Welcome. Our goal is to promote all facets of the Tiomkin catalog, including performances of his work, soundtrack recordings, and scholarly articles, as well as general research and study.
This page will focus on items of current interest, including concert performances, newly recorded soundtracks or archival recordings, and other timely information.
Thanks to Olivia Tiomkin Douglas for her generous support of this venture.
Please visit often.
December 2007
High Noon soundtrack set for December 18 release
Dimitri Tiomkin's landmark score for High Noon will be available for the first time on compact disc. This is the second in a series of Tiomkin scores painstakingly restored by Chelsea Rialto Studios and released by Screen Archives Entertainment, in association with Volta Music. As with last month’s D.O.A. release, the source material for the High Noon soundtrack was obtained from disc recordings in the Dimitri Tiomkin Collection at the Cinema-Television Library at the University of Southern California, thanks to the efforts of Olivia Tiomkin Douglas, Patrick Russ, and Ned Comstock. Ray Faiola and Craig Spaulding produced the CD. Film historian Rudy Behlmer provides detailed notes on the film and its production history in a lavish 32-page color booklet.
The thirty-three tracks time out at just over one hour and include a demo recording and rehearsal of “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’.” In addition to the dramatic underscore, listeners will now be able to own the famous main title ballad as sung by Tex Ritter in the film. The Ritter recording, released some fifty years ago, was a studio version that sounds similar to but is not the same as the version heard in the film. Film and music buffs will recall that Frankie Laine’s recording of the song was released prior to Ritter’s. Later performances by guitarist Chet Atkins, pianists Ferrante & Teicher, and the exotica combo the Three Suns, among others, brought the tune to an ever widening audience.
Fred Zinnemann directed this classic Western, which starred Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. The film was released by United Artists in 1952. According to his autobiography, Tiomkin convinced associate producer Stanley Kramer to allow him to write a main title ballad that would be sung, whistled, and played by the orchestra throughout the film, even though singing and talking (dialogue) did not mix, according to the rules of filmmaking at that time. For his efforts, Tiomkin earned two Academy Awards, one for dramatic music score and the other for the popular song “Do Not Forsake Me.”
This release undoubtedly will be highly sought after, since for various historical reasons the soundtrack for High Noon has never been issued in any format. Screen Archives Entertainment (www.screenarchives.com) will begin taking and fulfilling orders on December 18. No advance orders will be taken for the disc, which is priced at US$19.95.
November 2007
D.O.A. soundtrack released by Screen Archives
Dimitri Tiomkin's score for D.O.A. is now available for the first time on compact disc. Ray Faiola and Craig Spaulding produced the soundtrack, which is being released by Screen Archives Entertainment.
Rudolph Maté directed this film noir suspense thriller, released by United Artists in 1950. The cast includes Edmond O’Brien as an accountant desperately in search of the killer who lethally poisoned him. D.O.A. was the first in a trio of films produced by brothers Harry and Leo Popkin, with music by Tiomkin. In his audio and music notes, Ray Faiola writes that working for independent producers such as the Popkins allowed Tiomkin to both direct and conduct his own music. Mike Keaney, author of Film Noir Guide, provides detailed notes on the film and its production history.
The thirty-one tracks time out at just over fifty-seven minutes. Tiomkin’s diverse score, from prototypical 1950s horror in “Strange Sickness” to the Sturm und Drang of “Taken for a Ride,” takes listeners on a roller-coaster ride through various styles. Fans of dance music will enjoy the fantastic rhythms of “Hotel Rhumba” and “Another Rhumba.” Tiomkin was an early practitioner of placing theme music in the source score, as he does in “Juke Box Theme,” a light dance arrangement of the film’s love theme. And Tiomkin’s interest in jazz comes to the fore with “Fisherman’s Jive,” a lively, buoyant track for jazz combo that showcases his talent in the genre.
The source material for the D.O.A. soundtrack was obtained from disc recordings in the Dimitri Tiomkin Collection at the Cinema-Television Library at the University of Southern California, thanks to the efforts of Olivia Tiomkin Douglas, Patrick Russ, and Ned Comstock. As is often the case with independent productions, these may be the only discrete music tracks that survive. Ironically, had these acetate reference discs not been handed off as a courtesy to Tiomkin by the producer, we would not be able to enjoy his music in our homes or on our iPods some fifty years after it was recorded.
Screen Archives Entertainment and Chelsea Rialto Studios, in association with Volta Music, have announced this is the first in a series of scores by Tiomkin that they will jointly bring to market. Order yours today at www.screenarchives.com. Listen to four sample tracks at www.screenarchives.com/title_detail.cfm?ID=7873
October 2007
Dimitri Tiomkin and the Music Journal
Much has been written about Tiomkin and his music over the years—in books, magazines, and Web sites, this one included—but, in his prolific career, Tiomkin himself took pen to paper and wrote articles on film scoring, as well as participated in numerous interviews discussing his creative process.
Tiomkin was among a number of film composers who contributed to the Music Journal, a monthly educational magazine dedicated to the promotion of American music. Published in New York from 1946 to 1987, the journal’s film music articles lacked the bias and publicity-machine-driven content typical of Hollywood trade publications. Tiomkin wrote three articles: “Writing Symphonically for the Screen” (January 1959), “The Music of Hollywood” (November-December 1962), and “Music for the Films” (Music Journal Annual, July 1967). His intent was to enlighten the readership, which consisted primarily of educators. [Further coverage on these articles will be posted at a later date; please check back soon.]
Four years before the first article, an interview with Tiomkin, conducted by Music Journal columnist C. Sharpless Hickman, focused on Hollywood “mood music” versus concert music. Hickman brought to the interview his somewhat unusual (at the time) background as a concert music critic with an interest in film.
For the April 1955 “Movies and Music” interview, Hickman visited Tiomkin on the Warner Bros. lot. At the time, the composer was between projects—finishing Land of the Pharaohs and preparing Strange Lady in Town—and was besieged by telephone calls and visitors throughout the hourlong interview. In the interview, Hickman observes that Tiomkin has completely left behind his roots in the concert hall and adapted himself to “the system” in Hollywood. The composer then goes into detail about the differences inherent in writing for the screen. Tiomkin emphasizes the “highly specialized technique” needed to adapt music dramatically and emotionally to the cinematic form. The skills of a composer and orchestrator, Tiomkin notes, must be combined with a mastery of split-second timing and a wide knowledge of music for opera, ballet, theater, and dance. Comparing his task to working a puzzle, Tiomkin relishes the opportunity to compose music that fits a scene’s continuity, dissolves, audio-visual contrasts, and dramatic situations. Time, pace, emphasis, and color (as in orchestral timbre) are elements at his disposal, yet, even as a technical specialist, he believes musicianship and showmanship must not be ignored. In any case, Hickman points out, writing film music satisfies Tiomkin’s financial and emotional needs.
In the interview, Hickman describes the composer as vital, persistent, and self-satisfied, and indicates that Tiomkin’s achievements and recognition are matched by few other composers in Hollywood. The interview ends with Tiomkin, excited about future technological improvements, noticeably intrigued by the advent of stereophonic sound.
Born in Seattle, Charles Sharpless Hickman (1913–1959) spent most of his adult life in Los Angeles. While a student at the University of Chicago in the mid-1930s, he programmed silent classics and early sound films as head of the University Film Society. After graduation, he held a number of newspaper positions, first as an assistant music critic for the Los Angeles Times, then as a concert reviewer for the B'nai B'rith Messenger (his mother, who was Jewish, was born Liebenstein) and later the Pasadena Independent-Star News, among others.
Around 1949 Hickman turned to municipal music, serving as a publicist and then as a field representative for the Los Angeles Bureau of Music. He wrote several articles for educational journals on the subject of civic music. In a 1958 letter to Time magazine, he boasted that more than 2.25 million people had attended the bureau's band concerts in 1957.
Prior to his untimely death at 45, Hickman was a member of the National Music Critics Association and vice chairman of the International Music Conference. He also served on the board of the Los Angeles chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music.
September 2007
Our new look
We are pleased to announce significant upgrades to this Web site. With our growth over the last few years—thanks to you, our loyal and enthusiastic visitors—has come the need to deliver faster, more exacting searches. In response, we’ve converted to a MySQL database for increased performance, reliability, and ease of use. This new system will allow us to continue adding content in the form of news, cue sheets, photographs, and poster art, without slowing down access. Since our launch in November 2004, the number of monthly visitors to Dimitri Tiomkin: the Official Web Site has increased more than 400 percent. Our visitors reside not only throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe but also from all corners of the globe, including China, Japan, Brazil, and the Czech Republic.
The revised layout and design, by Gabriel Nordyke, president of Insights Design Studio (www.insightsdesign.com), is intended to get you to the data faster and more accurately. “Our goals with the functional redesign have been to improve the visual display of data returned by searching, as well as improved search performance and response time,” he explains. “There are so many different kinds of information contained on so many different levels that it was difficult to display it all with a single type of result.”
Nordyke and programmer David Panzarella developed a simplified approach that allows for filtered searching. “The new categorized search results illustrate just how many types of rich media are contained within this growing database,” says Nordyke. For example, entering “Hairston” in Archive Search will provide a link to three articles with information on the choral arranger Jester Hairston, along with links to photographs and cue sheet information.
“The new production display and navigation facilitates ease of use and interconnectivity of information from one record to the next,” adds Nordyke, “while clearly connecting the records with an associated production.” In the production details, reference numbers now connect each composer or lyricist associated with the music for a particular film to their contribution as listed on the cue sheet.
As we continue to add data and functionality to the site, we hope you will visit often to peruse the database and to check out the latest in news and features. Upcoming articles will examine Tiomkin’s career as a concert pianist and his score for The Westerner. Also, keep an eye out for lobby cards, coming soon.
A special note of thanks to Olivia Tiomkin Douglas for her continued support.
August 2007
The Moon and Sixpence
(First in an occasional series on Tiomkin’s lesser-known film scores)
by Warren M. Sherk
With so many scores to his credit, there are bound to be some overlooked gems in Dimitri Tiomkin’s film oeuvre. His music for The Moon and Sixpence is one such case. When the film was released in the early 1940s, the score was well received by Tiomkin’s peers and earned a nomination from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The venerable Film Music Notes published a glowing capsule review: “Feeling and atmosphere are skilfully [sic] blended so that the oriental, pagan flavor is well established.” The reviewer also described the score as “eloquent” and “finely tempered,” admiring the manner in which the music “foretells with subtle insinuation” the unfolding story.
The Moon and Sixpence served as the first of many collaborations between Tiomkin and the film’s associate producer, Stanley Kramer. It also marked the directorial debut of the producer Albert Lewin, who would go on to helm The Picture of Dorian Gray. Tiomkin previously had worked with Lewin on Spawn of the North. For The Moon and Sixpence, Lewin himself adapted the screenplay from W. Somerset Maugham’s novel of the same name. To bring the book’s sexually charged content to the screen, and to satisfy the film censors, Lewin invented a narrator to mitigate the more sensational aspects of the story, which include infidelity, miscegenation, misogyny, and suicide. The film chronicles the excesses of Charles Strickland, an abusive artist who abandons his wife and family, cavorts with a friend’s wife (who in turn commits suicide), and then sets off for Tahiti, where he marries a native teenage girl.
The story bears numerous similarities to the life of the painter Paul Gauguin, though Maugham did not use the artist’s name. During preproduction, the filmmakers received a letter from one of Gauguin’s sons that precluded the use of his father’s art in the film. Subsequently, the studio hired a young Russian-born painter, Dolya Goutman (1915-2001), to create Gauguinesque artwork specifically for the film’s climactic scenes. Educated at the Art Institute of Chicago, Goutman came to the United States with his parents as a teen by way of Latvia and Holland. Prior to the Moon assignment, he worked in Hollywood painting portraits of movie stars. After World War II he settled in Philadelphia, taught at the Moore College of Art, and is now considered to be one of that city's greatest expressionist painters. Goutman’s paintings for Moon incorporated nude figures, which stirred up controversy because of their prominent display in the film (onscreen close-ups of bare breasts and buttocks were not common at the time) and the fact that Lewin shot them in color.
Publicity tie-ins for the film included a book featuring cast members George Sanders, Doris Dudley, and Steve Geray on the dust jacket of Maugham’s novel. A song, “The Moon and Sixpence,” was written by Harold Miller, with lyrics by Bob Reed, and was a “tuneful, swingy number” widely promoted by the song’s publisher, Music Products. To increase awareness, the studio suggested local radio stations devote a program to native music of the South Seas to market the film’s exotic locale.
Balinese water music backgrounds, called by studio publicists the “most liquid and airy of all sound compositions,” were reportedly recorded for the film. The sound, with antecedents in Polynesian and African music, is made by cupping one’s hands and slapping them vigorously and rhythmically onto a surface of water. The result is a cross between soft drumming and a gurgling brook. In spite of the studio hype, there is no indication that these recordings made their way into the film.
Tiomkin’s score in the film’s first two-thirds tends to be casual, at times highlighting the comedic aspects. The slow-paced story is judiciously scored up to this point; the film then takes a turn for the better as the setting shifts from Paris to Tahiti. In one scene, a gregarious matchmaker recalls, “Her name was Ata,” and a Tahitian girl played by Elena Verdugo is introduced, commencing an almost three-minute-long sequence that allows Tiomkin a venue to humanize the girl. This is soon followed by Tiomkin’s underscore for Ata’s wedding to the protagonist, Strickland.
Tiomkin, no stranger to writing music for dancers, exquisitely scores the post-wedding feast scenes featuring the native Bali-Java dancers of Devi Dja, the film’s technical adviser. (One might assume that this would be the place for the water drums mentioned in the studio publicity.) The tribal dancers are accompanied by the requisite primitive rhythms played on log drums, but it is Tiomkin’s score that shines. His music ably illustrates the dance while simultaneously servicing the unfolding courtship between Ata and Strickland. After about the two-minute mark, the combined dance sequences end with a dervish of orchestral brilliance.
Devi Dja, a native of Bali, appeared in a number of films, including three of the “Road” pictures that starred Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. After Moon, she toured the United States with her dancers and a Gamelan orchestra. Those interested in more information on her life story, including her marriage to Native American artist Acee Blue Eagle, should read Standing Ovations…Devi Dja! Woman of Java, by Leona Merrin, published by Lee & Lee in 1990.
Although there is no theme song, Tiomkin did compose a melancholy, minute-long song that Ata sings to comfort her newborn baby. Mostly a cappella, it has bamboo flute accompaniment and exhibits a South Seas flair, including a pentatonic (based on five notes) melody and quasi-Polynesian lyrics.
Several more lengthy music cues follow before the film climaxes with the unveiling of Strickland’s paintings. After he dies, Ata sets them on fire. For the fire sequence, Tiomkin works up a splendid furioso that serves as the musical climax. The music winds down as we see the closing image: a small, intact sculpture amid the burning wreckage. The sculpture, perhaps a nod to the “Rosebud” image from Citizen Kane, was created for the film by Icelandic sculptor Nina Saemundsson (1892-1965). Among her notable works are a bust of Leif Erikson in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park and a number of statues in her native country.
Thanks to the subject matter and direction, the film’s reputation has held up over the years. The Moon and Sixpence screened as part of the “Modern Painters in Memorable Films” series at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1963, and opened the “Living Idols: The Films of Albert Lewin” retrospective programmed by the UCLA Film Archive in 1997. A print was for sale or rent from Crystal Pictures in New York for a number of years. It wasn’t until 2000 that a VHS version from Ivy Classics restored the look of the film’s original 1942 release: the first hour is in black and white, the island scenes in the final half hour are sepia-toned, and Goutman’s paintings are in Kodachrome. A 2005 VCI Entertainment DVD (apparently made from a black-and-white print) and a special collector’s edition released by VCI Video in May have kept the film in circulation. It’s worth viewing, particularly for the Tahitian sequences. The music for these scenes probably played a large part in Tiomkin’s Academy Award nomination.
Sources
July 2007
The High and the Mighty goes to court
by Warren M. Sherk
In 1955, after winning an Academy Award for the score from The High and the Mighty, Dimitri Tiomkin was named in a lawsuit by composer Leon Navara. Navara claimed that the film's title song was based on a composition of his own, and was seeking $5 million in damages for copyright infringement.
Navara (1899-1975) is perhaps best known for his appearance in the 1938 Vitaphone musical short "Leon Navara and His Orchestra." Billed as the "Aristocrat of Jazz," he was familiar to New York vaudeville audiences as a bandleader and master of ceremonies from the late 1920s through the 1930s. By 1939 he had taken up residence in Hollywood, where his career apparently stalled. His orchestra's West Coast debut took place at the Paramount Theatre in Los Angeles in 1940, where they played before screenings of Geronimo! After that, however, the orchestra's appearances were few and far between. Around 1949 Navara wrote a tune, and the following year Ned Washington supplied lyrics. The song, "Enchanted Cello," failed to sell, and Washington released his rights to Navara in 1951.
Fast-forward a few years. Tiomkin and Washington collaborated on "The High and the Mighty," each receiving an Academy Award nomination for their effort. Navara, having heard the work, filed suit, naming as defendants M. Witmark & Sons (publisher of the sheet music), Wayne Fellows Productions (now known as Batjac Productions), Tiomkin, and Washington.
The affected parties gathered in Manhattan in late 1958, as the case came before the Supreme Court of New York. (The Supreme Court of New York, unlike most other states and the U.S. Supreme Court, is a general jurisdiction trial court, not the highest court in that state.) During the trial Navara, representing himself, claimed that he, Tiomkin, and Washington had been collaborating on songs at around the same time Tiomkin was working on The High and the Mighty. Navara asserted that Washington, who knew the melody for "Enchanted Cello," somehow communicated it to Tiomkin. Thus, Navara concluded, Tiomkin either consciously or unconsciously copied his melody. As orchestrator Patrick Russ points out, Tiomkin never collaborated with other composers when he wrote songs, only lyricists.
Tiomkin contended that the melody originated with him, that he did not have access to "Enchanted Cello," and that he and Washington never discussed Navara's song. The case, heard by Judge Thomas A. Aurelio and argued before a jury, lasted three weeks. The defense called Sigmund Spaeth, known as the "Tune Detective," and Deems Taylor, the noted music critic and composer, as expert witnesses. (In Tiomkin's autobiography, he recalls how Spaeth demonstrated that the popular song "Yes, We Have No Bananas" shares melodic similarities with both Handel's Hallelujah chorus and the folk song "My Bonnie.") Spaeth, who was familiar with both Tiomkin and his compositional oeuvre, was in the twilight of his lengthy career as a music critic and reviewer. His books on music enjoyment and appreciation were widely read, and some of his many articles focused on the importance of motion picture music. Spaeth exhibited two dozen classical works, as well as two of Tiomkin's previous works, and explained that they shared the same melodic characteristics with the first six notes of "High and the Mighty." After the trial he commented to Newsweek, "It's impossible to get 'The High and the Mighty' out of 'Enchanted Cello.' Only one note, a B-flat, appears in the same place in both songs." Spaeth's testimony undoubtedly helped Tiomkin in the eyes (and ears) of the jury; however, it was not the deciding factor in the case.
Under New York state law, Navara had to prove that Tiomkin had access to and intentionally copied the song. Not only did Navara fail on both counts, but he also was unable to prove that "Enchanted Cello" was written prior to "High and the Mighty." The sole copyright record attributed to Navara in the U.S. Copyright Catalog is for a 1952 song, "I Hope, I Hope, I Hope," written with Stanley Adams. Navara was in fact suing Tiomkin for "common-law copyright infringement," meaning he claimed copyright on his work even though he had not registered it.
When playing the songs for the jury, the two sides made use of a piano, a record player, and a tape recorder. The jurors also watched at least part—if not all—of the film. During deliberations the jury asked to hear recordings of the two musical compositions again. The foreman twice sent written requests to the judge for clarifications of the law. One involved the definition of "unconscious copying" and the other "conscious substantial copying." The judge instructed the jurors that they must find "conscious substantial copying" and that the substantial portion must include a "considerable, large, important, essential and material part" of the melody. In the end, the jury returned a unanimous verdict in favor of Tiomkin and his co-defendants on December 18, 1958. (In an interesting aside, the court maintained that if Tiomkin and Washington were found guilty of copyright infringement, the other co-defendants, Witmark & Sons and Wayne Fellows, would also be found liable. Both Witmark and Wayne claimed during the trial that even if there had been infringement, they were innocent because they would have had no knowledge of it.) On January 8, 1959, Judge Aurelio entered a judgment in favor of Tiomkin et al.
Navara immediately filed a motion for re-argument, citing errors on the judge's part in his responses to the jury's inquiries during deliberations. Judge Aurelio granted the motion, but on March 26, 1959, he upheld the jury verdict. Ultimately, Judge Aurelio ruled that Navara's argument of "unconscious copying" did not satisfy the criteria of intentional copying under New York law. In September 1960 the case came to a close when three judges in the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York denied Navara's motion for an appeal to the Court of Appeals. Because Navara failed to establish that Tiomkin had access to "Enchanted Cello," he would not be entitled to a reversal on appeal even if the judge had erred in his instructions to the jury.
Spaeth, Taylor, and Tiomkin agreed that lay juries are not qualified to pass judgment on the similarity between songs, and that in the future a musical referee of some sort should be consulted prior to trial. Though vindicated, the trial cost Tiomkin perhaps as much as $100,000 in legal fees. He felt plaintiffs in plagiarism suits often sought only a quick settlement from publishers wishing to avoid court costs. "I hope that my experience will…help some other composer when his reputation is challenged," Tiomkin said.
© 2007 Volta Music
UPDATE: Read pianist Ronald Simone's experience with the court case.
Sources
June 2007
John Wayne Centennial DVD released
Paramount Home Entertainment has released the John Wayne Centennial collection, a 14-disc boxed set that includes The High and the Mighty. This is the restored version of the film that screened at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences last month (see May news). Now, Warner Home Video has released a two-disc collector's edition of Rio Bravo in honor of the iconic actor. This is the third restoration of the classic Western. The original faded single-strip color negative presented a technical challenge that called for the latest digital color-correction technology. By all accounts, the restoration is stunning. Days before the collection’s May 26 release, a Los Angeles Times article praised the film ("Rio Bravo deserves a hallelujah") and quoted film critic Robin Wood: "If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be Rio Bravo." The Cannes Film Festival, held last month in France, screened the restored film as part of its Cannes Classics program. Home theater enthusiasts will be able to purchase Rio Bravo on high-definition discs, in the competing formats of Blu-ray and HD DVD. The flurry of attention has stirred up renewed interest in Dimitri Tiomkin's music for the film. Orchestrator Christopher Palmer once described the chamber music–like score as nocturnal and atmospheric. As with High Noon, Tiomkin dispenses with Hollywood film scoring tradition and forgoes violins and violas, instead using plucked low strings (celli and double bass played pizzicato) for rhythmic effect. The Mexican ambience is partly achieved through the instrumentation, which calls for the marimba, guitar, domra (a Russian folk mandolin), harmonica, and the guitaron, a Mexican bass guitar. Palmer points out that the simple, folklike main theme quietly drifts in and out of the film. Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing “My Rifle, My Pony and Me” to good effect. The rendition of the song as heard in the film is available on a Bear Family compact disc available from www.amazon.com. A half dozen other Tiomkin songs for Westerns are also on the CD.
May 2007
The High and the Mighty to screen at Academy in Los Angeles
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Gold Standard Screening Series will feature The High and the Mighty to honor the 100th anniversary of the birth of the film’s star and co-producer, John Wayne. The film’s title song, by Tiomkin and Ned Washington, was nominated for an Academy Award and became so identified with Wayne that it was played at his funeral.
This is the theatrical premiere of a restoration of the 1954 film directed by William Wellman, and is part of a program titled "A Centennial Salute to John Wayne." A panel discussion follows the screening, moderated by Hollywood columnist Army Archerd and featuring William Wellman Jr., Wayne’s daughter-in-law Gretchen Wayne, and actresses Angie Dickinson and Nancy Olson. The program takes place Thursday, May 24, at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. Tickets for the general public can be purchased for US$5. For more information, log on to www.oscars.org or contact AMPAS at (310) 247-3600.
Tiomkin scored a number of John Wayne films, beginning with Red River in 1948 and followed by The Alamo, Rio Bravo, and The War Wagon, to name a few. This screening of The High and the Mighty may be the first public digital projection of a Tiomkin-scored film. The digital master, courtesy of Batjac Productions (a company co-founded by Wayne), is the result of a lengthy restoration process begun in the 1990s by Wayne’s son Michael. Gretchen Wayne shepherded the project to completion after Michael’s death in 2003. Tiomkin’s Academy Award-winning score will be heard in unparalleled splendor—eight-channel discreet AES digital audio from a state-of-the–art QuBIT server—in what is arguably one of the finest private theaters in the world.
April 2007
Orange County's Pacific Symphony to perform Tiomkin
The overture from The Alamo will be performed by Orange County's Pacific Symphony Orchestra (PSO) on Thursday, May 3, at Segerstrom Hall, Orange County Performing Arts Center (OCPAC). Richard Kaufman, the orchestra's principal pops conductor, will lead the concert, which features Western-themed film music by Tiomkin, Elmer Bernstein, and John Williams in the first half of the program. (Pop singer Crystal Gayle performs during the second half.) The concert, also scheduled for Friday and Saturday, May 4 and 5, is part of the symphony's Pops series. OCPAC (www.ocpac.org) is located at 600 Town Center Drive in Costa Mesa, California. Tickets are available by telephone from the PSO ticket office at (714) 755-5799 and online at ww.pacificsymphony.org. At Friday night's concert only, audience members will enjoy a performance of Tiomkin's march from Circus World, led by guest conductor Jim Driscoll.
Tiomkin aficionados may be familiar with the nearly thirty-minute suite from The Alamo, by Christopher Palmer. The suite originally was recorded by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin (RSB) with Lawrence Foster, for RCA. In response to popular demand, Kaufman requested a new, shorter suite of music from The Alamo, compiled by orchestrator Patrick Russ. Kaufman plans to conduct the eleven-minute work in concerts with the Florida Orchestra and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. In the suite, music from the film's overture and prologue segues into the Davy Crockett theme, followed by rousing battle music and concluding with an epilogue rendition of "The Green Leaves of Summer."
March 2007
Fascinating Rhythms: Dimitri Tiomkin, African American Music, and Early Jazz
by Warren M. Sherk
When one considers the music of Dimitri Tiomkin, jazz probably is not the first thing that springs to mind. The fact remains, however obscured by the passage of time, that jazz had a significant influence on the composer in his formative years, in Russia. In his pre-Hollywood career as a concert pianist, Tiomkin's interest in modern music extended beyond classical to jazz, which he publicly defended as a uniquely American art form. He believed that Russian composers were predisposed to rhythmic effects in music and that the strong, exciting rhythms inherent in the folk music of his country of birth gave him a certain affinity for African American folk music.
On the heels of Black History Month, this article assesses the influence of this music on Tiomkin and looks at his association with some of the finest black musicians of the twentieth century, among them singers Nat "King" Cole, Mahalia Jackson, Eva Jessye, and Kitty White, and arrangers Benny Carter, Jester Hairston, Hall Johnson, and William Grant Still. Hairston, Tiomkin's longtime choral arranger and conductor, once commented, "Tiomkin didn't give a damn what color you were, so long as you could do the work."
A new kind of sound
As a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Tiomkin met Flora Davis, a young black nurse from New Orleans who was the mistress of Count Alexander Sheremetiev (1859–1931). Tiomkin had been introduced to the Russian nobleman and philanthropist by the composer Alexander Glazunov, the conservatory's director, and was subsequently enlisted to teach piano to "Miss Ruby," as Davis was known. She had brought with her sheet music for songs she had performed in cabaret and minstrel shows back in America. By using the sheet music as a teaching aid, Tiomkin was introduced to American popular music as influenced by black artists—a sound much different from the classical works he had been studying at the conservatory. At such an impressionable age, he was intrigued by the rhythm and syncopation he heard in the cakewalks, ragtime, and early jazz.
It was around this time that Tiomkin first heard Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" at the Homeless Dog, a tune that Tiomkin says "swaggered, loud, rowdy, and insolent with its insistent pattern of dotted notes." The music combined African American rhythms and styles in a way that soon would be commonplace for American composers from Berlin to George Gershwin. Tiomkin's exposure to jazz did not end in Russia, however, as the music worlds of Paris and New York would later prove.
Poetry also had a lasting effect on Tiomkin, particularly the works of the Russian Romantic poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), whose maternal grandmother was African. Olivia Tiomkin Douglas recalls the lifelong influence Pushkin had on Tiomkin: "Tchaikovsky wrote three operas based on Pushkin's works, and for one of them, Eugene Onegin, Dimitri had to learn all the parts by heart in his early days at the conservatory in St. Petersburg. Tiomkin owned a set of watercolor paintings of the stage settings for Eugene Onegin, which he greatly cherished, he had books of poems by Pushkin, and Pushkin was very much part of his cultural background. He knew by heart many of Pushkin's works, and he was always interested in his black roots. I think that Dimitri admired his versatility—apart from Pushkin's serious dramatic works he also wrote (according to Dimitri) a collection of erotic poems—and it interested him that although Pushkin's works were so essentially Russian, he also had African blood in him. Dimitri used the Tchaikovsky-Pushkin collaboration many times in Tchaikovsky."
When Tiomkin arrived in Paris with pianist Michael Khariton in the mid-1920s, he experienced American music in the form of jazz and the blues. Wandering through the cabarets of the City of Light, he heard American jazz bands and tried to "catch the tricky rhythm" on the piano. Wishing to master the skill himself, he took lessons from a jazz pianist in New York. As a result, the rhythms and harmonies of jazz soon found their way into the budding composer's music. In Hollywood, Tiomkin would often hire black musicians for his film work.
Collaborating with African American choral directors
Hall Johnson
One of the first black musicians with whom Tiomkin worked in Hollywood was Hall Johnson (1888–1970). The choral director, composer, and arranger was "one of the two American composers who elevated the African American spiritual to an art form, comparable in its musical sophistication to the compositions of European Classical composers." After founding the Hall Johnson Choir in New York in the mid-1920s, Johnson devoted his life's work to "preserving and interpreting the rich legacy of African American music that developed under slavery."
When his choir was called west to California in 1935 for the film version of The Green Pastures, Johnson established a presence in Hollywood that lasted about a decade. (He returned to New York after World War II.) Tiomkin heard the Hall Johnson Choir in a concert and, as Jester Hairston recalls, "went crazy for the sound." The group was signed by Columbia Pictures in November 1936 to sing on Tiomkin's background score for the adventure-fantasy film Lost Horizon, directed by Frank Capra. Although the Los Angeles Times reported that the choir would be singing in the Tibetan language, Tiomkin said later that the words were made up for the film. The Tibetan chants can be heard to good effect in the film's "Entrance to Shangri-La" scene. When Tiomkin conducted a suite from Lost Horizon at the Hollywood Bowl in August 1938, the Hall Johnson Choir performed live, backed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
After Lost Horizon, Capra introduced Tiomkin to an American music anthology with music by Stephen Foster, along with Negro spirituals, Mississippi River songs, and songs from the cotton fields. This probably influenced the choice of music for Capra's Meet John Doe, which is interspersed with several Foster tunes, including "Hard Times Come Again No More" and "Some Folks Do." Friction arose between composer and director when Capra cut the Negro spiritual that figured prominently in the emotional impact of the score. For the film's climax, Tiomkin wove together a resonating requiem based on "Deep River" with the hopeful strains of "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, both performed by the Hall Johnson Choir. When Capra chose an alternative, brighter ending, Tiomkin's symphonic lament was cut in the process in favor of Beethoven, followed by a medley of Americana that included "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" and "Oh Susanna." After a brief chill, Capra recruited Tiomkin to score his army orientation and information films, including the "Why We Fight" series. When Tiomkin sought out a choral arranger for The Negro Soldier in 1944, he looked up Johnson's assistant, Jester Hairston, resulting in a lengthy and fruitful collaboration.
Jester Hairston
Born in North Carolina at the turn of the century, Jester Hairston (1901–2000) found his calling when he joined the Hall Johnson Choir in New York in the early 1930s. He quickly rose to the position of assistant conductor, where his duties included rehearsing and preparing the ensemble for performances. When Hairston accompanied the choir to California for film work, he saw that Johnson preferred conducting live concert performances to suffering through the tedium and repetition of film studio recording sessions. At some point during the drawn-out sessions for Lost Horizon, Hairston took over conducting duties when Johnson fell ill. Hairston's positive attitude and willingness to adapt gave him a leg up on his mentor, who balked at requests to break down a performance into small pieces for recording purposes. As Hairston once said, "If you want three bars, I'll do three bars." Tiomkin was pleased with Hairston's work and told him that he would use him again in the future. (At this point Tiomkin's film composing career was still in its infancy.) It took a few years before the Tiomkin-Hairston collaboration got off the ground, but when it did, with Negro Soldier, their unique professional and personal relationship lasted a decade.
During the war effort, the U.S. government sought to document the participation of "Negro Americans" serving their country in previous wars in which the United States was involved. Originally intended to be screened solely for black troops—ironic, considering the film pointedly tried to avoid such issues as segregation—Negro Soldier was released commercially after various groups, inspired by its message, lobbied for exposing it to a wider audience. As music director, Tiomkin selected and hired composers and arrangers, who were paid by the government through Paramount Pictures. They included several blacks, including Calvin Jackson, William Grant Still, and Phil Moore. Arranger Still and choir master Hairston, both of whom had worked on Lost Horizon, received $75 a week and a flat fee of $275, respectively, for Negro Soldier. For the twelve-voice choir, Hairston arranged the spirituals that supplemented Tiomkin's score, including a rousing rendition of "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho," which marks the film's conclusion. Both Tiomkin and Hairston attended the Los Angeles premiere of the film at the Ambassador Hotel Theater in April 1944.
After the war, Tiomkin called on Hairston for such films as Angel on My Shoulder (1946), Duel in the Sun (1947), It's a Wonderful Life (1947), Red River (1948), Home of the Brave (1949), and My Six Convicts (1952). In the late 1940s, Hairston looked back on the situation in Hollywood. "Before the war the studios only called us when they had ‘Negro music' to be sung," he said. "We were starving between pictures. So I organized my own choir, hired the best voices I could find, irrespective of color—and notified the studios we were capable of doing all music from Bach to Basie."
A cursory glance at Hall Johnson's film credits confirms Hairston's statement. The Tiomkin-scored films, such as Lost Horizon and Meet John Doe, stand out from the black-themed films and musicals, such as Way Down South and Cabin in the Sky. When a film studio questioned Tiomkin's request to hire a black choir to sing classical music, he reportedly replied, "It's my music, and I like the sound." An added benefit was that sound's compatibility with the recording and playback equipment available in the 1930s. While certainly state-of-the-art, the equipment had some well-known shortcomings when it came to recording music. Tiomkin must have realized that the low, warm tones of African American singers reproduced well in theatrical settings. Like Tiomkin, Hairston preferred the soft, round, mellow quality of Negro singers, particularly when blended with the more piercing tone quality of white singers.
Tiomkin signed the Jester Hairston Choir to perform the choral passages in the 1949 United Artists thriller Red Light. The choir Hairston assembled consisted of approximately twenty-five white and fifteen black singers to perform in the church scenes that incorporated classical music, such as Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria." That same year seventeen Negro and white singers are heard as the convent choir in Portrait of Jennie. To capture the emotions of the Egyptian Pyramid builders in the 1955 film Land of the Pharaohs, Tiomkin did not want a polished sound from the choir. So, he asked Hairston to assemble an eighty-voice mixed choir that could handle the symphonic aspects of the music and serve as the voice of the Egyptians.
Regarding the vocal score, Frank Lewin wrote in Film Music Notes that "an impressive use of the chorus is made to portray the spirit of willingness with which the Egyptians answer the call to work…. The people march to work shouting in song their devotion…in the quarries where great blocks of stone are chipped out of the rock the music blends with the sound effects of the chisels." Anna Wheeler Gentry points out some of the varied requirements of the vocal score: "Other scenes required Hairston to conduct various choral sequences including the sound of girls' voices in the distance, and ‘funeral songs of joy' where the choral ensemble becomes an integral part of the musical conceptualization—illustrating the moment of rebirth—through vocal color."
Tiomkin's devotion to Hairston was evident. "There are many choirs and choirmasters in Hollywood and they all compete like crazy," the composer said. "But Jester's work for me and for people like John Ford, Frank Capra, and Anatole Litvak has been so impressive that I, at least, prefer only to work with Hairston. I know that he can get music from his singers."
By the mid-1950s, Hairston's choir was well established as an interracial group of professional singers for which Hairston contributed his arrangements of gospel and folk music for concert performances. Hairston's association with Tiomkin led to other film offers. "When they found out I could please the greatest composer in town, they began to call me for other pictures," he remarked. A notable result is Hairston's spiritual, "Amen," for Lilies of the Field. Tiomkin expressed admiration for Hairston's work on Carmen Jones, a black version of Bizet's opera Carmen. After their professional relationship ended in the mid-1950s with Friendly Persuasion, the two stayed in touch. Hairston, who considered Tiomkin his friend and teacher, sent his 1970s disc recordings, including "Jester Hairston and His Chorus: A Profile of Negro Life in Song," on which he inscribed, "My sincere appreciation to you for all the many films we did together." Hairston lived nearly one hundred years. His New York Times obituary summed up his life as one dedicated "to preserving the authenticity of the rural black voice."
The New York jazz scene
Jazz infused Tiomkin's musical world in New York, from Harlem jazz clubs to vaudeville tours, where his two-piano act often shared the same program with Negro bands. While fascinated by the offbeat rhythms and frenzied free-for-all improvisations, Tiomkin's strict musical training made it difficult for him to master jazz idioms. To supplement his classical training, he took lessons from a New York jazz pianist, whom he refers to only by his surname, "Henderson." Henderson caused a stir when he called on Tiomkin's apartment and the doorman notified Tiomkin that the black pianist would have to take the service elevator. Not fully understanding American racial distinctions, Tiomkin was floored. Tiomkin describes the pianist as "six and a half feet tall, black, and dressed to perfection," with an expensive necktie. (While it's possible that "Henderson" is the bandleader-pianist Fletcher Henderson or his brother, Horace, further research is needed. Fletcher was indeed tall; he appears to be around six feet in archival photographs. In a French-language program, the New York critic Leonard Liebling writes that in the opinion of W. G. Henderson, no one is superior to Tiomkin in the field of blue jazz.)
Immersed in jazz, Tiomkin would listen repeatedly to George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue as played by the composer on a Duo-Art player piano roll. Tiomkin hails its originality and seemingly inspired improvisation as a masterpiece of American popular music. When Albertina Rasch set the music to a ballet, Tiomkin played one of the two piano parts. At Tiomkin's urging, the noted Hollywood caricaturist and artist John Decker painted a six-by-eight-foot impressionistic canvas depicting the evolution of jazz. Tiomkin hung the painting behind his piano for inspiration prior to his European tour, which included the premiere performance of Gershwin's Concerto in F, in Paris.
In 1930 Tiomkin joined in a public debate with composer William Wakefield Cadman over the future direction of musical influence for motion pictures. Cadman argued for classical music and declared "the motion picture industry will gain neither dignity nor respect from the encouragement of jazz, which is a shallow and soulless mode of musical expression." Tiomkin countered that jazz reflected the spiritual and mental life of the people.
Gone "jazzique": Tiomkin and African American arrangers
Russell Wooding
Prior to the Cadman debate, Tiomkin began work on a project while still in New York that included arranger Russell Wooding. In his youth, Duke Ellington played in a Wooding ensemble, and as a bandleader Wooding became a fixture on Broadway in the early 1930s. A July 1929 article in Variety, "Tomkin [sic] Preparing for Concert Work With Colored Pianists," tells of Tiomkin's rehearsals with two colored pianists backed by Le Roy Smith's colored orchestra from Hot Chocolates. That wildly successful all-black musical revue had just opened on Broadway and introduced Fats Waller's now classic "Ain't Misbehavin'" in performances by the Russell Wooding Jubilee Singers and trumpeter Louis Armstrong in his Broadway debut. The Variety article went on to say that Wooding was to arrange some new jazz-type numbers from original compositions by Tiomkin, who had gone "jazzique." The work may be related to "Creole Blues" or may have been a new piece cut short when Tiomkin and Albertina Rasch left New York for Hollywood soon thereafter.
Calvin Jackson
Tiomkin's hiring of twenty-five-year-old Calvin Jackson (1919–1985) for Negro Soldier was a stepping stone for that young arranger-pianist who went on to orchestrate at MGM. Jackson composed and arranged a fair bit, about one-fifth, of Negro's score. Jackson later recorded with his fellow Negro Soldier arranger, Phil Moore (1918–1987), before forming his own group, the Calvin Jackson Quartet. Jackson's 1961 album, "Jazz Variations on Movie Themes," features music by Tiomkin from The Alamo, The High and the Mighty, and High Noon. He previously cut a Reprise seven-inch promo (R-20009) of the High Noon theme.
William Grant Still
Under contract to Columbia Studios as a composer and orchestrator in the 1930s, William Grant Still (1895–1978) orchestrated Tiomkin's "Pigeon Music" cue for Lost Horizon (1937) and shared the orchestration with George Parrish for the "Procession" cue. Still knew Hall Johnson from their days together in the "Shuffle Along" orchestra in New York in the mid-1920s. This film may have introduced Tiomkin to Still, the "Dean of American Negro Composers," best known for his much-performed first symphony, "The Afro-American." The head of Columbia's music department, Howard Jackson, whom Tiomkin knew in New York, brought Still in. Still worked for Tiomkin on three 1944 films: Ladies Courageous; Negro Solder, for which he orchestrated about one-fifth of the score; and Tunisian Victory.
Benny Carter
Benny Carter (1907–2003) was among the first black arrangers and musicians accepted by the Hollywood studio system in the 1940s. In the 1960s he supplied arrangements for The Guns of Navarone and the love theme from 36 Hours, "A Heart Must Learn to Cry," popularized by vocalist Irma Curry on Vee Jay Records. Around this time Carter inspired and mentored the young Quincy Jones (b. 1933). Jones later scored the 1969 Western MacKenna's Gold, co-produced by Tiomkin.
Black musicians, civil rights, and the union in Los Angeles
Although the American Federation of Musicians' Locals in Los Angeles were segregated, this didn't keep whites and blacks from working together. Los Angeles Local 767, known as the Colored Musicians Union, was formed in 1920. In 1953 the Colored union merged with the white Local 47. According to Florence Brantley, recording secretary for Local 767, Tiomkin used the "colored" Local for his films. In addition to black arrangers, Tiomkin often hired black singers, pianists, and other musicians.
Florence Cadrez "Tiny" Brantley is a perfect example. A Los Angeles native, she met Hall Johnson and Jester Hairston when she served as rehearsal pianist during the filming of Green Pastures. She took on that role for Johnson's choir, for both concert and film work, and sought out additional singers from the local talent pool. Johnson and Hairston introduced her to Tiomkin during Lost Horizon. Later she served as rehearsal pianist on Negro Soldier, Duel in the Sun, and Portrait of Jennie, and she frequentlyaccompanied Jester Hairston's choir in concerts.
As chairperson of the committee for amalgamation, Benny Carter was instrumental in the fight for equality. Arranger and union activist Marl Young later related how film and television music played an important role in desegregating the union. Interestingly, the bulk of Tiomkin's hiring of African Americans took place prior to the merge. In recognition, Tiomkin was made an honorary member of the Colored Musicians Union.
Carter, Nat Cole, Frankie Laine, and others Tiomkin worked with were involved in the historic fight for civil rights. Carter and Cole had to overcome restrictive covenants in order to live in predominantly white neighborhoods in Los Angeles. And Tiomkin worked with Cole prior to the singer's 1956-57 television show that was canceled after it failed to attract a national sponsor due to the perception that it catered only to a black audience. Singer Frankie Laine (1913–2007), who popularized Tiomkin's song from High Noon in 1952, was the first white artist to appear as a guest on Cole's show. Laine himself was "the most successful of the black-influenced white singers who came to prominence in the post-war era," according to his obituary in the London Daily Telegraph.
A time to sing
Nat "King" Cole
Although Nat "King" Cole (1919 –1965) did not work directly with Tiomkin until the 1950s, two films scored by Tiomkin contained a musical connection to the recording artist. In 1946 Cole sang "The Christmas Song" for It's a Wonderful Life, and in 1949 the song "Portrait of Jennie," by J. Russell Robinson and Gordon Burdge, became a hit even though it was not heard in the film of the same name.
In 1953 Cole covered Tiomkin's title song from Return to Paradise in a memorable Nelson Riddle arrangement. Incidentally, another black artist, bebop bassist Douglas Watkins (1934-1962), recorded a thirteen-minute version of "Return to Paradise" for "Watkins at Large," featuring guitarist Kenny Burrell and others, which was issued by jazz label Transition Records in 1956.
As a Capitol artist, Cole recorded the title songfor The Adventures of Hajji Baba inJuly 1954. "Hajji Baba," or the "Persian Lament," was written by Tiomkin and Ned Washington and is heard over the opening credits in an arrangement by Nelson Riddle and intermittently throughout the film in Tiomkin's underscore. Although the movie failed to connect with audiences, the seven-inch single (Capitol 2949) topped the pop charts that year at No. 14. The following year it became track six on Cole's "Unforgettable" album. For another take on "Hajji Baba," listen to Johnny Campbell's rhythmic jazz version from a 1999 album, available on iTunes.
Kitty White
Jester Hairston introduced singer and pianist Kitty Jean Bilbrew White (1923–2009) to Tiomkin. When Hairston heard the voice of the twenty-seven-year-old singer, he immediately began using her for film gigs. White's excellent sight-reading skills proved advantageous for studio recording sessions. (Hairston recalls that many of the Negro Soldier singers did not read music, and some Tiomkin scores dispensed with key signatures, making sight reading more difficult.)
White hailed from a musical family well known around Central Avenue, then the center of black Los Angeles and the jazz scene, and Tiny Brantley was a friend of White's daughter. White's mother, A. C. Harris Bilbrew (1888–1992), was a vaudeville performer who also worked in radio and film. (A Los Angeles County Library branch is named in her honor.) A. C. Bilbrew's father founded the First Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, where A.C. served as choir director. White's uncle, Omri Watson Bilbrew (1890–1988), was one of eight African American charter members of the "colored" union. Kitty White's daughter recalls Tiomkin's visits to their home to conduct sessions, and in turn, White would accompany Hairston to Tiomkin's home in Windsor Park, where her piano stylings provided source material for some of Tiomkin's scores.
In 1955 White was signed by Mercury Records, and her first LP was subtitled "A New Voice in Jazz." By that time she already had sung the background vocal on "Return to Paradise." Tiomkin loved her voice, and turned to her whenever he needed a female vocalist for the demonstration records that were commonly made to audition film songs for producers, directors, and studio heads. As an independent composer, Tiomkin was usually responsible for arranging and supervising these recordings, which often took place at a local studio. Some demos were used as recorded, some were re-recorded with a more commercial singer, and some ended up on the shelf. In the case of White's vocal for "The Last Train," written by Tiomkin and Paul Francis Webster for the 1959 film Last Train from Gun Hill, the idea was to repeat the theme several times throughout the film, but instead of repeating the main title lyric each time, Webster wrote several sets of lyrics, each of which commented on the development of the story. Eventually the idea was scrapped, and the song was placed on the shelf.
For 1958's The Old Man and the Sea, White cut a demo of Tiomkin's song "I Am Your Dream" at Gold Star Recording Studios in Hollywood, soon to be the home of Phil Spector's groundbreaking Wall of Sound. The "song" is heard only as a background instrumental in the film. GNP Records later released the White recording as a seven-inch single (GNP 141X).
Mahalia Jackson
Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (1911–1972) was at the height of her career when Tiomkin hosted a party for her in 1961, a few days before she performed in concert at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper reported that Jackson, who almost exclusively performed religious songs, rejected the first song Tiomkin sent her for its lack of Scripture. "Then he sent another of his songs that had some words from Proverbs," Jackson said. "I love it and am happy to say it's successful." She is probably referring to "The Green Leaves of Summer," written by Tiomkin for The Alamo. In it, Paul Francis Webster writes the following lyric:
A time to be reapin', a time to be sowin',
The Green Leaves of Summer are callin' me home.
This is thematically similar to the biblical passage in Ecclesiastes 3:1:
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to reap that which is planted.
Jackson performed the song at a legendary concert at the Hollywood Bowl in September 1963. The Composers and Lyricists Guild of America presented the live concert, simultaneously broadcast on television and radio and featuring music by Tiomkin, Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini, Jerome Moross, Alfred Newman, Alex North, Miklos Rozsa, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, and John Williams. Some of the music appeared on a Columbia LP at the time, and in 1995 Sony issued a CD with previously unreleased tracks. In addition to Stanley Wilson's arrangement of "Green Leaves," a suite of music from High Noon—specially arranged for the concert by Morton Gould—was performed.
The crowd of 10,000 must have been enthralled that night by Jackson's hauntingly beautiful rendition. On the recording, her performance—made indelible by her deep contralto voice and her unique and drawn-out pronunciation of the word time ("tie-eeem")—is followed by passionate "Bravos" and waves of enthusiastic applause. Tiomkin seemed attracted to voices with unique characteristics, and Jackson's voice, though untrained in the classical sense, had been nurtured and cultivated in a childhood spent singing in her father's Baptist church in New Orleans and listening to phonograph recordings of the blues. The combination of Jackson's soulful vocal embellishments and Wilson's understated orchestral accompaniment, with Tiomkin conducting, turns this performance of "Green Leaves" into one for the ages. The divine Sarah Vaughan (1924–1990) covered "Green Leaves of Summer" for Roulette Records (R-4343) in a Billy May arrangement from 1960.
Cakewalks and Creole blues: The effect of African American music on Tiomkin's work
One of Tiomkin's early piano compositions, "Quasi-Jazz," features a ragtime bass pattern and elements of the cakewalk. The work created a stir in musical circles when Tiomkin introduced it on his concert of modern classical piano music at Town Hall in March 1927. The New York Times called it "a new expression of syncopation" and its reception heralded an encore. Shortly after the concert, the composer announced he would begin work on an American jazz ballet for a forthcoming Albertina Rasch Broadway revue—probably "Creole Blues," completed in November 1927, which two years later became the second movement of his Mexican Suite.
Tiomkin performed "Quasi-Jazz" at Carnegie Hall in late 1927. He had been originally scheduled to open Fortunate Gallo's new theater, but when the opening was delayed, he played Carnegie Hall instead. An annotation in an unused Gallo Theater program suggests that "Quasi-Jazz" and "Impression of the Blues," which Tiomkin later played in a recital at Maison Gaveau in Paris, are the same piece. Music critic Sigmund Spaeth wrote that "Impression of the Blues" represented "the reaction of a Slavic temperament to the negroid syncopations of the day."
For a 1930 concert at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, Tiomkin played "Quasi-Jazz" and premiered a modernist piano piece by Bernard Rogers (1893–1968) titled "Little Africa," which the composer dedicated to Tiomkin. (Bernard Rogers went on to become a well-regarded piano teacher at the Eastman School of Music and served on the editorial board of Musical America.) It was apparently a little too modernist: "Its lurching negroisms may be interesting to a Russian program maker, but not to American ears," commented one reviewer, Bruno David Ussher, who also wrote about Tiomkin's film music for the Los Angeles Daily News in the late 1930s. Unlike "Quasi-Jazz," which combined jazz elements in a classical setting, Tiomkin's "Scarlet Jazz" from 1929 wholeheartedly embraces the idiom through its harmonies, voicings, and rhythm. The Suite Choreographique, or Choreographic Suite, was premiered at the Hollywood Bowl with a syncopated last movement, "Exotica," inspired by American blues. "Modernistic Impressions of the Blues," ballet music from 1931, continued Tiomkin's African American-influenced compositions.
The Albertina Rasch Dancers presented a 1932 concert at Lewisohn Stadium in New York that featured three ballet numbers influenced by African American music. "Cakewalk," composed prior to Tiomkin's arrival in America according to the program notes, may be one of his earliest original compositions. By this time the cakewalk had crossed over from its Negro dance origins and found acceptance with white audiences. Likely conceived for solo piano, the marchlike work was orchestrated by Ferde Grofé in New York before he moved to Santa Monica, California, where he wrote his memorable Grand Canyon Suite.
Grofé orchestrated another Tiomkin work on the program, "Negro Chant." Hugo Riesenfeld conducted the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra and a choir supplemented by the forty-voice Eva Jessye Choir. Jessye (1895-1992), a leading African American choral director, had assembled her group from members of the Dixie Jubilee Singers and led them in spirituals, ragtime, and jazz in a variety of mediums, including film and radio. Incidentally, prior to meeting Hall Johnson, Jester Hairston had been introduced to spirituals as a member of Jessye's choir. The work, titled simply "Chant," was performed at the Hollywood Bowl in 1933. Music in the Dimitri Tiomkin Collection at USC indicates at one time the work bore the title "Africano" and the subtitle "Native Jungle Ceremonial Dance."
Two other Tiomkin pieces on the program incorporated jazz elements. The "Scherzo Humoresque" was full of jazzy accents and blue notes. The work was later performed at the Hollywood Bowl under the title "Ambition." The closing ballet, "To-Day," was conceived as "the apotheosis of modern eccentric jazz, atonal, strongly syncopated, with cross rhythms." "To-Day" became Tiomkin's "Mars Ballet."
Tiomkin's musicological-like assessment of white America's acceptance and interest in early jazz is apparent in interviews in the 1920s with Sigmund Spaeth and others. "Jazz is not so much a revolt against conventional music in general as it is a revolt against conventional popular music," the composer would argue. "If you listen to the songs of the gay nineties, with their absurd sentimentalities, or the watery two-steps and polkas of an earlier day, you will realize that popular music in America was sadly in need of pep. It acquired this ingredient through the development of rag-time and jazz."
Jazz rhythms and harmonies became an integral part of Tiomkin's music vocabulary, and he recognized their creative significance before much of white America did. At a time when it was not the norm, he hired black musicians and vocalists for dramatic films aimed at white audiences. He did not shy away from visiting homes in predominantly black neighborhoods and hiring black musicians for music traditionally performed by whites. A producer once questioned the ability of black singers to perform classical or film music. Tiomkin reportedly had this simple reply: "I don't see color, I hear music."
© 2007 Volta Music
Sources
February 2007
Remembering Frankie Laine, 1913-2007
Legendary entertainer Frankie Laine died February 6 in San Diego, California, of heart failure at age 93. His powerful voice and confident delivery led to a string of hits, romantic ballads and Western songs among the most popular. Early in his career, Laine gained recognition by recording film and television theme songs. These included several composed by Dimitri Tiomkin: Blowing Wild (1953), Strange Lady in Town (1955), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), “The Green Leaves of Summer,” from The Alamo (1960), and the made-for-television movie Gunslinger (1961). In fact, Laine’s was the voice immortalizing two of the most memorable Western songs of 20th-century film and television: “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,” from High Noon, and the title theme from the television series Rawhide. London’s Daily Telegraph called Laine “the most successful of the black-influenced white singers who came to prominence in the post-war era.”
Next week, in recognition of Black History Month, we will post a new article that examines the influence of African American music on Tiomkin and his association with some of the finest black musicians of the 20th century, including singers Nat “King” Cole, Mahalia Jackson, Eva Jessye, and Kitty White, and arrangers Benny Carter, Jester Hairston, Hall Johnson, and William Grant Still.
Sources
January 2007
Albertina Rasch (1891-1967)
The première danseuse Albertina Rasch, married to Dimitri Tiomkin from 1926 until her death in 1967, had a prolific career as a ballerina and choreographer. As a teen, she wowed concert hall audiences throughout her native Austria with her classical ballet performances. She went on to become a renowned dance director in the United States, where she embraced vaudeville, the stage, and motion pictures. A leading practitioner and creator of the style known as American ballet, her influence on the art of dance both on Broadway and in Hollywood musicals came largely through her signature choreography and her dance troupe, the Albertina Rasch Girls.
Born in 1891 in Vienna to a Polish (probably Jewish) mother and a Russian father—according to an interview she gave in the 1920s—Rasch first studied piano, but it was in ballet that she excelled. She was about seven years old when she enrolled at Vienna's Imperial Ballet. As a teenager, she debuted in the sentimental comic ballet Coppelia, with music by Delibes.
Vaudeville and the Concert Hall (1909–1932)
In 1909, while scouting for talent in Europe, Robert H. Burnside, stage director of New York City's Hippodrome Theatre, attended a Rasch performance at the Vienna State Opera. Impressed by the eighteen-year-old dancer, he booked passage for her on the S.S. Bluecher. Rasch proved to be a quick student: less than three weeks after her arrival in New York on August 18, she was leading seventy other dancers in a performance of the glittering Ballet of Jewels at the Hippodrome. The spectacle, featuring two tableaux staged by Burnside with music by Manuel Klein, enjoyed a run through the following May. Billed as the largest playhouse in the world, the Hippodrome could seat more than 5,000 and was known for its lavish productions. A dazzling circus shared the same bill as the Ballet of Jewels, and the finale featured a silver-clad army of men and women who magically seemed to vanish as they marched toward the audience (a feat accomplished with the help of a water tank hidden beneath the stage).
Now under contract to the Hippodrome, Rasch's career continued to grow. From September 1910 through May 1911 she headlined the Burnside-staged Ballet of Niagara. Prior to the rehearsals for that show, Rasch spent two months in Europe. Within a month after returning to New York, she wed August Schneider, an assistant manager at the tony Astor Hotel, located in the heart of the city's theater district. The marriage was kept under wraps until the morning of October 15, 1910, when the New York Times announced the couple had tied the knot in August. In the article, "Hippodrome Has Romance," Schneider explained his objection to his wife's appearance onstage, hence their decision to keep the marriage secret until the expiration of her contract. The plan was exposed when one of the dancer's associates found a wedding ring in Rasch's dressing room—or so the story goes, most likely embellished by a press agent or publicist for dramatic effect.
Rasch, however, did not wish to give up her rising career. From 1911 to 1913 she appeared in performances at the Schubert Winter Garden, the B. F. Keith Union Square Theatre, and Proctor's Fifth Avenue Theatre. Returning to her classical ballet roots, she then signed with the Century Opera House in 1913, performing in New York and Chicago with the latter's Grand Opera Company. Rasch would dance solo in short ballets that served as interludes in operas such as Hansel and Gretel. One performance succeeded in raising some eyebrows when a member of the New York Sabbath Committee complained that the ballerina had violated the city's Sunday theater law. On the same program as the "Dance of the Hours" from La Gioconda, Rasch and the Russian dancer Edmund Makalif appeared in "The Evolution of the Dance," which was promptly decried by the secretary of the Sabbath Committee as "an illustration of saloon dances of all nations." Apparently, dancing in operas or other "high art" was permissible on Sundays; however, the Rasch–Makalif performance may have offended some patrons by allegedly desecrating the Sabbath. Police and an inspector from the Sabbath Committee attended a subsequent performance to ensure the law would be observed.
In addition to dealing with the fallout, Rasch was experiencing financial hardship. She had been sending most of her money home to support her extended family, a customary practice for immigrants, and was now in debt. By the end of 1913, divorced from Schneider, she filed for personal bankruptcy. About a year later, soon after her debt of $600 was discharged, the Century Opera declared bankruptcy, owing Rasch more than $1,500 in back pay which she may never have collected.
Perhaps looking to start anew, she left New York for Los Angeles in early 1915. In July she was prima ballerina in Horatio Parker's opera Fairyland, today remembered more for winning a $10,000 prize than for its music. Rasch dabbled in film—she appeared in a 1916 Selig short-subject dance film—and continued to concertize during the war years before returning to vaudeville. Her subsequent four-year association with the Keith-Albee Circuit from 1919 to 1922 took her to both coasts for performances at the Orpheum in Los Angeles in 1919 and 1921 and at the Capitol in New York. Los Angeles Times writer Grace Kingsley, who specialized in documenting the home life of Hollywood stars, provided a close-up look into the ballerina's life offstage, based on an interview with Rasch in late 1919. At twenty-eight, Kingsley wrote, the dancer preferred driving around town to indulging in "ice cream soda orgies," as was the favorite pastime of some Hollywood starlets.
In the early 1920s, Rasch spent two years touring and studying in Europe, ending up in Paris in the fall of 1922. She announced the formation of a production company for her dance films. Nothing came of it, and she returned to the States in August 1923. Eager to impart her experience and knowledge to teachers, other dancers, and children, she settled in New York and opened the Albertina Rasch Dance Studio in October 1923. With its inspiring view of the Hudson River, the studio offered private and group lessons in ballet and interpretative dance. Rasch's strict regimen, including body alignment and breathing exercises based on her own European training, set her dancers apart from the typical chorus-line girls who populated the New York stage. The rigorous training program gave Rasch's dancers the stamina necessary to endure long vaudeville days and nights and, later, filming that required take after take.
Although Rasch founded her school to prepare dancers to accompany her in her own routines, interest grew so rapidly that she soon had more qualified dancers than were needed; by 1925, enrollment had swelled to three hundred. When it became apparent that sending out her trained pupils could be financially rewarding, Rasch did just that. As early as 1924, she had begun advertising her studio as a one-stop shop, providing music arrangements, choreography, and dancers for performances during the prologues at moving-picture theaters via the Exhibitor's Service Bureau. To meet the demand, the Albertina Rasch dancers ensemble was created. Eventually it became the umbrella for several traveling troupes known variously as the Albertina Rasch Girls or the Albertina Rasch Dancers. By 1925, 150 dancers were performing under her banner on vaudeville stages across the country.
Around this time a new style of dance had begun to emerge, crafted by Rasch herself, which she first dubbed the New World Ballet, later American Ballet. It was a hybrid created by combining various traits found in ballets set to classical music with movements and rhythms associated with modern American dance music, primarily jazz and syncopated popular music. This unique combination of American idiom and European ballet tradition became Rasch's signature. She later wrote that "instead of traditional realism, [Americans] prefer dynamic surprises, accentuated action and syncopated sensations." At Boston's B. F. Keith Theatre in 1926, the Albertina Rasch Girls, "Terpsichore's Best," tapped, kicked, pirouetted, and burlesqued to Spanish and Russian folk tunes. Rasch continued to teach even after she joined the production staff of the Keith-Orpheum, where she organized and choreographed routines for the circuit.
As Rasch settled into her newfound success, she was introduced to Tiomkin by the vaudeville producer Morris Gest in Paris in the summer of 1925. Tiomkin soon joined Rasch's American vaudeville act. (Their collaborative efforts on stage and screen will be documented in a future article.) The couple wed in New York City in May 1926, with Rasch's half brother, Ferdinand G. Schlesinger (1903–1984), also known as Frederick, in attendance. (It is presumed Rasch's father died when she was fairly young; her mother had remarried by the time Rasch was twelve.) Tiomkin described Rasch as slender, shapely, and graceful, with handsome features and expressive eyes: "She was a woman of few words and spoke only when it was to the point."
Vaudeville had brought them together, and soon each would make a name for themselves in theater and film, respectively. It was 1929, and America's economic climate had helped bring about a decline in vaudeville ticket sales. By 1932, twice-daily shows at New York's Palace Theatre had come to an end. The Albertina Rasch Girls were among the last to perform, ending a near decade-long string of vaudeville productions. Rasch went in search of other concert venues, bringing her show to Lewisohn Stadium in New York in 1932 and the Hollywood Bowl the following year.
In addition to her ballet studio, Rasch was involved in launching the landmark eatery the Russian Tea Room. Hungry New Yorkers en route to Carnegie Hall in the late 1920s often gathered at this neighborhood pastry shop, the window of which was lettered Albertina Rasch Russian Tea Room when the establishment moved to 150 West 57th Street around 1928. Four years later the Poland-born founder, chocolatier Jacob Zysman, sold it to a Russian, Sasha Maieff. Rasch was listed as the establishment's president in a 1929 corporate directory, and often was seen in the restaurant enjoying tea and cakes in the company of her fellow dancers and musicians.
On Broadway (1924–1945)
Just prior to meeting Tiomkin, Rasch began an association with staged musicals on Broadway that would last into the 1940s and bring her in contact with some of the biggest names in the business, from George Gershwin to Al Jolson to Cole Porter. Her inspiration for this new career path came when twenty of her dancers appeared in George White's Scandals of 1924, a musical revue that went on to log 171 consecutive performances at the Apollo Theatre.
In 1927, a banner year for Rasch's choreography, she had five shows on stage, including Rio Rita, in which the Rasch dancers performed alongside a hundred Ziegfeld girls. She choreographed the ballets "In the Clouds," "Stars and Stripes," and "The Jungle-Jingle" for the Ziegfeld Follies, featuring the words and music of Irving Berlin. "Jungle-Jingle" showcased dancers dressed as animals, from cobras to gazelles. Roy Webb, who would go on to a career as a film composer, orchestrated some of the numbers.
Rasch did the choreography for a ballet based on George Gershwin's orchestral work An American in Paris for the 1929 production Show Girl. She was not unfamiliar with Gershwin, having staged a ballet to his Rhapsody in Blue back in 1925. Varieties, an original 1931 revue in twelve scenes staged by Le Roy Prinz, featured three dances choreographed by Rasch: "On with the Show," "Tapping Depression Away," and "In a Rose Garden." One of her most notable achievements on Broadway is 1931's The Band Wagon, with Fred and Adele Astaire. Described as a choreographic feast, it is probably one of the greatest musical revues ever mounted on stage, and includes the memorable production number "Dancing in the Dark." The double revolving stage and scenic and lighting effects were so popular they traveled with the show to London, Paris, and beyond.
The Rasch dancers also graced the stage in 1931 in Everybody's Welcome, a production marked by two firsts: the stage debut of Harriet Lake, later known as the film actress Ann Sothern; and the first performance of the song "As Time Goes By," now forever linked with the film Casablanca. A succession of musicals followed: The Wonder Bar with Al Jolson in 1931, Irving Berlin's Face the Music in 1932, Wild Violets in London in 1933, and The Great Waltz in 1934. Rasch also co-staged, with director Monty Woolley, the musical revue Walk a Little Faster in 1932. All of the dances and ensembles were created and staged by Rasch to music and lyrics by Vernon Duke and E. Y. Harburg.
The apex of her Broadway career came with Cole Porter's Jubilee in 1935, for which Rasch choreographed the production number that followed the now classic song "Begin the Beguine." Her stage work continued through 1941 with Lady in the Dark, but she had already begun training her sights on Hollywood—at the same time, ironically, that Hollywood folk were now moving east in search of stage work. The cast of Lady in the Dark included Danny Kaye in his first legit production, Gertrude Lawrence, and Bert Lytell, with costumes by Irene Sharaff. The sets were designed by future Oscar winner Harry Horner, father of the Oscar-winning film composer James Horner. Written by Moss Hart, with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ira Gershwin, Lady in the Dark was one of the few shows in which Rasch choreographed for both male and female dancers, in this case aptly named the Albertina Rasch Group Dancers.
Marinka, her final show as a choreographer, closed on Broadway in December 1945. The Albertina Rasch Girls made their last stage appearance most likely in 1947's Bitter Sweet. With Rasch spending more and more time in Hollywood, the direction of her New York dance studio fell to Agnese Roy, the former prima ballerina of the Rasch troupe, Rasch's frequent assistant choreographer, and wife to Rasch's half brother, Ferdinand. The studio closed in the late 1930s or early 1940s.
Films (1929–1940)
As sound films signaled the end of vaudeville and economic depression loomed over Broadway, Rasch looked west toward yet another medium, filmed dance. Her Hollywood career can be divided into two distinct acts. In the first, sound musicals from 1929 to 1931, she directed dance routines in set pieces that were interpolated into films, often with no direct relation to the film's storyline. The second, beginning in 1933, afforded her the opportunity to choreograph scenes integral to a film's plot, storyline, or action.
Her entrée to Tinseltown came through her dance troupe. A series of MGM publicity stills show the leggy dancers posed in front of a Greyhound bus sporting a twenty-foot banner that read "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Welcome Albertina Rasch's Hollywood Party Girls." The Albertina Rasch Dancers were in town for the filming of the Technicolor finale of Hollywood's first all-star revue, the aptly named Hollywood Revue of 1929, with dances staged by Sammy Lee. Charles King sang "Orange Blossom Time" to pirouetting blossoms (the Belcher Child Dancers) and full-blown flowers (the Rasch girls). The Albertina Rasch Dancers also appeared in Galas de la Paramount, the 1930 Spanish-language version of Paramount on Parade.
Our Blushing Brides (1930) was typical of her early work in musicals. Rasch staged the ballet, led by actress Joan Crawford, that takes place during the spectacular garden party scene. Studio publicists claimed Crawford lost eight pounds from the four-hour daily training sessions necessary to master the number. Angel Cake and three other Vitaphone musical shorts filmed in 1931 ended her initial foray into Hollywood dance circles.
Throughout the 1930s, Rasch and Tiomkin traveled back and forth between New York and Hollywood, sometimes alone, sometimes together, following the work. Rasch was under contract to MGM, where she worked on a number of musicals at the Culver City studio, many featuring scores by Herbert Stothart, beginning with Devil-May-Care (1929), and continuing with Going Hollywood (1933), The Firefly (1937), and Marie Antoinette (1938). The latter was one of three film collaborations with director W. S. "Woody" Van Dyke II. For 1937's Rosalie, Rasch choreographed the "Gypsy" and "Tartan" production numbers, which featured some 500 ballet and tap dancers. Rasch returned to her roots with the Broadway Melody of 1936, directed by Roy Del Ruth, staging the "You Are My Lucky Star" number with music and lyrics by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed. In the mid-1930s, MGM loaned the Albertina Rasch Dancers to Warner Bros. for William Dieterle's Madame Du Barry. Two Columbia films also date from this period, After the Dance and Josef von Sternberg's The King Steps Out.
Ever the innovator, Rasch envisioned a ballet school that could train young charges for film work, a West Coast counterpart to her New York studio. She opened her Hollywood studio in March 1930 at the corner of Fairfax and Sunset. Instead of the typical Hollywood chorus girl, Rasch sought out young, ambitious, educated, and pliable high school girls with athletic figures to engage in her strict and rigorous method, characterized at times as militaristic in its discipline. The première danseuse-turned-teacher loathed routine steps that were mechanical and meaningless. "It is high time that dancing becomes intellectual," she proclaimed. Rasch believed every motion had to have an intelligent thought behind it, and she demanded uniformity and perfection, particularly in the field of film, where performances are frozen in time. Early on she had come to the realization that filmed ballet movements required techniques that differed from live concert or stage dancing. For example, she felt that movement needed to be slowed down for the camera so that the audience could "catch" the action. Choreography, for its part, had to take editing into account. Considering her love of music and marriage to a composer, it is ironic that Rasch rarely used music during her training classes, preferring to use a cane to beat time on the wooden floor. Dancers, she felt, should not rely too heavily on musical cues (one can imagine her calling out, "Count, count, count!").
By the time of her retirement, Rasch had more than a dozen feature films to her credit and was perhaps the best-known female dance director in Hollywood.
Retirement (1946–1967)
Leaving behind her a celebratory career in film and stage, Rasch settled into retirement at the couple's Windsor Square home in Los Angeles. After more than forty years of marriage, "Albertinotchka"—as Tiomkin fondly called her—died on October 2, 1967, at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, California. Initially drawn together by a love of art and music, both Rasch and Tiomkin shared a common Russian-Jewish heritage and began their formal artistic training at an early age. Each emigrated to the United States in hopes of furthering their careers, and both enjoyed considerable success, making significant contributions to the American art forms of theater, dance, and music.
© 2007 Volta Music
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