Two things today, one for the event that happened twenty-four years ago today, and one that happened much more recently.
Something for Thursday
Social media has been abuzz lately over the trailer for a new film of Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights. I mean, look at this thing:
Yeah, that’s…quite something, isn’t it? Will I watch that? Maybe. I think it will be viewed best at home, after several drinks.
But anyway, here’s a suite of music by film score great Alfred Newman, composed for the 1939 film of the same book.
Of course, I suppose as time marches on it becomes less and less known that the greatest single adaptation of Wuthering Heights is the semaphore version!
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
The Music Man doesn’t get enough credit for how inventive it is, methinks. The Music Man is known for its Iowa setting, and it generally seems to be viewed as safe Americana. But it makes a lot of interesting choices, and those include its music numbers. This one, “Lida Rose and Will I Ever Tell You”, blends two different songs together, sung by entirely different characters, who aren’t even in the same place. How does that work?
It starts as our hero, con man Professor Harold Hill, is returning to his hotel room where he is met by the local school board, four guys who used to hate each other until Hill noticed that their voices lent themselves to music–and he somehow converted them into a barbershop quartet. The board members are tasked with getting Professor Hill’s educational credentials (which he has entirely made up); he keeps distracting them by tricking them into singing, whereupon he slips away. He does that again here, with a song called “Lida Rose”. But then we shift to Marian Paroo, the woman who is falling for Professor Hill, who is singing a love song called “Will I Ever Tell You”. And then, via the magic of some very inventively-done split screen, we hear both songs together.
The Music Man is a much more sophisticated musical than I think it gets credit for! That’s all I’m saying.
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Something for Thursday
Well, I don’t know how often I do this. It’s not very often. Probably the last time was something like Ravel’s Bolero.
I’m about to share something I don’t like at all.
See, there’s this thing that’s been going around social media of late, particularly Tiktok, where you share what the Number One song was when you were born. I looked mine up…and my shoulders sagged. My stomach fell. My heart sank.
I had never heard this before, so I had to go listen to it, hoping against hope that maybe it’s not terrible.
Oh, it is.
Look, I have no problem with this particular artist, but I knew upon seeing this song title that I was not going to dig this particular song. And lo! I did not.
Here, folks, is what was Number One in the land on September 26, 1971. I’m not even going to name it! If I’d waited another week, I’d have arrived during “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart’s chart-topping success. Alas!
Sigh. Here it is….
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Something for Thursday
I just finished a remarkable novel the other night, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos. The book is a slow burn of a novel about the life of a man (told as a series of memories as he looks back on his life during his last hours, in a seedy hotel in New York City) who, along with his brother, was once a major figure in Cuban music (particularly Mambo music) in the 1950s. Cesar Castillo remembers his childhood with his brother, Nestor, in Cuba, and he remembers the loves they had there before they came to New York, hopefully to establish a life and then move their families and their loved ones along later. Cesar and Nestor become musicians and their lives…well, their lives go on. I don’t want to say a whole lot more than that, because the book is as effective at showing life for what it is–a sequence of things that happen to us, few of which we have any control over–and there are turns along the way that we don’t see coming. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is not a novel that grabs right away…in fact, I was wondering if I’d bother finishing it just after fifty pages or so. But it grows in the mind, and by the time I was in the last hundred pages or so, I honestly couldn’t stop thinking about it. I read the book slowly, savoring as it went, enjoying Hijuelos’s chapter-less structure and his very long paragraphs, sometimes extending over several pages, and his long parenthetical asides as one of Cesar’s memories triggered another one, barely related, that took place at some total other point in his life.
The Castillo Brothers’ biggest hit is a song that Nestor writes about the love of his life, a woman he can’t forget even though she is back in Cuba (and their relationship didn’t work out anyway), named Maria. Nestor pens a song called “Beautiful Maria of My Soul”, and this song’s success marks their high point as a musical act and it also somewhat haunts Cesar for the rest of the novel. And thanks to the fact that the book was adapted for the screen in 1992, in a film simply called The Mambo Kings, we can hear the song. It is sung by Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas, who star in the film as Cesar and Nestor Castillo. I have never seen the film, but the song is quite good.
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Something for Thursday
(Normally I try to wait longer than just under four months before I do a re-post of something I’ve already written here, but Chuck Mangione has died, and I like what I wrote about him and this song back in March, so here it is again. I’m listening to it anew as I write this. Thanks for the music, Mr. Mangione!)
So for Tuesday Tones the other day, I went to feature a piece of music that I know I’ve featured here before but I couldn’t remember how long it’s been, so I looked it up. I featured it less than six months ago. So I chose something else.
Today I want to feature a piece of music I know I’ve featured here before, but I can’t remember how long it’s been. So I looked it up. Almost fifteen years.
Time is weird, y’all.
Anyway, here’s something I discovered after music camp one year. I was playing in the jazz band and we did a number by Chuck Mangione, called “Land of Make Believe”, and it was a really catchy tune, upbeat and happy with a relentless figure underneath it that will make only the deepest comatose people fail to react with toe-tapping glee. At that point I had heard the thing a number of times, always in the instrumental, but at the camp we included vocals. The lyrics at the time struck me as kind of syrupy and childish, but then our band director started pointing things out–the saxes quote “Old McDonald” here, the trombones quote “Farmer in the Dell” there–and gradually it started to make sense why this thing was so peppy and childlike.
Those actually aren’t bad things at all, unless you’re putting up a jaded front.
After the camp ended for that year, I embarked on a usual project of mine after a musical experience in which a new work captivated me: I sought out recordings of the pieces we had played, at least, the ones that I had particularly enjoyed. One was, indeed, “Land of Make Believe”, which I found on a Mangione compilation tape. (Yes, this was in the era of cassettes. Sue me!) But where the version we’d played at camp had been six minutes long or so, this one was over twelve minutes. It had a lot more vocals, it started with a long slow intro (the version we played started with the up tempo part), and it had more solo sections than the version we’d played (which only featured one solo, for trumpet/flugelhorn).
And there was more of those lyrics.
Here’s how it begins:
When you’re feelin’ down and out, wond’rin’ what this world’s about
I know a place that has the answer, it’s a place where no one dies
It’s a land where no one cries and good vibrations always greet you
How I love when my thoughts run to the Land Of Make Believe
Where ev’rything is fun forever
Children always gather ’round Mother Goose and all her rhyme
They fill the air with sounds of laughter
And another sample, farther in:
I once asked the Wizard of Oz for the secret of his land
Now just between us he said “Just take a look around here”
Seven Dwarfs and Little Boy Blue, Uncle Remus and Snow White too
Now just between us, that’s what’s known as integration
Silly? Sentimental? Simplistic?
Yeah, maybe. But if you want to illustrate for someone what the sentimental side of the 1970s was like, I think you can do a lot worse than play Chuck Mangione’s “Land of Make Believe” for them.
A note about this particular performance: it was recorded live, with Mangione and his band being backed by the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra (Hamilton, Ontario). Not only did you have Mangione and his own talented band on stage, but in the Hamilton Philharmonic at the time were five brass players who would go on to be the founding members of the Canadian Brass, one of the most famous chamber music groups in the world.
This is just over twelve minutes long, so give yourself some time…and give yourself permission to go where this music wants to take you. Here is Chuck Mangione (born in Rochester, NY!) and friends with “Land of Make Believe”.
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Something for Thursday
This lovely film music cue has been on my mind the last few days because for some reason, the YouTube algorithm served up a clip from The Karate Kid Part II, and because I like that movie (it’s not as good as the first one, but it’s still quite watchable and it’s gorgeously filmed), the YouTube algorithm proceeded to give me more of it to watch. So here’s a wonderful cue that’s from a scene toward the end, just before the movie’s climactic action starts to unfold. Daniel is set to leave Okinawa and return home, but before he does, he visits the Okinawan girl he’s been hanging around with in an old warehouse, where she performs a tea ceremony for him. It’s a frankly wonderful scene, wordless as the music plays. I featured this cue here before, but it’s been a bunch of years, so here it is again: “Daniel Leaves” by Bill Conti.
(The cue ends suddenly because at that moment the wind whips up, blowing out the candle hanging above them and alerting them to the coming cyclone.)
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Something for Thursday
You may remember the improv comedy show Whose Line Is It Anyway, which has had several incarnations over the years…including the original, which was a BBC production. Here’s a clip that I’ve always liked. The second guy’s reaction to the tempo his improv song is set always makes me laugh.