Interview: Johnny Mandel (Part 1)

Nothing stops Johnny Mandel. As a composer,

Johnny has written dozens of pop and jazz standards, including the blockbusters Emily, Suicide is Painless, The Shining Sea, A Time for Love and The Shadow of Your Smile, for which he won an Oscar and a Grammy in 1965.

Johnny has scored 36 films, including I Want to Live, The Verdict and Being There. As an album arranger, Johnny won Grammy awards for Quincy Jones' Velas, Natalie Cole's Unforgettable, Shirley Horn's Here's to Life and Tony Bennett's Shadow of Your Smile. He also arranged Ring-A-Ding-Ding, Frank Sinatra's first album for Reprise, tracks on Chet Baker & Strings and Diana Krall's When I Look Into Your Eyes.

What I find most remarkable about Johnny's music is the quiet clash of intensity and sensitivity. After seven decades in the music business, he remains as

comfortable arranging a swinging chart for a big band as he is writing sweeping strings behind a singer. The same duality exists in his personality. When you speak with Johnny, you detect a slight urban gruffness in his voice, the tone of a guy who doesn't pull his punches or back down. But after that passes, you soon realize that his true nature is rooted in kindness, warmth and caring. Clearly, these are the qualities that helped make him one of the most in-demand jazz and orchestra leaders and conductors in the business. The edge just gets people to listen hard the first time.

In Part 1 of my five-part interview with the legendary composer and arranger, Johnny talks about growing up first in New York in the early 1930s, then Los Angeles in the mid-1930s, and then moving back to New York in 1937, where he was sent to boarding schools, where he fell in love with the trumpet and began taking arranging lessons from the great Van Alexander:

JazzWax: Where were you born?

Johnny Mandel: In New York. Originally my mother and father lived in Chicago. A year after my sister was born in 1919, they moved to New York. I was born in 1925.

JW: What did your parents do?JM: My dad was in the garment business. My mom had ambitions to become an opera singer. But back then, in order to make it in the music business, you had to

sleep with the producer. She grew up in a Victorian era when nice girls just didn’t do that. So she gave up her ambition of becoming a professional singer. The result was she became very supportive of me when I wanted to become a musician.

JW: Did you have brothers or sisters?JM: I had a sister, Audre. Her name was pronounced "Audrey," but she left the "y" off. She was creative. Audre was six years older than me. Girls grow up much faster than boys, so I was an only child in a certain sense. My sister and I were friendly, but she was grown up before I ever knew what was happening around me. I was a pest, but she put up with me.

JW: Was your neighborhood in New York tough?JM: No, we were comfortable. I grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, on 85th St. and

West End Ave. I spent a couple of years going to P.S. 9 on 82d St. and West End Ave. One day my mother dropped me off at school on Election Day in 1932, the day Roosevelt was elected president. She didn’t realize there wasn’t school that day. I started wandering around, and they found me conducting traffic on West End Ave. I was seven years old. [Pictured: New York's P.S. 9, now known as The Mickey Mantle School]

JW: What was your mother’s reaction?

JM: She had a fit. She came to pick me up after they called her. The school was prehistoric, as I remember it. We had toilets with a long trough and a bunch of seats. The trough carried everything into the sewers. I got into a fight with some kid about something one day and pushed him in there. His mother called my mother and complained that her kid caught a cold. I remember my mother saying to her, “You’re lucky that’s all he caught.” My mom was a real New Yorker.

JW: How about your dad?JM: My dad owned a clothing company called Mandel & Cash. But he took a financial beating when the Depression hit in the early 1930s. Then Roosevelt's New Deal forced

him to hire a lot of people he didn’t need or use. So in 1934, my dad finally said to hell with it and closed up shop. He had been to California on a visit years earlier and loved it. He wanted to retire there. So we moved. My mother wasn’t happy in Los Angeles at first. She had been sort of a New York swinger and liked it there. She had a bunch of buddies. They were like flappers.

JW: Did you like California?JM: When I first got out there with my family, I looked around and realized that I hated New

York. I hated all the noise. In L.A., we lived in the Hancock Park area. All the houses had been built in the Spanish Mission style in the 1920s. The area looked then pretty much the same as it does today. Back then, there was more grass and trees. I thought it was wonderful. In New York, you went to Central Park once in a while but always in groups. California was a complete change. You could run free.

JW: When did you know you wanted to become a musician?JM: On the day my dad died at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles in 1937. I was 11 years old. My dad's sudden death of a heart attack had nothing to do with my decision. A

cousin I never knew existed had come to visit, and the day my dad died I spent the day with him. His name was Mel Rosenbach. He was a drummer with Harry Reser's Clicquot Club Eskimos. Back then, the big thing for a band was to have a radio show and name the band after the sponsor. In this case, Clicquot Club was a lemon soda, like 7Up. I met Mel,  and we started talking. He told me he was going out on the road with Reser. I asked why he was doing that. Mel said he was a drummer. I said, “You mean you’re a drummer all the time?” He said, “Yeah, I play with this band, and we play at different dances." I said, “Wow, is it fun?” [laughs]

JW: What did Mel tell you?

JM: He said, “Oh yeah.” I didn’t ask Mel about the girls because I didn’t know about that yet. Later I discovered that most band and jazz guys became musicians because they could get girls easily. And I was one of them. But that would come later. [laughs] When Mel told me what he did with Reser, I wanted to become a musician, too. It sounded like they had a blast.

JW: Were you already listening to music?JM: Yes. Thanks to my mom’s interests in singing, there was plenty of music around the house. The latest sheet music was there, and the record business was starting to take off again after being clobbered in the early years of the Depression. So everyone I knew played piano for their own amusement or listened to the radio or knew the latest songs. And it was all jazz of one type or another.

JW: What did your family do after your dad died?JM: We returned to New York, where my mother wanted to live, and stayed at the Essex

House hotel on Central Park South.

JW: That's pretty fancy stuff for 1937. How could your mother afford that?JM: We were lucky that my father had had an insurance policy. After we moved, I met Marshall Robbins, whose family also lived on the fifth floor of the

hotel. Marshall and I were the same age, 12. His father was Jack Robbins of Robbins Music, the big music publisher. Jack used to take Marshall and me around to see all the big-name bands in the late 1930s. I knew by then I wanted to play a horn. It had to be a trumpet or saxophone, something you kissed.

JW: Which bands did you see?

JM: Every one of them. I hadn’t learned to differentiate yet. The records were coming out quickly then, and swing was already hot after Benny Goodman had played the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles in 1935.

JW: How long did your family live at the Essex House?JM: For about a year. Then we moved to the Lombardy apartments hotel on East 56th St. My dad’s insurance policy saved us, and my mother was good with money. We lived comfortably.

JW: Were you a handful?JM: Boys were very rare in our family. My family knew how to raise girls but they didn’t

know much about dealing with boys. They didn’t know how to deal with me after my dad died. I wasn’t a bad kid or anything. While we were still out in L.A., I went to the John Burroughs School [pictured]. But one day I came home with such a bad mouth that my mother sent me to a terrible boarding school called Cal Prep way out in

Covina. It was an awful place. But that was a holding pen until we moved to New York. In all fairness, my mother and my sister didn’t really know what to do with a rowdy teenage boy.

JW: What did your mom do with you in New York?JM: In New York she sent me to a good but dreadful boarding school called the Irving

Institute [pictured] up in Tarrytown, N.Y., about 45 minutes north of the city. It was quite an anti-Semitic place. It was for families of rich kids, a middle school for young gentlemen founded by the writer Washington Irving. They didn’t have any use for someone like me. I spent four years at Irving. I had a few friends but stuck with my trumpet. That was all I was interested in. And I totally had my ears glued to the radio. [Click on images to enlarge]

JW: It sounds like they left you aloneJM: For the most part unless I stepped out of line. The Irving Institute was like something out of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield. One day I used up all the hot water at 6 am. One of the headmasters got a switch and decided he was going to teach me a lesson.

JW: What did you do?JM: That was the last straw. I finally told my mother, and she yanked me out of there. I then

went to the New York State Military Academy [pictured] in Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y. I went on a band scholarship in 1942, the equivalent of high school. The academy was very proud of its marching band, but many of the guys in the band couldn’t play very well. Our gig was to play and march. You learned to march and play at the same time.

JW: Did you enjoy it?

JM: It was a great experience. Having to wake up the whole place as the bugler helped develop my chops—when the horn wasn’t sticking to my lips in the cold. Many well-known musicians went there. The whole Brown family had gone there—Les [pictured], Warren and Stumpy. We had a dance band there that I started arranging for. I graduated in 1944.

JW: Before you graduated, what did you do over the summers?

JM: My mother sent me away to sleep-away camp. In the summer of 1942, I was a music counselor at one. I was a trumpeter in charge of forming a band. The places up in the Catskill Mountains weren’t very nice. I was working there as an employee. The following summer in 1943 I was good enough to play with [jazz violinist] Joe Venuti’s band. That was a baptism by fire.

JW: How so?JM: We were on the road in the Catskills for about 2½ months over that summer. I was going

to stay with the band in the fall but my mother talked me into going back to finish my senior year at the academy. She was right. Joe Venuti was one of the best musicians I’ve ever known. He was such a clown, a practical joker. People didn’t take him seriously but he was every bit as good as Stephane Grappelli. Our girl singer was Kay Starr [pictured]. I learned what it was like to be a professional musician with Venuti. We were on the road a lot, but the band also played in New York at Roseland. That’s how hard up top venues were for musicians.

JW: What did you do after you graduated from the military academy?

JM: One of the first jobs I had after graduating was with Billie Rogers [pictured], the girl trumpet player and her orchestra. She had been with Woody Herman, in his first band, the one known as the "Band that Played the Blues." I was writing for Billie's band and playing third trumpet, but that band broke up three months after I joined.

Tomorrow, in Part 2, Johnny talks about who taught him how to arrange, why he switched from the trumpet to the trombone, meeting a teenage Al Cohn, playing bebop with Alan Greenspan and Leonard Garment, performing professionally in war-time New York and joining Boyd Raeburn's band.

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Johnny Mandel on Streisand (Pt. 1)

Table your politics and any pre-conceived notions about

Barbra  Streisand. In fact, forget everything you know about her. If you can do this, you'll find that her new album, Love Is the Answer, is a beautifully crafted document of vocal warmth and arranging. Rather than turn out another battleship-sized production that winds up too many miles from your heart, Streisand here is intimate, familiar and downright cozy. To be fair, the new album's seductive power owes a great deal to the bold vision of producer-pianist Diana Krall and the historic hand of composer-arranger Johnny Mandel.

In fact, Johnny's arrangements are so exceptional and Krall's playing so tasteful that the

album feels like a trio recording.  Each time I listen to the CD, I hear something new in Johnny's blending of reeds, woodwinds, harp and strings around Krall's quartet. Rather than lay back and passively fill in the gaps, Johnny's arrangements reach out to engage Streisand, pull away, rush forward and play tag with her impassioned vocal treatments. The result is one of Johnny's finest singer-supported orchestrations since his work on Krall's 1999 album, When I Look in Your Eyes.

Johnny's arranging sensibilities were forged in the mid-1940s, when the measure of a big

band chart was how hard it could swing. Johnny's also a veteran of the 1950s studios, when singers emerged as recording stars and arrangements had to frame and dramatically provoke. And, of course, Johnny is a champion 1960s songwriter, penning the melodies of some of America's most-loved contemporary songs, including Emily, Shadow of Your Smile, A Time for Love, Where Do You Start, The Shining Sea, Theme from M*A*S*H, and so many others.

In Part 1 of my interview with Johnny on his mood-setting work on the new Streisand album, the 83-year old composer-arranger talks about how he worked with Krall and Streisand, his scoring process, and the big trick he uses to end songs on an ascending note:

JazzWax: What goes through your mind when you get an assignment like this?Johnny Mandel: Committing suicide [laughs]. No, I’m just kidding. These projects are always more involved than you imagine at the start.

JW: Did Barbra call you?JM: Actually, in this case, Diana [Krall] did. She was the

album’s producer and principal pianist. There’s nobody I’d rather work for than Diana. She’s my favorite singer. And my favorite pianist. She’s superb.

JW: Why?JM: She has the best taste of anyone I know as a singer and as a pianist. I’ve always liked working for singers. I’ve worked with Barbra before, a little here and there. Barbra’s great and, bless her, she records my songs. Tony Bennett does, too. On the other hand, Diana’s never recorded a song of mine. But that doesn’t matter. She’s still one of my favorite musicians.

JW: When did you work with Streisand before?JM: The first time I arranged For All We Know, on James Newton

Howard’s score for Prince of Tides. We played it down once and did a perfect take. Barbra wanted to do additional takes. She likes to push herself, to extract that something extra special. To my ear, her first takes are always the best.

JW: How did you, Krall and Streisand work together on the new album?JM: Barbra first got together with Diana and went over the songs she wanted to do and

the keys in which she wanted to sing them. Then Diana and I spoke about the approach. Diana is always on the road, and she works 28 hours a day. So we did a lot of talking on the phone. Then I had a month to finish five songs.

JW: Five arrangements in a month? That sounds impossible.JM: [Laughs] I wasn’t writing full orchestrations at that point. Just the arrangements for Diana’s quartet. Once those were completed, Barbra recorded her vocal tracks with just Diana’s quartet. Then those tracks came back to me for the orchestral arrangements. After those were added, Barbra listened to the results and in many cases re-recorded her vocal tracks. As I said, it's a process. For me, the goal initially when writing for Diana's quartet was to avoid writing any little traps for myself that I'd have to deal with later with the orchestration.

JW: What do you mean by traps?JM: Things I’d be sorry I wrote for the quartet because I'd have to deal with them when adding strings, woodwinds, reeds and so on.

JW: Pick a song from the album to illustrate what you mean. JM: OK, for example, Here’s That Rainy Day. Barbra likes songs and keys she feels comfortable with. In this

instance,  Here's that Rainy Day was in D-flat, I think. But toward the end of the last chorus, Barbra descended a half step to a C, which is very uncommon for a singer at the end of a song. Obviously, she felt more comfortable range-wise with what she wanted to do there. Most singers end by finishing on a higher note. But that’s what Barbra wanted, to drop down a half step. I would have created a trap for myself if my arrangement followed her down a half step. My trick is to make the song sound like it's going up at the end, in this case without stepping on the feeling Barbra wanted to deliver vocally.

JW: Did you talk about what you were going to do there before the recording?JM: No. It’s just one of my arranging tricks that I’ve used over the years. It’s uncommon for an arrangement to go down a half tone at the end of a song. It’s a downer, unless you deliberately want that feeling, dramatically. So I created the illusion with orchestration that the song ends up without crushing what Barbra wanted to do there. It's subtle.

JW: When arranging the album's songs, how did you work?JM: At the piano. And then with Diana. Her quartet is at the heart of this album. The trick for me on the orchestration side was to elegantly surround the arrangements I wrote

for Diana’s quartet. You don’t want to hear the quartet accompanied by the orchestra, or first the quartet and then the orchestra. I hate that sound—hearing one and then the other. Barbra has never recorded an album like this before, with a jazz quartet plus orchestration. She had mixed feelings about it, mostly over concern that just the sound of a quartet might be too spare for her sound. Which was perfect for me, since I like when a quartet and orchestra overlay are completely integrated as one.

JW: For those who know little about what a producer does, what was Krall’s role?

JM: Holding the whole thing together. Diana never lost her focus, regardless of the many creative places Barbra wanted to go. When Barbra is on and does it, there’s no one who can compare. Diana has always admired her tremendously. Which is why they worked beautifully together.

JW: So when you approached the orchestral arrangements for Streisand, what are you doing?JM: Without getting technical, I write down every note Barbra sings as well as what I've

written for the quartet. Then I go everywhere Barbra and the quartet aren't. You need to know where Barbra's going to be so you aren’t in her way. I listen carefully to all of that. I don’t want to write something that sounds like there’s an anchovy in there. It takes a little more time, but I like working that way. [Pictured: Johnny Mandel with songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman]

JW: On Here’s to Life, you have a flute sailing through swelling strings, and then you have the strings sort of playing tag with Streisand's vocal. What were you doing there?JM: I don’t’ know [laughs]. I don’t know anything about the violin. That doesn’t matter because I know what I like to hear the strings play, and I know what I don’t like.

JW: Such as?JM: I hate hearing strings in octaves. It’s a sound I consider the epitome of schmaltz.

My approach is to write strings in chords the best way I know how. There’s no format. I’ll voice them a certain way that sounds right to me [pause]. I know that’s kind of a stupid explanation, but that’s how it works with me. I try not to write them like the world’s largest sax section [laughs].

Tomorrow, Johnny talks about his focus on instrumental textures and personalities for each of the 11 songs he scored, the special way he treats the piccolo and harp, and why arranging two of his own songs was so challenging.

JazzWax tracks: Barbra Streisand's Love Is the Answer is available at iTunes, Amazon and other online retailers. I have not heard the deluxe edition, a double CD that includes the quartet versions.

JazzWax clip: Here's Johnny's arrangement for Streisand's Here's That Rainy Day. Note what he does with the flute and strings to build enormous drama in the intro before backing off as Streisand enters. Streisand's vocal is superb by any measure, and Krall's piano lines backed by a soft samba beat are gorgeous. Most of all, dig the ending note Streisand chooses—and how Johnny inches the strings and piano up at the tail end to play against her vocal choice...

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Tony Bennett: Movie Song Album

One of Tony Bennett's most spectacular recordings of the 1960s is The Movie Song Album.

On this 1965 tribute to Hollywood, Bennett is at his artistic and vocal best, delivering deeply personal and emotionally reflective renditions of the day's movie themes. For my money, there's no finer Bennett than the singer interpreting 1960s movie and Broadway hits. I even dig Bennett on pop-rock material of the period (Something, Love Story, etc.)

But make no mistake—The Movie Song Album isn't a pop disc. It's a stealth jazz album on par with the best jazz-vocal strings recordings (Billie Holiday's Lady in Satin, Frank Sinatra's

Only the Lonely, Ella Fitzgerald's Rodgers and Hart Songbook and David Allyn's A Perfect Match). At the helm on this date was Johnny Mandel, who as musical director perfectly selected the arrangers for the songs and arranged three himself—two of which he composed. Johnny also conducted the orchestra on a number of the tracks.

First, a word about movie music. In the 1960s, with the decline of the MGM musical and rise of the adult drama, more films began to feature a theme song that had a dual purpose. If the

song was beautifully crafted, you left the theater feeling more emotional about what you saw on the screen. What's more, the song could be used to sell soundtrack LPs and 45-rpms and would wind up being covered by singers of the day. Interestingly, many movie themes from the early and mid-1960s were piercing ballads (More, Alfie, Valley of the Dolls, Jean, Romeo and Juliette, Born Free, Moon River and so on).

The Movie Song Album captures the ballad era in movie music perfectly. As Bennett sings, you can hear him immersing himself in the various lush arrangements and weighing his phrasing of every lyric. On each song, Bennett delivers a passionate and penetrating rendition without ever abandoning his up-close intimacy or street-singer optimism.

For the date, Johnny Mandel pulled in the era's greatest studio and arrangers and players. There are charts by Al Cohn (Smile, The Second Time Around and The Trolley Song) and

Larry Wilcox (a dazzling Maybe September, Days of Wine and Roses). Other arrangers were the songs' composers: Neal Hefti [pictured] (Girl Talk), Quincy Jones (The Pawnbroker), Luiz Bonfa (Samba de Orfeu) and a spectacular arrangement of Never Too Late by David Rose. And, of course, Johnny Mandel wrote nonpareil charts for The Gentle Rain and his own Emily and The Shadow of Your Smile.

The sidemen? A virtual It's a Mad Mad Mad World of the jazz business. That's Lou Levy's doodling piano opening Girl Talk, pianist Jimmy Rowles providing the key-spray intro to The

Shadow of Your Smile and Tommy Flanagan offering tender chord voicings on his accompaniment to Smile. Johnny knew what he was doing: Each pianist put his own stamp on the song. The tenor solo on The Trolley Song (the only non-60s theme and the session's only uptempo tune)? Zoot Sims [pictured].

As Johnny Mandel told me yesterday, "I had the best studio and jazz musicians in the world on that album."

What I love most about this album are the now-forgotten

hits—Quincy Jones' The Pawnbroker, David Rose's Never Too Late and Percy Faith's Maybe September, a powerful ballad from The Oscar, a now-hammy 1966 movie in which Tony Bennett had a co-starring role (as Hymie Kelly). As you listen to these songs, you're transported back to another time: the twilight years of film songcraft, jazz studio sensibilities and powerful vocal interpretations.  

Bennett here is more than matched by the majesty of the arrangements.

Listen to David Rose's [pictured] surging nuances in Never Too Late or the smoldering intensity Johnny captures on his own Shadow of Your Smile. Or the crisp snappy delivery Hefti brings to his composition Girl Talk. Or the somber pathos Quincy Jones adds to his work The Pawnbroker. This album has it all—and on multiple levels.

Johnny's reflection yesterday on his masterpiece The Movie Song Album:

"I love that record. We did a good version of The Shadow and Emily. Tony always sings the

definitive  version of every song I write. His interpretations are always the best. He comes to the territory, stakes his turf and winds up owning the song. There wasn't much agonizing in the studio during those sessions. We ran down some things and then just went to work, and the other composer-conductors were all enormous pros. We just did it, and the result was gorgeous, just great."

JazzWax tracks: Tony Bennett's The Movie Song Album (Columbia) is available at iTunes and here. Even if you already have some of these songs on compilations,

download the remastered version. Trust me, this is one of those albums where you want to hear these tracks in order, as producer Ernie Altschuler intended. Or if you can find it on vinyl, even better. I recently purchased a sealed original copy, and the sound is warm and spectacular. Bennett sounds like he's in the room.

JazzWax clip: Here's Tony Bennett singing The Shadow of Your Smile from The Movie Song Album—composed, arranged and conducted here by Johnny Mandel. Listen to Jimmy Rowles' tender piano intro. And dig how warm Tony becomes and how he turns on the power three minutes in. And most of all, dig the fluttering flutes Johnny added at the end....

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