George Bruns

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

George Edward Bruns (* 3. July 1914 in Sandy , Oregon ; † 23. May 1983 in Portland , Oregon) was an American jazz - trombone player , film music - a composer and arranger . He became internationally known through his work for Walt Disney . He gained continued popularity in the United States with the hit The Ballad of Davy Crockett .

Life

Youth and musical development

George Bruns was the eldest of five children from Edward and Augusta Bruns. Originally a farmer , his father later worked in the local sawmill . He enabled his son to have a musical education from an early age. George Bruns received piano lessons at the age of six and learned to play the tuba and trombone in high school . He continued his music education and in the end mastered another twelve instruments. In 1932 he began studying engineering at Oregon State Agricultural College (later Oregon State University ). But since he also spent most of his time at university making music in various bands and groups, he dropped out of his studies in 1934 to join various popular bands as a musician, first with The Jim Dericks Orchestra, then with the band von Jack Teagarden and from 1941 with Harry Owens' Hawaiian Band . He was particularly fond of Dixieland jazz , and so he played the trombone in Dixie combos, including from 1943 to 1947 in the Castle Jazz Band in Portland. He then formed his own combo, arranged music for Jack Teagarden and worked as musical director and conductor for two radio stations in Portland.

In 1950 he went to Los Angeles , where he not only continued to play in bands like Tennessee Ernie Ford's and Turk Murphy's San Francisco Jazz Band , but also began working for Capitol Records and United Productions of America (UPA) . His contribution to the UPA cartoon Little Boy With a Big Horn (1953) received a lot of attention in the professional world and led to Walt Disney's attention.

Careers at Disney Studios

The Disney studio in 1953 stuck in the middle of the development of its hitherto most expensive animated feature film project: Sleeping Beauty (Sleeping Beauty) . Disney commissioned Bruns with the difficult task of adapting the world-famous Sleeping Beauty (ballet) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky for the film music . This represented a challenge because - similar to Fantasia (1949) - the music had to be adapted to the special technical and artistic requirements and the narrative structure of the cartoon on the one hand, but Tchaikovsky's work was not to be distorted in the process. Bruns managed this balancing act, in which he himself wrote some pieces of music for scenes that had no equivalent in ballet in the style of the original. Further effort resulted from the fact that the film was to be brought onto the screen with stereo sound . Since the best recording technology for this existed in Germany at the time , the orchestra recordings took place there from September to November 1958. The reward for working on the mammoth project was Bruns' first Oscar nomination in 1960 , which was to be followed by three more. In addition, the musical director of Disneyland Records, Tutti Camarata , convinced Walt Disney not only to consider the songs when the soundtrack was released on record - as was customary up to then - but also to include as many instrumental passages as possible. This preparation largely defined the general standard for how soundtrack releases were designed from now on.

But already at the very beginning of his career at Disney, George Bruns landed the biggest hit of his career in 1954/55. After filming the three-part television series about the experiences of Davy Crockett, who is revered as a folk hero in the USA, with Fess Parker in the title role, the studio discovered that there was not enough material to fill three 60-minute episodes. Walt Disney then spoke to Bruns whether he could contribute a song to background music for some additional pictures and scenes, which should also serve as a dramaturgical bracket. Bruns and screenwriter Tom W. Blackburn then sat down at the piano and, based on a few lines from Blackburn's script, found a catchy melody with text in a very short time. While producer Bill Walsh said, “I thought it was pretty awful, but we didn't have time for anything else. (I thought it was pretty awful, but we didn't have time for anything else.) “Disney, however, agreed, the song was revised by its creators the next day and a demo version recorded. The finished piece The Ballad of Davy Crockett , a ballad with four stanzas and 20 lines of verse , begins like this:

Born on a mountain top in Tennessee
 The greenest state in the land of the free
 Raised in the woods so's he knew ev'ry tree
 Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three
 Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier.

When the television series with the episode Davy Crockett Indian Fighter launched on December 15, 1954, it was an instant bombshell and generated a completely unexpected hype. The children and adolescents not only wanted raccoon fur hats like Davy Crockett, which triggered merchandising of previously unknown proportions, they also wanted to hear the song. A hastily recorded version by Bill Hayes sold more than two million copies and remained a number one hit on the US charts for five weeks . Numerous other versions followed, recorded by Fess Parker himself, Tennessee Ernie Ford , Eddy Arnold , Burl Ives , The Sons of the Pioneers , Steve Allen , Mitch Miller and Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians , among others . Around seven million records were sold in this way within six months. The worldwide success meant that in the end there were even more than 200 different recordings of the song. More than 750,000 prints of the sheet music were sold. This success was ultimately the decisive factor in the fact that the Walt Disney Music Company, founded in 1949, was expanded in 1956 to include the “ Disneyland Records ” label .

After that, Bruns, nicknamed "Big George" because of his height, worked primarily on the studio's westerns that were musically similar , including Train of the Fearless (1956). He also contributed music to the early Disney television series of the 1950s and 1960s - Disneyland , The Mickey Mouse Club and Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color - and occasionally appeared there as a musician. He had another hit with the title theme of the popular Disney television series Zorro (1957 to 1959), of which a million records were sold. This made Bruns one of the most important composers in the studio and headed the music department alongside Paul J. Smith and Oliver Wallace .

After Sleeping Beauty, he was also involved in the other cartoon films 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Witch and the Magician (1963), The Jungle Book (1967), Aristocats (1970) and Robin Hood (1973). Bruns always worked closely with the respective songwriters - especially the Sherman brothers and Terry Gilkyson - and integrated their songs into his film scores. Aristocats in particular , with their jazz and swinging cat combo, was very accommodating to Brun's own enthusiasm for these musical styles. But the Jungle Book had previously proven with great success that the Indian jungle atmosphere and Dixieland jazz do not have to be mutually exclusive. For a Disney composer, it goes without saying that Bruns mastered the techniques of underscoring and " Mickey Mousing " - in both a positive and a negative sense.

Bruns also wrote the soundtracks for numerous Disney feature films, including the box-office hits The Flying Pauker (1961) and A Great Beetle (1968) directed by Robert Stevenson . For Disney's first pure music feature film Aufruhr im Toyland (1961), he adapted the famous operetta Babes in Toyland (1903) by Victor Herbert . In addition to another Oscar nomination, this work also earned him a Golden Laurel . In the Wonderful World of Color episode titled Backstage Party , a " making of " for riot in Toyland , he can be seen playing the piece he co-wrote Nineteen Twenty-five on the trombone.

In 1976 in an interview with Gordon Growden for Oregon Stater Magazine, Bruns was very positive about the work under his boss Disney:

“Walt was always very good to me personally. He mostly let me go my own way, trusting my own musical sense of what was right. What really impressed me about him was his fantastic memory for details. (Walt was always very good to me personally. He pretty much let me go my own way, trusting my own musical sense of what was right. The one thing about him that really impressed me was his fantastic memory for detail.) "

In total, George Bruns has been involved in more than 200 cinema and television films , television shows and other productions. In addition, he cultivated his passion for Dixie and jazz, made music recordings for Disneyland Records with the formation of George Bruns and His Wonderland Jazz Band and, after the death of Ed Penner, played the tuba from 1956 in the 1949 of some music-loving employees of the Disney studios as a free time Project founded jazz band Firehouse Five Plus Two . Although their members could only perform locally due to their professional obligations and not go on tour, they gained international fame through recordings.

Activities in retirement

After his last film composition Herbie Rides Again ( Herbie Rides Again , 1974) joined Brunswick in 1975 to retire and returned to his hometown of Sandy. There he remained artistically active. He conducted and played in bands, continued to compose and arrange music and taught at Lewis & Clark College in Portland.

George Bruns died on May 23, 1983 of a heart attack . In 2001 the Walt Disney Company posthumously named him a " Disney Legend ".

Awards

Film music (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b biography on "The Original Mickey Mouse Club Show" ; Retrieved June 30, 2009
  2. ^ Up Close and Personal: George Bruns ; Retrieved June 30, 2009
  3. ↑ a b c d biography at "Disney Legends" ; Retrieved June 30, 2009
  4. ↑ a b Randy Thornton: Producers Note on Sleeping Beauty. On Original Walt Disney Records Soundtrack. Classic Soundtrack Series. Walt Disney Records, Burbank 1996, audio carrier no. 60881-7 / ISBN 1-55723-770-0 .
  5. ^ A b c Steven Watts: The Magic Kingdom. Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Houghton Mifflin, New York 1997, ISBN 0-395-83587-9 , p. 315.
  6. ↑ quoted from Steven Watts: The Magic Kingdom. Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Houghton Mifflin, New York 1997, ISBN 0-395-83587-9 , p. 315.
  7. ↑ Complete text with melody ( memento of the original from June 1, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the websites of the National Institutes of Health, Department of Health & Human Services (English)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / kids.niehs.nih.gov
  8. ↑ Bob Thomas speaks in Walt Disney. The original biography. (Original title: Walt Disney - An American Original ). Ehapa, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-7704-0705-9 , pp. 264-265, even from a total of ten million records sold.
  9. ^ A b c R. Michael Murray: The Golden Age of Walt Disney Records 1933–1988. Price Guide for Disney Fans and Record Collectors . Antique Trader Books, Dubuque 1997, ISBN 0-930625-70-6 , pp. 6-8.
  10. ^ Quoted from the portrait Up Close and Personal: George Bruns of the Oregon State University Alumni Association; Retrieved June 30, 2009
personal data
SURNAME Bruns, George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bruns, George Edward (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American film music composer and jazz trombonist
DATE OF BIRTH July 3, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Sandy , Oregon
DATE OF DEATH May 23, 1983
Place of death Portland , Oregon