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MOON RIVER
LIGHT CLASSICS FOR HARMONICA & CLARINET
JACK HARRISON
WEST AUSTRALIAN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
RICHARD MILLS
ARTIE SHAW 1910-2004
1 Concerto for Clarinet
8’51
WOODY HERMAN 1913-1987
2 Golden Wedding
3’08
JOHN CARMICHAEL b. 1930
3 A Country Fair
8’27
HENRY MANCINI 1924-1994
4 Moon River
2’53
LARRY ADLER 1914-2001
5 Genevieve Waltz
2’16
VERNON LISLE 1906-1995 arr. Neil Thurgate
6 A Touch of Love
2’57
JACK HARRISON b. 1931
7 Jumping Joeys
2’01
JOHNNY MANDEL b. 1925
8 The Shadow of Your Smile
3’08
TONY OSBORNE b. 1922 arr. Michael Hurst
9 Sunspot
2’09
arr. MICHAEL HURST
0 Summer Medley
7’26
Jack Harrison clarinet 1-3, harmonica 4-0
West Australian Symphony Orchestra
Richard Mills conductor
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Concerto for Clarinet (Shaw)
Shaw performed part of Concerto for Clarinet in
the film Second Chorus.
A thoughtful, highly self-critical musician, Artie
Shaw formed and dissolved bands with
bewildering rapidity throughout his musical life.
Dubbed “King of the Clarinet” in 1938, when his
second band was performing across the USA
and hitting the charts with such numbers as
Begin the Beguine, Back Bay Shuffle and Traffic
Jam, Shaw grew jaded with the music business
and broke up this band after barely 18 months.
“I was a compulsive perfectionist, and in the
world we live in, compulsive perfectionists finish
last,” he would say later. He took himself off to
Mexico and came back with two tunes, Frenesi
and Adios Mariquita Linda. He assembled a
distinguished band of Hollywood freelance
musicians to record them, in arrangements by
William Grant Still, and ended up with one of the
biggest hit records of the swing era.
Golden Wedding (Herman)
One of the most popular figures of the swing
era, clarinettist Woody Herman formed his first
band as a result of Isham Jones’ retirement.
Jones, composer of It Had to Be You, I’ll See You
in My Dreams and other standards, was also
one of the original dance band pioneers, and
when he decided to retire from band-leading in
the mid-1930s the young Herman, then a
member of the Jones reed section, formed a
band with several of the Jones alumni as the
nucleus of the new group.
They struggled for success for a number of
years as The Band That Plays the Blues until a
number called At the Woodchopper’s Ball
became a monster hit in 1939. Not long after,
Herman took Gabriel Marie’s salon piece La
Cinquantaine, crafted from it a clarinet/drums
feature and called it by its English title, “Golden
Wedding.” In so doing he created one of the
indelible anthems of the era, particularly in
Australia. Many decades after Golden Wedding
first hit the charts, Herman came to our shores
for the first time and was perplexed to find this
his most frequently requested number.
Thus emboldened, he formed another full-time
band and wrote a showpiece for himself called
Concerto for Clarinet. In truth, it is not more a
concerto than the “Warsaw” Concerto; it’s a
collection of blues riffs surrounded by virtuosic
soliloquies for the soloist. The point of the piece
is not its shape but its status as a vehicle for
Shaw, whose command of the instrument
(particularly his ease in the upper register) is still
the stuff of legend. With his death at the age of
94 in 2004, the world lost the last of the major
swing-era bandleaders.
A Country Fair (Carmichael, arr. Hurst)
John Carmichael is well known for his skill as a
composer of melodic music for a range of
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instrumental forces; his Trumpet Concerto,
Concerto Folklorico for piano and orchestra and
Phoenix Concerto (premiered and recorded by
James Galway) continue to be heard regularly
on radio.
in partnership with his two most frequent
directorial collaborators, Blake Edwards and
Stanley Donen, he created a new kind of film
music. In place of the symphonic, heavily-cued
scores that had dominated mainstream
Hollywood pictures up to that time, his short,
lightly scored, jazz-inflected pieces not only
sounded “hip”, but worked just as well as
background music to a cocktail party – when
released as soundtrack albums – as they did
when underscoring a dramatic situation. To the
film studios’ money men, his scores could thus
“sell” a picture and were often successful in
their own right.
Born in Melbourne in 1930, Carmichael began his
musical studies as a pianist, studying with
Margaret Schofield and Raymond Lambert at the
Melbourne Conservatorium. He also studied
composition with Dorian Le Gallienne and took
lessons from Arthur Benjamin in London. In the
1950s he became one of the first to work in the
field of music therapy in Britain. He became
Music Director of the Spanish dance company
Eduardo Y Navarra, quickly becoming fascinated
with Spanish folk music idioms. Carmichael
developed a style that featured attractive
melodies and infectious rhythms. He now lives in
London and visits Australia for recordings and
performances of his music.
Blake Edwards’ film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)
was one of Mancini’s first big pictures as a
composer and he was not yet known as a hitmaker. At a post-production meeting following a
screening of the film, a studio executive, in
reference to Moon River, said, “Well, I think the
first thing we can do is get rid of that stupid
song,” to which Audrey Hepburn responded:
“Over my dead body!” Moon River was not only
used to haunting effect in the picture but, with
Johnny Mercer’s lyrics, won the Oscar for Best
Song of the year and became that rare breed of
number known as a standard.
A Country Fair is an orchestral version of a
work for clarinet and piano, Fêtes Champêtres,
and has the gallic charm and lightness its
original title suggests.
Moon River (Mancini)
Henry Mancini, intentionally or not, changed the
way films were scored in the 1960s. In keeping
with the contemporary visual language of such
films as The Days of Wine and Roses (1962),
Charade (1963) and Two for the Road (1967), and
Genevieve Waltz (Adler)
Mouth organ virtuoso, raconteur, bon vivant and
octogenarian, Larry Adler led a colourful life
which included several tours of Australia, stage
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university, he sang professionally, conducted
choirs and composed. His university years were
followed by several as a conductor, and then a
brief period as the manager of a music store. He
worked also in vaudeville, musical comedy and
opera, before the outbreak of World War II saw
him enter the RAAF, where he was in air
intelligence. After the war Lisle’s career was
mainly in broadcasting – he spent 25 years at
2KO Newcastle, the ABC and 2UW Sydney as
program and studio manager.
appearances for Florenz Ziegfeld and a game of
doubles tennis with Charles Chaplin, Greta
Garbo and Salvador Dali. A high-profile supporter
of liberal causes, he fell foul of the McCarthy
witch-hunts in the early 1950s and moved from
the US to the UK, where he composed the
score for (and played on the soundtrack of) the
film Genevieve (1953). A fondly remembered
comedy of a London-Brighton car race starring
Kenneth More and Kay Kendall (with an
hysterical cameo by Joyce Grenfell), Adler’s
jaunty main title theme has since become
indelibly associated with the picture.
Lisle’s scores include ballads and songs for
children, as well as art songs and “serious”
music for strings and keyboard. He was the first
person in Australia to sing on radio (3LO
Melbourne) and was President of the Fellowship
of Australian Composers. He was awarded the
Order of Australia for services to music in 1991.
The spectre of political paranoia reached him
even in England, however, when distributors the
Rank Organisation felt obliged to remove his
name from North American prints of the film.
When the score was nominated for an Academy
Award, Rank could only offer up the name of
music director Muir Mathieson. It took until 1986
for the Academy to credit him appropriately. (His
score lost, incidentally, to Dmitri Tiomkin’s for
The High and the Mighty.)
Next we meet Jack Harrison in his composerly
garb, creating a suitably bounding tribute to the
kangaroo in Jumping Joeys.
The Shadow of Your Smile (Mandel)
A Touch of Love (Lisle, arr. Thurgate)
Jumping Joeys (Harrison)
One of the indelible tunes of the 1960s, The
Shadow of Your Smile has long outlived the
picture for which it was composed, The
Sandpiper (1965). A high-cholesterol vehicle for
the hot couple du jour, Elizabeth Taylor and
Richard Burton, it is set in California’s Big Sur.
Taylor plays a free-spirited artist who wears a lot
of caftans and Richard Burton a tortured
Vernon Lisle, who died in his 90th year in 1995,
was a composer who did not disdain what used
to be called “light music,” of which his A Touch
of Love is an example. He had a background in
engineering – which he studied at Melbourne’s
Swinburne College – and singing. While at
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Episcopalian priest married (unhappily) to Eva
Marie Saint. He and Liz are thrown together by
fate and the rest, as they say, is cheesy.
the unenviable task of asking ‘Our Gracie’ to take
out her false teeth…she was happy to oblige.”
Osborne’s work on P&O cruise liners in the
1970s eventually brought him to Australia, where
he remarried and settled in Sydney.
The song won the Academy Award for Best Song
and went on to be recorded by many vocalists,
most beautifully perhaps by Matt Monro.
Summer Medley (arr. Hurst)
Johnny Mandel was a trumpet and trombone
player who became a sought-after jazz arranger,
creating charts for Artie Shaw, Count Basie and
Frank Sinatra, whose album Ring-a-ding-ding!
Mandel conducted. In addition to The Shadow of
Your Smile, the other tune for which he is
renowned is Suicide is Painless, also known as the
theme tune to the movie and TV series M*A*S*H.
The Girl from Ipanema (Jobim)
Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head
(Bacharach)
Theme from Summer of ’42 (Legrand)
You are the Sunshine of My Life (Wonder)
When Tony Osborne’s tune Sunspot was
appropriated by ABC TV in the 1960s as the
theme for the Sunday evening program
Weekend Magazine, Osborne was best known
as a pianist/arranger/composer in his native
Britain. He was then working as musical director
for Mel Tormé, Shirley Bassey, Johnny Mathis,
Eartha Kitt, Nina and Frederick and, for some of
her final performances, Judy Garland. Of his
work with Gracie Fields he recalled:
This collection of songs associated with
sunshine in general and good weather in
particular begins with one of the most widely
performed numbers of the 20th century, Antonio
Carlos Jobim’s tribute to a girl in a bikini he saw
on her way to the beach in the Rio suburb of
Ipanema. We then segue to Paul Newman,
Robert Redford and Katharine Ross on a bicycle
in a celebrated sequence from the 1969 film
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Built
around Burt Bacharach’s song Raindrops Keep
Falling on My Head as sung by B.J. Thomas, the
scene is one of the few that now dates the film,
but at the time the song went hand-in-hand with
the movie’s success.
“We were recording Gracie’s last-ever hit,
Around the World. Producer Norman Newell was
bothered by a clicking sound on the vocal track.
Eventually we worked out what it was and I had
Michel Legrand’s father Raymond was a
bandleader and film composer; his son followed
in his footsteps and has created instrumental
pop and film scores in seemingly equal
Sunspot (Osborne arr. Hurst)
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Other career highlights have included giving the
world premiere of a Concerto for Clarinet written
by David Tunley, former head of music at the
University of WA, which was also dedicated to
Jack; performing as soloist with Viennese
soprano Rita Streich and with Dame Janet
Baker; and appearing with composer Henry
Mancini when his orchestra came to Perth. He
won a Churchill Scholarship in 1971, travelling to
Britain, the United States and France to study
advanced teaching methods. In 1987 Jack
Harrison was invited to perform with the World
Philharmonic Orchestra in Tokyo.
Jack Harrison
measure. His score for the “composed film”
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) may be his
finest achievement, and he achieved megahits
with the theme from the 1968 film The Thomas
Crown Affair, the psychadelically flavoured The
Windmills of Your Mind (“Is the sound of distant
drumming just the fingers of your hand?”) and
with this, the theme from the coming-of-age
drama Summer of ’42 (1971).
1988
Perth-born Jack Harrison started his musical
studies when he was five – on a mouth organ
given to him as a birthday present. Two years
later, in 1940, he won the Search for Talent
competition on radio station 6ML; the following
year he was the winner on Australia’s Amateur
Hour, and his career was launched.
When Jack was 12, his father suggested that he
take up the clarinet, since his instrument of
choice, the horn, would have limited him to
classical music. With his twin sister Jill and his
elder brother Ray, the teenager formed a jazz
trio, which soon attained pop star popularity
after appearing on the radio show National Fair.
By the time the twins were 15, Jack Harrison’s
Dance Band was earning so much money, their
father took them out of school.
We close with the work of a musical superstar
who made his first LP at the age of 12 as “Little
Stevie Wonder” and emerged from the Motown
factory to create a string of No. 1 albums,
including 1972’s Talking Book, for which You are
the Sunshine of My Life was created.
Phillip Sametz
After a stint as Second Clarinet with the
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Jack returned to
Perth and to take up the same position with the
West Australian Symphony Orchestra. He was
19 when he joined WASO; when he retired in
1993, he was the Orchestra’s longest-serving
member, having played the clarinet with them
for 42 years. He became Principal Clarinet in
1966, and appeared with the Orchestra as
soloist on numerous occasions, including a tour
of Singapore in 1983.
2006
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Executive Producers Robert Patterson, Lyle Chan
Recording Producer Ray Irving
Recording Engineer Karl Akers
Mastering Les Crockford
Editorial and Production Manager Hilary Shrubb
Publications Editor Natalie Shea
Cover and Booklet Design Imagecorp Pty Ltd
Recorded June 1985 in the Basil Kirke Studio of the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Perth studio.
ABC Classics thanks Jody Harrison, Alexandra
Alewood and Melissa Kennedy.
1985 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
© 2006 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Distributed in
Australia and New Zealand by Universal Music Group,
under exclusive licence. Made in Australia. All rights of the
owner of copyright reserved. Any copying, renting, lending,
diffusion, public performance or broadcast of this record
without the authority of the copyright owner is prohibited.
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