New York, where he played jazz, Broadway shows, and modern classical music. Stratton was the only member of Pierce's Boston band to work with him again, in New York in 1956. George Green settled in New York as well, and became a sought-after copyist.

Sonny Truitt was bitten by the same modernist bug as Charlie Mariano. He was an early member of Mariano's bop groups at the Melody Lounge, and took part in Mariano's The New Sounds from Boston recording in 1951. Truitt, Mariano, and drummer Joe MacDonald toured with Bill Harris and recorded under Mariano's name on the West Coast. In New York, Truitt recorded with Miles Davis in 1953, and played in innumerable bands before forming The Six, a sextet with Bob Wilber, in 1956.

A few members of Pierce's band returned to Boston. Nick Capezuto was with Harry James, Tex Beneke, and Louis Prima before returning to Boston and the Herb Pomeroy Orchestra. Dave Chapman entered the U.S. Air Force, and joined Capezuto with Pomeroy after his discharge. Joe MacDonald joined Woody Herman in 1954, but after less than a year returned to Boston, where he worked as an engineer and played music part-time, eventually becoming president of AFM Local 9. Trombonist Bob Carr worked with Manny Wise in the mid-1950s. Phil Viscuglia from the 1949 band taught at the New England Conservatory and played bass clarinet with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Mert Goodspeed was one who left music. He remained with the Pierce band until 1950, when he went with Dean Hudson, a dance band working seven nights a week across the southeast. When that ended, he moved to New York and worked with Buddy DeFranco while he waited for his union card. In 1951, though, he left music and enrolled in business school. He faced the realities of the business: "Why did I quit? Six months of one-nighters, you get real tired of that. And guys like Urbie Green were getting all the studio work and I didn't see any way past that."

There were never any revivals or reunions. For all its importance to Boston's jazz scene, the Nat Pierce Orchestra was forgotten until Art Zimmerman collected its music for an LP he released in 1977. At the time. Pierce was surprised anybody was interested.”

The following YouTube features the Pierce band on The Ballad of Jazz Street. Stick around for the “shout” or “shout me out” chorus following the solos.

Frank D. Waldron and Seattle Syncopated Classics - The Greg Ruby Project

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The problem with Jazz as an art form is that it hasn’t always been considered so. For most of its existence, the music has had a limited appeal.

This and the fact that the music is created in real time and, unless it is saved through recordings, it is almost impossible to savor it again because as soon as it is created it is gone into the Ether or wherever once-played sounds go as a final resting place.

When you consider these two “problems” from the vantage point of the Early Jazz years, they become compounded by the fact that the general public had a poor opinion of “Jass” [“Jungle music”] and, as such, there were very limited opportunities to save music from this period on recordings, especially if the Jazz musicians were regional and not nationally known.

From its origins in New Orleans, the music made its way north to Chicago and then jumped to New York because these entrepots were commercially dynamic enough to make it possible for its merchants to develop the leisure time and money to support Jazz and the musicians who made it as a form of entertainment.

[Of course, gangsters selling prohibited booze in speakeasies that featured Jazz was part of this mercantile “dynamic,” while at the same time, further underscoring the larger public’s dim view of the music.]

In its early years, Jazz planted some roots in Kansas City, San Francisco and Los Angeles, but musicians from these areas soon set out for Chicago and New York where the opportunities to gain fame and fortune made them “the place to be.”

Imagine my surprise, then, when I was contacted by Chris Estey of bigfreakmedia.com and xopublicity.com to gauge my interest in a vinyl recording of some Early Jazz made in SEATTLE!?

I have a very high regard for Chris and his public relations skills, but I have to say that although I lived in the Green Lake area of the city for a time and knew a bit about the modern Jazz scene in the Emerald City, the only connection I had with the city from a historical Jazz perspective was that I remembered reading somewhere that it was Quincy Jones’ hometown.

But trusting to Chris’s judgment, I said: “sure send it to me and I’ll check it out.”

I don’t make many, but this was one, smart move because in the door came Frank D. Waldron Seattle’s Syncopated Classic: Greg Ruby and The Rhythm Runners Play the Lost Work of 1920’s Seattle Jazz Musician.

But wait, it gets better because in addition to the vinyl recording the package also included the sheet music for each of the eleven Waldron compositions nicely tucked away in a folder plus a manuscript-sized bound booklet in which Greg in conjunction with the accomplished Jazz author, Paul de Barros provide a comprehensive history replete with many rare photographs of the background of Frank D. Waldron and the Seattle Jazz scene of the 1920’s. This booklet also includes copies of the sheet music for all of Waldron’s music on the recording.

So the Jazz fan can purchase the LP, and/or the sheet music and/or the historical overview of Waldron and the sheet music for the music on the LP!

Would that it were that the presentation of recorded Jazz was so well served all the time!

It have included links for order information for the LP and the book at the conclusion of this feature.

And in order to provide you with an accurate account of Syncopated Classic: The Previously Unrecorded Compositions of Frank D. Waldron, here are Paul de Barros’ liner notes to the recording.

“Frank D. Waldron is a name not even Seattle jazz aficionados will readily recognize, but these enchanting arrangements of his music by Seattle guitarist Greg Ruby should change that.

Waldron was the first published jazz composer in the Emerald City, one of the area’s first jazz players and the city’s go-to teacher for two generations of musicians, including Quincy Jones. Born in San Francisco in 1890 to a black father and a white mother who taught piano lessons,

Waldron learned to play saxophone and trumpet with such startling technical precision that his student Buddy Catlett speculated Waldron was “conservatory trained.” Wherever or however he learned to play, Waldron showed up in Seattle a year after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake,

and 10 years later was working a regular dance gig at Tacoma’s Olympus Hotel.

From 1918 to 1921, Waldron played a run of cruises on Hood Canal with the Wang Doodle Orchestra, a quintet featuring mandolins made by Port Townsend luthier Chris Knutsen. In 1920, Waldron could also be found in Vancouver, B.C., where New Orleans jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton was with a band led by Oscar Holden, who would later move to Seattle.

This was heady company, but Waldron apparently preferred the settled life of teaching to the fast lane. In 1919, he hung out a shingle in front of Bessie Young’s Boarding House at 1242 South Jackson Street to announce the opening of the Waldron School of Saxophone and Trumpet. Seattle’s first jazz generation learned to play in that studio, including pianist Evelyn Bundy of the Garfield Ramblers, whose son, Charlie Taylor, also a Waldron student, recruited Garfield High School classmate Quincy Jones into his first band 20 years later.

In 1924, Waldron published a book of nine songs– etudes, really–titled “Syncopated Classic for C Melody and Alto Saxophone” that took students through various techniques like slap-tonguing and flutter-tonguing, as well as fundamental fingering challenges. The tunes in that book, along with Waldron’s “The Kaiser’s Got the Blues” and “Valse Queen Ann,” are rendered here with verve and élan by Ruby’s Prohibition Era dance band, The Rhythm Runners. The group features Ruby, a veteran of Seattle’s hot jazz scene; New York revivalists Dennis Lichtman (clarinet and mandolin) and Gordon Au (trumpet); and New Orleanians Charlie Halloran (trombone) and Cassidy Holden (bass). They are joined by Bellingham, Washington-based drummer Julian MacDonough.

For his arrangements, Ruby draws inspiration from Morton’s New Orleans style recordings, using trumpet lead, trombone answer-lines and filigree clarinet obbligatos driven by a rhythm section of drums, bass and guitar (or banjo). Waldron’s tunes usually include a dulcet “trio” component, which allows the arrangements extra opportunities for instrumental variety and contrast. On the opener, “Low Down,” for example, Au’s trumpet takes the A section, followed by Halloran’s looser trombone rendering, a B section on clarinet and a polyphonic return to the first melody. The trio is played first on trumpet, then on clarinet, then by the whole band for a rousing tutti. Ruby also opens up sections for solos, such as Au’s bluesy outing on “Climb Them Walls.”

Though Au often invokes the golden tone and gentle swagger of Bix Beiderbecke, his break on the fetching melody of “Go Get It” is pure Louis Armstrong. Ruby follows with a guitar break and a lively solo in the same spirit. On “It’s Easy,” the clarinet invokes a chirping bird with the repeated grace notes of the B section and Lichtman is also front and center on the lyrical “Valse Marguerite,” written by Waldron for his mother. “The Kaiser’s Got the Blues,” which features the collection’s only 12-bar blues segment, is formally an outlier, as is “Pretty Doll,” a 16-bar verse followed by 16-bar solo choruses, with Ruby’s guitar providing a witty obbligato under Lichtman’s clarinet. Doubling on mandolin, Lichtman weaves melodies with special guest and mandolin virtuoso Mike Marshall brings an extra sparkle to the exquisite sigh of “Valse Hawthorne” and to the more dramatic “Valse Queen Ann.” One can easily imagine dancers gliding over the wooden deck of a Hood Canal cruise ship as the mandolin trills of the Wang Doodle Orchestra wafted through the air.

After the Jazz Age slipped into the Great Depression, Waldron continued to play around town, notably at the Nanking Café, with the Odean Jazz Orchestra, the first African-American group to play in downtown Seattle. Though Waldron was briefly married, he never had children and when he died in 1955, he left little evidence of a career that, in retrospect, played a

significant role in shaping Seattle jazz. This music is a delightful sample of his legacy.”

Paul de Barros

April 2017

Paul de Barros has written for Down Beat magazine and the Seattle Times since 1982 and is the author of Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle and Shall We Play That One Together:The Life and Art of Jazz Piano Legend Marian McPartland

For order information for the CD/Digital go here

For order information regarding the book go here.

Robert Farnon: An Arranger’s Arranger

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“[Although a Canadian who spent most of his professional career in England following a posting there during WW II,] Robert Farnon’s influence as an arranger has been strongly felt in the USA. Quincy Jones, Johnny Mandel, Henry Mancini, Marian Evans, Marty Paich and Neal Hefti are some of the top writers who aren’t ashamed to admit occasionally having ‘borrowed’ some of his ideas.”

- David Aides, English writer and music critic

“… I had never heard anything like this. The harmony was exquisite, fresh and adventurous; and if I could not analyze the voice leading I could certainly hear it. It was startling stuff, and I got my hands on as much of it as I could. Forty and more years later, I still have the London LPs I acquired at that time.”

- Gene Lees, Jazz author and critic

“I wanted to enhance the popular song. When I do an arrangement of a popular song, I like to put some thought into it, not just dish it up in two choruses. Make it into a piece of music, a composition, tell a story.”

- Robert Farnon

"I look at Bob as a composer who is an arranger, His mastery of music is almost total. The lines that he writes! His music is extraordinarily linear. Gil Evans wrote that way. The individual parts are wonderful to play. They make incredible sense.

What really attracted me initially were the arrangements. All the arrangers love his harmony. But his harmony is derived from linear writing. The way he would realize these things for orchestra was just extraordinary. And of course we all know about the string writing. Everybody has commented on it.”

- Jeffrey Sultanof, Jazz composer-arranger, educator

As a young boy, I was a big fan of pirate movies.

My Dad was always taking me to see them at The Strand, The Majestic, The RKO Albee, The Loew’s State and other less, palatial theaters in Providence RI, where I grew up.

My all-time favorite buccaneer flick was The Crimson Pirate which starred the incredibly acrobatic, Burt Lancaster.

On more than one occasion, I almost killed myself trying to duplicate some of the Crimson Pirate’s stunts using the roof tops of three-storied, tenement buildings in place of the rigging on the three masts of a barkentine.

Another seafaring adventure film that made a indelible impression on me was Captain Horatio Hornblower, R.N. which starred Gregory Peck. The movie was set during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19^th century and Peck’s character was loosely based on Lord Nelson, who commanded the British fleet during a number of its epic battles against the navies of Napoleon and his allies.

But, what struck me most about this film was not the gymnastic gyrations of its hero [Peck was no Lancaster], but rather, the beauty and grandeur of the film’s music.

The film’s score contained music that was the aural counterpart of the many breathtakingly beautiful Technicolor images that made up the film.

The Technicolor Company’s movie film was so densely rich and bright in color that I always wished that I could put a spoon into it to see what would come out. It was the first time I ever felt that way about a film score, too.

I had no idea who composed the music to Captain Horatio Hornblower, R.N. until many years later.

Once I learned the film’s score was written by Robert Farnon, it seemed that whenever I encountered his name after that, it was always followed by expressions of deep and abiding admiration.

Gene Lees once observed about Farnon:

“The reverence in which Farnon is held by arrangers and other musicians, not to mention singers, is unlimited. They have long referred to him as the Governor, or just the Guv, and I heard one arranger say in a radio interview, "He is God."

When someone unfamiliar with Farnon's music asked Rob McConnell who he was, Rob said, ‘He is the greatest arranger in the world.’

Andre Previn long ago called Bob ‘the world's greatest string writer.’ Andre told me once that when John (then Johnny) Williams was a young studio pianist in Los Angeles, he asked a question about string writing. Andre gave him a Farnon album, telling him to take it home and listen to it. Late that night, Johnny called him back to ask what the hell Farnon was doing at such-and-such point in one of the tunes. Andre said, ‘I don't know, but if you figure it out, call me back.’”

Johnny Mandel, one of the most brilliant composers and arrangers jazz has produced, said:

"Most of what I know is based on having stolen everything I could from Farnon. I'll say that right off. I've listened to him and tried to approximate what I thought he was doing. He made strings sound like they always should have and never did. Everybody wrote them skinny. He knew how to write them so that it could wrench at you. I'd never heard anybody like him before and I've never heard anybody like him since. We're all pale imitations of him, those of us who are influenced by him."

Another great admirer of Robert Farnon’s work was Marion Evans, a highly regarded studio arranger who was particularly admired for his use of strings in albums by vocalists Steve Lawrence, Edie Gorme and Tony Bennett.

Marion was unapologetic in his admiration [and replication] of Farnon’s approach whose influence he further disseminated as explained in the following excerpt from by Gene Lees in his chapter on Farnon from his book entitled Arranging the Score: Portraits of the Great Arrangers:

“Further disseminating the Farnon influence, Marion founded an informal school for arrangers in his cluttered apartment on West 49th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.

Marion denies that it was ever a school, and in any case he refused payment from his students. ‘I'd get drunk and we'd talk about music,’ he said. He imposed two strict disciplines on his students: they had to study thoroughly the composition and harmony books of Percy Goetschius and the records of Bob Farnon. Through that ‘school’ passed Patrick Williams, J.J. Johnson, Torrie Zito, Jack Cortner, and Nick Perito, and you can hear the Farnon influence in the writing of all of them.

Nor was Marion the only arranger to use the Farnon albums as teaching material. "We all used them for that purpose," [noted composer-arranger] Ralph Burns said.”

…

Marion's evaluation of Farnon: "He just simply is the best," he said.

‘He's a rare combination. Every once in a while, by some biological meeting, some cross-fertilization, we produce an Albert Einstein. We produce somebody who has the talent, the dedication, the training. Farnon had it all. And it was all in one place.

‘Plus, through no fault of his own, he found himself in an incredible position in London, where he was standing in front of a large orchestra every day and writing. You do that for a while and you learn. And that's doing it the hard way.

‘He had that rare combination of everything. He is exceptional by every standard.

I think it's not really kosher to analyze Bob in a highly technical manner. It doesn't begin to touch the depth of his talent. Bob has enormous technique, but his talent far exceeds his technique, and so did Mozart's. And that is precisely what you want. Anyone can learn as much technique as Bob Farnon has by going to music school. But they don't have that extra edge.

‘Mozart didn't write masterpieces all the time. He sat down and kept writing and let it flow. Bob has a lot of that in him. He's fast. He is one of the fastest writers I've ever known. He just does it, and that's it. He doesn't labor over it. When it's good, it's fantastic.’” [excerpts from pp. 63-64]

I guess there was a reason why I was so impressed with Robert Farnon’s music the first time I ever heard it.

And it looks like I was in good company."