Gordon Jenkins

Gordon Hill Jenkins (born May 12, 1910 in Webster Groves , Missouri , † May 1, 1984 in Los Angeles , California ) was an American musician , composer and arranger . Among other things , he wrote Goodbye , Benny Goodman's final signature song .

Life

Beginnings

Gordon Jenkins, son of a village pianist and parish organist, had already mastered a dozen instruments in his youth and wrote his own arrangements. He began his career in the Isham Jones orchestra in 1931 , after he stood in for the sick pianist at short notice during a performance by the band in St. Louis and was spontaneously hired as arranger. In 1933 he wrote for Woody Herman Blue Prelude orchestra ; In 1935, Goodbye, his most famous song followed, which Benny Goodman adapted as a signature melody at the end of the concert. Both pieces have become standards that are widely interpreted around the world to this day.

Career

Since 1936, Jenkins has composed and arranged - anonymously at first and under his own name since the 1940s - film music for the Paramount studios, of which he was musical director for many years. Jenkins remained connected to the genre into his final years ( The First Deadly Sin , 1980, with Frank Sinatra and Faye Dunaway ).

In addition, Jenkins worked since 1939 as arranger and orchestra conductor for numerous radio shows at NBC , including for Dick Haymes , through whom he came across the Decca label . In addition to Haymes, he also worked successfully with stars such as Bing Crosby , Billie Holiday , Al Jolson , Ella Fitzgerald , the Andrews Sisters and Louis Armstrong (for whom he arranged the evergreen Blueberry Hill ), but also succeeded with self-written songs such as San Fernando Valley (1944). As Musical Director at Decca, he established the folk group The Weavers ( Goodnight Irene , 1950) with great success in 1949 .

In 1956 Jenkins switched to the Capitol label . It was there that he began working for several years with Judy Garland ( Alone , 1956), whom he also accompanied as a conductor at some of their European concerts, and Nat King Cole ( Love Is The Thing , 1956), for whom he orchestrated Stardust , among others , and led both artists to some of her best vocal performances.

His collaboration with Frank Sinatra ( Where Are You?, 1957; No One Cares , 1959), which was later followed by recapitulation with further albums and singles up to 1981 ( She Shot Me Down ), lasted the longest, mainly focused on melancholy ballad albums accompanied by strings. was continued and with September Of My Years (1965) produced a multiple Grammy- winning album, on which, among other things, It Was a Very Good Year (also Grammy-winning) can be heard. Between 1965, 1966 and 1973, Jenkins also designed and arranged three longer “saloon medleys” for Sinatra's television specials.

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

Jenkins was married to the soprano Beverly Jenkins , who can be heard on some of his albums , in his second marriage . In his final years, Jenkins suffered from ALS , which made his work increasingly difficult and to which he finally succumbed on May 1, 1984. In the fall of 2005, his son Bruce Jenkins , a sports journalist from San Francisco known in the USA , published a very personal biography of his father.

Suites

Among the most distinctive works by Gordon Jenkins are his extensive suites for orchestra, vocal soloists and choir, often accompanied by spoken interludes, in which he demonstrated his great musical versatility as a composer and arranger and with which he also strongly influenced the genre of the concept album .

The prelude was Manhattan Tower , which Jenkins recorded in autumn 1945 with Bill Lee and Beverly Mahr (his future wife) as soloists and Elliott Lewis as narrator and which came out in 1946 as one of the very first concept albums by Decca . Jenkins processed his depressing impressions from his first stay in the urban canyons of the city of New York City in various episodes and sound images, some of them experimental . Ten years later, Jenkins expanded the original 17-minute work and released it as a new LP on Capitol . In his later suites, Jenkins repeatedly reverted to elements from this piece.

In 1953, again with Bill Lee and Beverly Jenkins as soloists, the 51-minute suite Seven Dreams (Decca) was created, in which the story, which unfolds in seven images, is only revealed as a dream at the very end through a sophisticated musical punch line. From one of the pieces, Crescent City Blues , Johnny Cash took large passages of the text for his hit Folsom Prison Blues (1955) and was sued for it, which led him to a compensation payment of 75,000 US dollars.

In 1958, Jenkins composed and arranged The Letter , the musical story of a couple and their faded love, recorded for Capitol by Judy Garland , partnered with Canadian actor John Ireland . In 1959 Judy Garland went on a major concert tour that took her to the New York Metropolitan Opera , among others .

A final monumental suite was created in 1979 with Reflections On The Future In Three Tenses for Frank Sinatra , as the third part of Sinatra's triple album Trilogy: Past-Present-Future ( Reprise ). Sinatra's musical-autobiographical journey through space and time on what is probably his most unusual album, on which Loulie Jean Norman and Beverly Jenkins can be heard as soloists and in which Jenkins Sinatra also puts a line in her mouth about herself (“I'll have Lefty to write me one more chart “in Before The Music Ends ), initially met with a mixed response from the critics, but more recently, as next to Manhattan Tower, probably the densest composition by Gordon Jenkins has again received increased attention.

Discography

Albums under your own name

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

with Louis Armstrong

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

with Judy Garland

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

with Nat King Cole

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

with Frank Sinatra

• 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) (alongside Don Costa )

literature

• Bruce Jenkins: Goodbye - In Search Of Gordon Jenkins. Frog, Berkeley 2005, ISBN 1-583-94126-6 .

Web links

• Works by Gordon Jenkins in the catalog of the German National Library
• Gordon Jenkins in the Internet Movie Database (English)