The Ralph Burns Centennial + 2: Rare Extended Concert Works by The Master
Or “Wilsci Fiddles While Ralph Burns”
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For starters, here’s a profile that I wrote of Ralph for The Village Voice in 2000 - when he was 78 - I was delighted to see that it’s still available on the Voice website:
https://www.villagevoice.com/everybodys-arranger/
The Ralph Burns centennial occurred officially two years ago on June 22, 2022. Alas, I didn’t start doing Sing! Sing! Sing! on KSDS San Diego until a few weeks after his centennial in 2022. So this week on the program, we’re honoring the great arranger / composer / conductor with “The Ralph Burns Centennial + 2.” I play about 40 of my favorite Ralph arrangements on the program.
An avowed disciple of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, Ralph also followed their example as one of the earliest jazz composers to regularly write extended works. I’m featuring a few of those longer works below, but this is just the tiniest sample of Ralph’s music, over the course of a career in which he collaborated meaningfully with everyone from Tony Bennett to Ray Charles to Bob Fosse. (At the bottom of the page is a link to Sing! Sing! Sing!, which streams over the KSDS website.)
And here are some unique pieces of music by the incredible Ralph Burns:
Lady McGowan’s Dream, Parts 1 & 2 (1946)
Yes, six minutes was considered a long-form, extended work in 1946. This is a beautiful, evocative piece, in which one can readily hear the influence from the early Ellington extended works, such The Perfume Suite (1945). Appropriately, there’s plenty of solo space for Woody Herman’s Johnny Hodges-like alto saxophone work. Interestingly enough, we think of Woody Herman as leading a straight-ahead jazz big band and Stan Kenton as leading something more akin to a sit-down-concert style band; even so, Herman still played an impressive number of concert-style works throughout his long career, composed for him by a wide range of writers from Ralph to Bill Holman (Concerto For Herd, 1967) even to Igor Stravinsky (Ebony Concerto, 1946).
Summer Sequence (4 parts) (1946)
1946 was a busy year for Ralph. Summer Sequence opens with a brief clarinet intro by the leader before there’s a longer delineation of the melody by guitarist Chuck Wayne (who, like Ralph, would later work extensively with Tony Bennnett). The story goes that the original Summer Sequence lasted under nine minutes and took up three 10” 78 RPM sides. Woody then encouraged Ralph to come up with a a fourth part to fill out the set, and that “bonus track” (which begins here around 8:45) became the most successful part of the work, for Herman, for Burns, and for Stan Getz, the young saxophonist featured in the movement.
Not long after, Johnny Mercer, inspired by Getz’s solo and Ralph’s melody, added lyrics and a new title, “Early Autumn.” Whenever I mentioned the song to Ralph, he always jokingly said, “That’s my biggest hit - in fact it’s my only hit.” (The sheet music below is dated 1949, but the song wasn’t published under this title until 1952, when the vocal versions, starting with Ella Fitzgerald & Billy Eckstine, started coming.)
Woody recorded his vocal version in July 1952. Ironically, both Ella Fitzgerald and Billy Eckstine had beaten him to it, but Woody’s version is still worth hearing:
Rhapsody in Wood (1947)
This is only three minutes long, thus not really an extended work, but very much a piece of concert music. This may be the first - of many - film assignments for Ralph, occasioned when Woody Herman and the Herd were hired to appear in a 1947 Puppetoon short subject produced by George Pal and released by Paramount Pictures. Featuring Herman’s clarinet all the way, “Rhapsody In Wood” almost sounds more like something written for Artie Shaw - it starts with a dramatic, concert-style intro, and then gradually shifts into a boppish, swinging riff number. (This is the best YouTube version I could find, but there’s a beautiful copy included in The Puppetoon Movie packages.)
Red Hills and Green Barns (excerpt) (1950)
Ralph’s fellow New Englander and Herman Herd veteran Nat Pierce recorded this with an all-star orchestra of Bostonians in 1950. It was finally issued in 1977 on an LP produced by our friend Artie Zimmerman, and so far that’s the only complete issue of this exceptional, jazz-classical hybrid piece. Allan Lowe included a three-minute excerpt on his Devilin’ Tune anthology, and so far that’s the only part of the work that’s been heard in the digital era.
“Skyscraper Blues” (from Hometown, My Town, 1959)
Also technically not an original extended work, but still worthy of inclusion here: Tony and Ralph made three masterpiece albums together, Hometown, My Town (1959), My Heart Sings (1961), and This is All I Ask (1963). All three are classics, but the first is special in that it features a mere six songs - half the usual number - all of which are decked out in sumptuously beautiful, extended concert-style arrangements. “Skyscraper Blues” is both the opener, and, at seven minutes, the longest in the package. Gordon Jenkins originally wrote the song for a 1949 revue titled Along Fifth Avenue, and it serves as a kind of postscript to Manhattan Tower, his epic extended work / song cycle of 1945-’46. After Tony sings the whole chorus - which is, not surprisingly, in popular song form and not actually a 12-bar blues - we get an orchestra instrumental featuring trombonist Urbie Green and harpist Janet Putnam. The Tony-Ralph version also features a unique introduction, in which there’s a dramatic intro wherein Tony chants the names of prominent skyscrapers, “The Empire State! The RCA!” This is unique to this version.
And one bonus track - one Lucky Strike Extra
Our buddy Robert Isaiah hipped me to this. The pop singer Sunny Gale did an album of standards for the independent label Warwick Records in 1961. Ralph isn’t credited anywhere on the album, but he did two other albums around the same time for Warwick (one with Dick Haymes and one with Mrs. Dick Haymes, aka Fran Jeffries). This version of “Rockin’ Chair” sounds exactly like Ralph’s work, although I also hear some Nelson Riddle-isms. (Sunny Gale sounds so cutesy and bright and chirpy that she makes Teresa Brewer sound like Bessie Smith.)
And one more Lucky Strike Extra - Woody and Ralph meet Orson Welles:
“Jackson Fiddles While Ralph Burns”
This was an original blues that Ralph seems to have put together for this one occasion: the 1946 Esquire All Star concert - held at the Ritz Theater, currently the Walter Kerr Theater. What wouldn’t you give to have been there that evening, for an event which co-starred Duke Ellington and his Orchestra plus the King Cole Trio in addition to Woody and the Herd. The announcement by Orson Welles is a big part of the fun, especially when he introduces Ralph as “a pint-sized pianist” and Chubby Jackson as “the far from pint-sized genius.” As Welles explains, the piece features Red Norvo on vibraharp, as well as Ralph and Chubby, and, also as Welles says, it’s a good example of the humor inherent in the music of the Herman Herd. (Trumpeter Sonny Berman - Ralph’s room-mate on the road - quotes a few bars of “Manhattan Serenade.”)
Very Special thanks to the fabulous Ms. Elizabeth Zimmer, for expert proofreading of this page, and scanning for typos, mistakes, and other assorted boo-boos!
Sing! Sing! Sing! : My tagline is, “Celebrating the great jazz - and jazz-adjacent - singers, as well as the composers, lyricists, arrangers, soloists, and sidemen, who help to make them great.”
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May 25: Henry Mancini @ 100: A Century of Hank
June 1: The Rainbow Connection (For Pride Month)
Four Episodes of Sing! Sing! Sing on KSDS (88.3 San Diego) spotlighting the life and legacy of Tony Bennett:
SSS 59 2023-08-12 Tales of Tony
SSS 58 2023-08-05 Tony Bennett sings the George & Ira Gershwin Songbook
SSS 57 2023-07-29 Tony Bennett - Van Heusen, Burke, Cahn, Styne, Sondheim, Comden & Green
SSS 5 2022-07-30 Tony Bennett @ 96: The Johnny Mercer Songbook
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This adds another dimension to my knowledge of Mr. Burns' career. I know him more as a film and television composer, although I did have an understanding that he worked with Herman before that- and given the included material, he did more than just "work" with Herman.