Billy May

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Edward William "Billy" May Jr. (born November 10, 1916 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , † January 22, 2004 in San Juan Capistrano , California ) was an American musician , composer , arranger and band leader .

Life

Billy May grew up as the son of a roofer in Lawrensville and played the tuba in his school orchestra as a teenager after his family doctor recommended this instrument to him to overcome an asthma illness. May also learned the trombone and trumpet as an autodidact . Together with his childhood friends Billy Strayhorn and Erroll Garner , he also dealt with arranging early on. After finishing school, May played in various local orchestras.

May's breakthrough came in 1938 when Charlie Barnet hired him as a trumpeter for his orchestra. Barnet's popular signature tune Cherokee was an arrangement by May. Almost two years later he switched to Glenn Miller's big band as solo trumpeter , for whom he arranged the hits Take the 'A' Train and Serenade in Blue , among others . When Miller went to the military with his orchestra in 1942, but May failed the medical exam, he switched to the NBC radio orchestra and also worked for band leaders such as Les Brown , Woody Herman and Alvino Rey .

Since the 1950s May worked, initially mainly at Capitol , as an arranger with a number of well-known vocalists and instrumentalists in the studio, especially Peggy Lee , as well as Bing Crosby , Nat King Cole , Ella Fitzgerald , Sammy Davis Jr. , George Shearing , Louis Armstrong , Anita O'Day , Bobby Darin and Rosemary Clooney .

One of his longest musical partnerships was May's with Frank Sinatra , whom he met in 1939 and for whose radio shows he had occasionally contributed arrangements in the 1940s. Between 1957 and 1979, Capitol and Reprise recorded seven joint albums with Sinatra, including Come Fly With Me (1957), Grammy-winning Come Dance With Me (1958), Come Swing With Me (1961) and Trilogy-The Past (1979 ). With the instrumental title theme of the Sinatra strip The Man with the Golden Arm by Elmer Bernstein in 1956, it entered the international pop charts in the same year, and even made it into the top 10 in Great Britain. Sinatra's last recording for Reprise (1988) was also an arrangement by Billy May.

In addition, May has been producing recordings under his own name since 1951 and at times had his own orchestra before he sold it to his colleague Ray Anthony in 1954 . With musicians like Conrad Gozzo , Manny Klein , Barney Kessel , Si Zentner and Alvin Stoller , he recorded his only top 30 hit for Capitol with “Charmaine” at the end of 1951.

May won a Grammy for his instrumental album Billy May's Big Fat Brass in 1958. He later worked on a comprehensive series of albums with new recordings of well-known swing classics. He has also composed title themes for various television series and a number of film soundtracks, including cartoons such as Daffy Duck and The Jaywalker .

Billy May's trademarks as arranger were his experimental versatility and his musical humor, qualities that were reflected, for example, in the often unexpected constant change of rhythm, dynamics and tempo, in the use of many exotic percussion instruments and in his typical "slurping" saxophone movements. The musical satire 'The History Of The United States' (Vol. 1 1961, Vol. 2 1996) was created with comedian Stan Freberg .

May always referred to the band leader Jimmy Lunceford as his greatest role model, who had a lasting influence on his own musical style , to whom he dedicated his album 'Jimmy Lunceford In Hi-Fi' in 1957. Frank Sinatra said that taking a picture with Billy May is like "like someone throwing a bucket of cold water in your face".

At the beginning of 1997 May withdrew to a large extent from the stage following a last European tour, but occasionally continued to work on studio projects, including for up-and-coming artists such as the singer Michael Bublé . May gave his last interview in the fall of 2003 for a large television special about Peggy Lee. A few weeks later he died of heart failure.

literature

  • Jack Mirtle: The Music of Billy May: A Discography. Greenwood Press, Westport / London 2000, ISBN 0-313-30739-3 .

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