Gordon Jenkins

Gordon Hill Jenkins ( born May 12, 1910 in Webster Groves, Missouri; † 1 MAY 1984 Los Angeles, California ) was an American musician, composer and arranger. He wrote, among other things Goodbye, closing signature tune by Benny Goodman.

Life

Gordon Jenkins, son of a village and parish organist pianist, already mastered the youth about a dozen instruments and wrote their own arrangements. He began his career in 1931 in the orchestra of Isham Jones, after he was short stepped in during a performance of the band in St. Louis for the ailing pianist and spontaneously committed as an arranger. In 1933 he wrote for the orchestra by Woody Herman Blue Prelude; Followed in 1935 with Goodbye his most famous song, which was adapted by Benny Goodman as the theme song on the concert circuit. Both pieces were worldwide to date much interpreted standards.

Career

Since 1936, composed and arranged Jenkins - anonymously, since the 1940s under his own name - Film Music for Paramount Studios, whose musical director, he was later for many years. The genre remained Jenkins up in his last years inside ( The First Deadly Sin, 1980, with Frank Sinatra and Faye Dunaway ) connected.

In addition, Jenkins since 1939 worked as an arranger and orchestra leader for numerous radio shows on NBC, including for Dick Haymes, over which he joined the Decca label. There he worked out with Haymes also successful with stars such as Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Al Jolson, Ella Fitzgerald, the Andrews Sisters and Louis Armstrong ( for which he received the Evergreen Blueberry Hill arranged ) together, but reüssierte well with self-penned songs like San Fernando Valley ( 1944). As a musical director at Decca in 1949, he established the highly successful pop group The Weavers ( Goodnight Irene, 1950).

1956 Jenkins moved to the Capitol label. There his multi-year collaboration began with Judy Garland ( Alone, 1956), whom he accompanied as a conductor even with some of their European concerts, and Nat King Cole ( Love Is The Thing, 1956), for which he orchestrated among others Stardust, and led both artists to some of her best vocal performances.

The longest lasted for its concentrated primarily on melancholy, under painted by strings ballads albums collaboration with Frank Sinatra ( Where Are You, 1957;? No One Cares, 1959), which later on Reprise with further albums and singles until 1981 (She Shot Me Down) was continued and September of My Years ( 1965) brought forth a multiple Grammy - award-winning album, on which, among others, It Was a Very Good Year ( also Grammy awards ) can be heard. Designed for Sinatra's TV specials and arranged Jenkins between 1965, 1966 and 1973 and three longer " Saloon medleys ".

Along with Harry Nilsson Jenkins succeeded in 1973 with the album A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night (1973 ), another worldwide success, which again earned him a Grammy. The recording sessions were filmed and later broadcast by the BBC as a television special.

Jenkins was married to his second wife, the soprano Beverly Jenkins, who can be heard on several of his albums. In his last years, Jenkins was suffering from ALS, the increasingly difficult for him to work and he eventually died on 1 May 1984. In autumn 2005, published by his son Bruce Jenkins, a well-known sports journalist in the United States from San Francisco, a very personal biography of his father held.

Suites

One of the most striking works by Gordon Jenkins include its peripheral suites for orchestra, vocal soloists and chorus, often accompanied by spoken between texts in which he presented his great musical versatility as a composer and arranger demonstrated and with whom he also greatly influenced the genre of the concept album.

The prelude Manhattan Tower, which grossed Jenkins in the autumn of 1945 with Bill Lee and Beverly Mahr ( his future wife ) as soloists and Elliott Lewis as narrator and 1946 as one of the first concept albums ever came out on Decca. In various episodes and sound images with some experimental features Jenkins recorded his impressions of the depressing first stay in the streets of the big city New York City. Ten years later, Jenkins extended the originally 17minütige work and brought it with Capitol in a new recording on LP out. In his later suites Jenkins kept reaching back to elements of this piece.

In 1953, again with Bill Lee and Beverly Jenkins as soloists, the 51minütige Suite Seven Dreams ( Decca ), in which will be unmasked in seven scenes unfolding story at the very end by a refined musical Pointe as a dream. From one of the pieces, Crescent City Blues, Johnny Cash took great passages of the text for his hit Folsom Prison Blues (1955) and was sued for court, which led him to a compensation payment of $ 75,000.

1958 composed and arranged Jenkins The Letter, the musical story of a couple and his faded love that was recorded for Capitol by Judy Garland, with Canadian actor John Ireland as a partner. 1959 Judy Garland took it to a big concert tour, which led, among others, in the New York Metropolitan Opera.

One last monumental suite originated in 1979 with Reflections On The Future In Three Tenses for Frank Sinatra as part of Sinatra's third triple album Trilogy: Past -Present -Future ( Reprise). Sinatra's musical- autobiographical journey through space and time on his most unusual album, where as soloists Loulie Jean Norman and Beverly Jenkins again be heard and in the Jenkins Sinatra also sets out a line about yourself in the mouth ( " I'll have Lefty to write me one more chart " in Before The Music Ends ), joined by the critics initially a mixed response, but found recently as well in addition to Manhattan Tower by Gordon Jenkins composition densest again reinforced attention.

Discography

• Manhattan Tower ( Decca, 1946) ( Advanced Addition: Capitol, 1956)
• Seven Dreams ( Decca, 1954)
• 26 Years of Academy Award Winning Songs ( CG, 1960)

• Satchmo In Style ( Verve, 1959) (recorded 1949-1954 )

• Alone ( Capitol, 1956)
• The Letter ( Capitol, 1959)

• Love Is The Thing ( Capitol, 1956)
• The Very Thought Of You ( Capitol, 1958)
• Spirituals ( Capitol, 1959)
• Where Did Everyone Go? ( Capitol, 1963)

• Where Are You? ( Capitol, 1957)
• A Jolly Christmas From Frank Sinatra ( Capitol, 1957)
• No One Cares ( Capitol, 1959)
• All Alone (Reprise, 1962)
• September Of My Years ( Reprise, 1965)
• Ol'Blue Eyes Is Back (Reprise, 1973)
• Reflections On The Future In Three Tenses ( = Trilogy, Part 3, Reprise, 1979)
• She Shot Me Down (Reprise, 1981) (next to Don Costa)