The Lone Ranger
Yeah, that’s me, all right. And to think I didn’t even know what an arranger was when I was 24 and knee-deep into a private music school in Boston, the Berklee school of music, which featured classes in jazz. My piano teacher that first year was Ray Santisi, a fine jazz pianist. Right away he saw that I couldn’t sight read and had fairly terrible technique. He suggested I change my major to arranging, with a piano minor.
I asked him what was involved in “arranging.” I remember he smiled and said, “Take the classes. You’ll learn soon enough.” And he was right, in a way, but it wasn’t “soon enough.”
What did we want to be when we grew up? I remember Walt Myers asked me that question when I was around 10. “I want to be a mechanical engineer,” I remember answering. God knows why I said that, I didn’t even know what a mechanical engineer did… still don’t, really. I suspect it sounded important and I must have wanted/needed to feel important. Probably Walt laughed and thought to himself, “Yeah, right, kid. Good luck with that…”
I don’t remember even thinking about what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be until I was 17-18, when the question began popping up so often I had to actually think about it. My original dreams, to become a pilot or a ship’s captain had already been flushed by my inability to understand math, along with poor eyesight.
I had several old Christmas albums that I absolutely loved, and my favorite, of all things, was the Ames Brothers album There’ll Always Be A Christmas. Crazy, I know, and if you aren’t at least 70 years old, you probably never heard of the Ames Brothers. I didn’t know it at the time, but I wasn’t a fan of the Ames Brothers per se, it was the arrangements of their songs on that Christmas album that I had fallen in love with.
Those arrangements were so damned musical, complete with the right fills, an obvious sense of humor and playfulness, adding so much dimension to the songs themselves, as did the Fred Waring Christmas album, T’was The Night Before Christmas. As much as I loved listening to them, I had no idea what an arrangement was, or why I loved them so.
But I can tell you, briefly, what an arranger did – he was given a lead sheet… that is, a piece of piano music (sort of) with the melody of the song and some chord symbols or, maybe (back then) a cassette tape of a bad singer (usually the songwriter) with a guitar or piano playing the chords. His assignment, should he choose to take it, was to make that song
– beautiful
– Memorable
– a hit
– Sad
– Sexy
– Magnificent
– Moody
– A la Broadway
– Really different
– Energetic
– Deeply personal
– Introspective
And how was he supposed to accomplish that? Why, first by understanding the real meaning of the song, knowing what it wanted to communicate. He would go over the song in his mind, thinking about how the very best version of the song would sound. He then picked the tempo and key of the song and whether it were to be sung, and, finally, the right choice and number of instruments for that song. In my case, I usually got to pick the folks who played those instruments as well.
There’s more. If you did an arrangement for a singer, you had to know their range and their comfort zone. For Sinatra, for example, your arrangement needed to be snappy, hip, rhythmic and instrumentally colorful. Jazzy, as Frank was very musical and wound not only find his way through a cool orchestration, but usually used it to his advantage.
Now Doris Day’s arrangements, on the other hand, needed to be straightforward, rhythmically predictable and warm. In short, totally different from Frank’s. It wasn’t that Doris wasn’t musical, she was… but the “sincere” approach to her arrangements were the best way to enhance her vocals.
To me, being an arranger is much the same as being an architect, a chef, a painter. The architect could design a dozen different buildings for the same function and space. A chef can prepare a dozen different meals from the same ingredients, and of course a painter can paint a hundred different pictures using the same colors. It’s how well we use our elements and our tools that usually define us.
As arrangers, most of us can hear multiple versions of the song in our heads, and will most often make our choice based on 1. a personal choice of what would be the most fun to listen to, 2. What is the final purpose of the song, and 3. Which version best serves the song writer’s original intent. Oh, and 4. what your client told you to do. (That one is optional… I learned over time that more often than not their direction was horrible.)
One of the cooler aspects of arranging is knowing the different textures of each instrument, and the multiple ways they might blend together, creating unique and often memorable sounds… sounds that often become an arranger’s signature. Johnny Mandel and his score for the movie “The Sandpiper” comes to mind.
Billy May & Frank
I found out recently that Sinatra loved Billy May, both as a top notch arranger and a really funny, almost goofy guy on recording sessions. Billy May is probably my all-time favorite arranger. Here are a few things I want you to know about him –
Birth name – Edward William May Jr.
Born – November 10, 1916, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U. S.
Died – January 22, 2004 (aged 87) in San Juan Capistrano, California, U.S.
Genres – Big band
Occupations – Musician, composer, arranger
Instrument – Trumpet
May wrote arrangements for many top singers, including Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Anita O’Day, Peggy Lee, Vic Damone, Bobby Darin, Johnny Mercer, Ella Fitzgerald, and a host of others. Billy arranged a wildly creative and humorous Christmas album for someone I can’t remember. I wore it out.
Just because I could play piano as a kid, several people, including my parents, began suggesting I make a career of music, though none of them knew how that would look. Hell, my mom didn’t think it would work, and she occasionally encouraged me to go to college and become an English teacher. Good try, Mom, but both Dad and I knew that wasn’t going to happen.
After two frustrating years in Montana colleges, wanting to learn to play jazz, but being taught to be a music teacher, I found the Berklee School back in Boston and was admitted there in the Fall of ’64. Berklee was going to help me realize my dream of playing jazz in a sophisticated room at the top of a tall building in a big city somewhere back East. I know, I know… don’t ask.
You had to ask. Okay, here it is. I had an Oscar Peterson trio album, him playing to a dark room in Chicago with his trio. I could hear ice tinkling in glasses and occasional quiet conversion in the background. For some weird reason that album, that sound rang my bell… really hard. Somewhere in that album, in that room in a Chicago nightspot, was a major part of me that wanted, needed to be there, to be a part of that.
My four years at Berklee certainly made my piano dreams come true. I failed my piano final, still not being able to sight read, but it was okay… I had been given the tools for a successful music career, and I ran with them, still not really knowing where it all would take me, how it was all going to work.
My piano playing sustained me for the first year out of school. Then, while working for a recording studio outside of Boston, I was challenged to put some horns and strings together for a singer’s album. I did it, with moderate success, and thus began my other, real career as an arranger, that strange and mysterious occupation that I didn’t even acknowledge, until I was actually doing it, and successfully!
This was the first jingle I did in Atlanta, which got some attention and started my jingle career, which sustained me beautifully for over 30 years.
Over the years I would become several things musical… a composer, a jingle writer, a recording session pianist, a night club jazz pianist and a recording studio owner and operator. All that sustained me nicely and I loved the diversity of my musical life. No one called me an arranger, and I still didn’t think of myself as one until that day in L.A. when I was attending a music symposium and was chatting with a young guy from L.A. while on a break. I was telling him what I did back in Atlanta. At one point he smiled and said, “Oh, you’re a playing arranger!” He was right! And that damn kid actually knew it before I did!
All those years I’d been writing and recording jingles, I was arranging the rhythm section, the horns and strings, and occasionally the backing vocals, without really thinking about it as arranging. What a dufe, right? And something that no one knew, except perhaps the Doppler Studio owner Pete Caldwell, was that those big arrangements that we recorded in his studio on Thursdays and Fridays were all written out, first on score paper, then the parts all copied out individually.
The horns, strings, woodwinds, and vocals were all written out. The only “easy” parts were for the rhythm section players… we had a shorthand for them that worked to perfection. But those arrangements took long hours to write out, often quiet, even lonely hours, for once the creative fun part was finished, the grunt work of writing it all out had to be done. A lot of late nights, and some very early mornings.
The Atlanta music community knew I was an arranger, as not many guys back in the ’70’s and ’80’s could do much tasteful arranging for horns and strings. There was only one other school, North Texas State, that taught any modern composition and arranging classes. Actually, Lyle Mays attended North Texas State. Anyway, my arranging skills had distanced me from the other composers in town, and there was my Berklee education coming back to serve me, in a way I’d never suspected.
Here’s an example of my horn arranging, an instrumental for my first album, “Sundance.”
I was greatly influenced by the arrangements of Quincy Jones, Johnny Mandel, David Foster, Earth, Wind & Fire, Tower Of Power. I never stole any of their “licks” but I did borrow from some of their textures. I had a good ear for orchestral textures, and could duplicate many of those I’d heard on records. Sure, I knew I was doing it at the time, but it wasn’t illegal… you can’t copyright an ensemble texture, or even a whole arrangement. And anyway, some of my favorites even sounded like each other from time to time, so I simply added some of their techniques to my pallet and forgot about it.
I have so many recordings of my jingles and musical arrangements, all as files on this computer now. It can be an immense trip down memory lane, though I only occasionally take that trip. I’ve luckily grown so old that, when I hear some of those pieces now, I think, “Damn! That’s pretty good! How did I even think of that shit?”
Did I do the arrangements on any albums you might know of? No. I arranged the horns and strings on 4 different albums – Susan Anton, Nigel Olson, Jimmy Helms, and The Masqueraders. Susan Anton’s Killing Time was the only one I know of that got any airplay. Oh, and Fred Knoblock’s Why Not Me. The kicker to all that lies in all the different studios I got to record my arrangements in… Boston, Nashville, Boulder, Colorado, Raleigh, NC, 3 different studios in L.A., in London at the Music Centre, and of course 5 different studios in Atlanta.
Probably my biggest moment as an arranger came in 1986, when I was voted the Southwest Region Ad Council’s Arranger Of The Year, and got a Clio! Think of it… one of the only awards I ever won was for something I didn’t even think about most of the time.
I’m fairly sure that award came as a result of a piece I arranged earlier that year for Coca Cola’s 50th anniversary of their partnership with McDonalds’s… you know, that partnership where you can’t get a Pepsi at McDonald’s. Check their drink dispenser next time. Anyway, my assignment was to string together some of the Coke and Mickey D’s product jingles over the past 50 years as a medley, to be played at their 50-year celebration party.
Well, they loved it. Even the Atlanta Symphony played it once at a Chastain Park concert. And I’d guess that the SW Ad council members heard it and noted it. Honestly, it is probably the best arrangement I ever did. I jazzed it up as best I could, as I always tried to slip a little jazz in here and there, being the lifelong promoter of jazz that I tried to be. Anyway, here it is – anyone over 50 should recognize a few of these jingles.
So, an arranger. See, I am the lone arranger. Almost a reluctant arranger, even. And now, immensely proud of it, proud of that thing that I never knew I was. My god, life is so damn strange.
Steve Hulse