Billy May
Edward William May Jr. was an American composer, arranger and trumpeter. He composed film and television music for The Green Hornet, The Mod Squad, Batman, and Naked City. He collaborated on films such as Pennies from Heaven, and orchestrated Cocoon, and Cocoon: The Return, among others.
May wrote arrangements for many top singers, including Frank Sinatra, Yma Sumac, Nat King Cole, Anita O'Day, Peggy Lee, Vic Damone, Bobby Darin, Johnny Mercer, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Prima, Keely Smith, Jack Jones, Bing Crosby, Sandler and Young, Nancy Wilson, Rosemary Clooney, the Andrews Sisters and Ella Mae Morse. He also collaborated with satirist Stan Freberg on several classic 1950s and 1960s comedy music albums.
As a trumpet player in the 1940s big band era, May recorded such songs as "Measure for Measure", "Long Tall Mama" and "Boom Shot" with Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, and "The Wrong Idea", "Lumby" and "Wings Over Manhattan" with Charlie Barnet and His Orchestra. With his own band, he had a hit single, "Charmaine". In the 1950s he released several successful albums of his unique orchestral arrangements and compositions, including Sorta-May and ''Sorta-Dixie.''
Early life and music
May was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He started out playing the tuba in the high school band. "I sat in the rear of the stand", he said. "I didn't realize it at the time, but I was intrigued with becoming an arranger and an orchestrator". At the age of 17, he began playing with Gene Olsen's Polish-American Orchestra.Swing era and big bands
May moved to New York City at age 22 to become chief arranger for the Charlie Barnet Orchestra. He held this position from February 1939 until October 1940, and joined its trumpet section in June 1939. May's contract with Barnet called for writing at extraordinary speed: four new arrangements per week, about 70 of which were recorded and commercially released by RCA Victor on the Bluebird label. May arranged some of Barnet's best-selling records, including "Pompton Turnpike" and "Leapin' at the Lincoln", but it was May's now-classic arrangement of Ray Noble's "Cherokee" that launched Barnet and his band to national stardom.At Barnet's request, May closely studied the musical language of Barnet's idol, Duke Ellington. May soon developed a harmonic and sonic palette rich with Ellingtonian colors. The Ellington influence is apparent in some of May's arrangements of new pop songs including "Danger in the Dark" and "Strange Enchantment". They are on full display in May's arrangements of Ellington's own compositions, particularly "The Sergeant Was Shy", "Ring Dem Bells", and "Rockin' in Rhythm". Ellington even reciprocated the musical respect by recording his own arrangement of "In a Mizz", a Charlie Barnet original arranged by May in June 1939.
May's first recorded serious composition for jazz orchestra was Wings Over Manhattan, a three-part suite celebrating the "aviation" theme of the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair for which it was written. It is also a musical salute to Ellington, showing the influence of Ellington's longer-form works like Reminiscing in Tempo and Symphony in Black. Composer/historian Gunther Schuller felt that by age 23, Billy May's command of Ellington's compositional language had become so convincing that "the 'disciple' could hardly be distinguished from the 'master'."
May's sense of musical humor—which later became one of the hallmarks of his sound—began to take shape with the Charlie Barnet Orchestra, as evident in his arrangements of novelty numbers like "Six Lessons From Madame La Zonga". May's earliest recorded musical parody—a comedic skill he would later master with comedian Stan Freberg—was "The Wrong Idea", an original song by May and Barnet, with syrupy vocal and comically bad trumpet soloing by May. Barnet called "The Wrong Idea" a "flagrant burlesque" of the best-selling "sweet" bands of the day led by Kay Kyser and Sammy Kaye, whose motto "Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye" becomes "Swing and Sweat with Charlie Barnet" when May sings it.
May and Barnet remained close throughout their lives, and May arranged another 36 titles for the Barnet Orchestra between 1954 and 1970.
The original manuscript scores, and some of the original band parts, for about 80 of May's arrangements for Barnet are now housed at the Music Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where they are open to the public for research. Many others were destroyed in the 1939 fire at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles.
Bandleader Glenn Miller hired May away from Barnet in 1940. "May points out that he was not responsible for any of the band's signature hits, but he did write the beautiful left-field introduction to Finegan's 'Serenade In Blue'".
Miller and May had a wary relationship. According to Will Friedwald, by 1942 May was ready to resign from the Miller band. Miller refused to record half of May's arrangements, and May objected to Miller's regimented style. But since Miller was joining the military, he convinced May to stay on until the band broke up. May said around 1995 that working with Miller "helped me immensely. I learned a lot from Glenn. He was a good musician and an excellent arranger."
Later career
When the era of the Big Bands ended in the late 1940s, May relocated to Los Angeles, where he became a much-coveted arranger and studio orchestra leader, working for top recording stars of the day including Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Anita O'Day and Bing Crosby.With Capitol Records
At Capitol, May wrote arrangements for many top artists. These included Frank Sinatra on the albums Come Fly with Me, Come Dance with Me! and Come Swing with Me! ; Nat King Cole on the albums Just One of Those Things and Let's Face the Music!, as well as numerous singles ; Peggy Lee on the albums Pretty Eyes and Christmas Carousel; Sue Raney on her second album Songs for a Raney Day; Vic Damone on the albums The Lively Ones and Strange Enchantment; Jeri Southern on the album Jeri Southern Meets Cole Porter; Keely Smith on the album Politely and on a duet single, "Nothing In Common"/"How Are Ya Fixed For Love?", with Sinatra; Bobby Darin on the album Oh! Look at Me Now; Nancy Wilson on the albums Like In Love, Something Wonderful, Tender Loving Care, Nancy - Naturally! and various tracks from the albums Just For Now and Lush Life; Matt Monro on several tracks from the albums Invitation to the Movies, Invitation to Broadway, and These Years; Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney on the albums That Travelin' Two-Beat and Fancy Meeting You Here; and Sir George Shearing on the albums Satin Affair and Burnished Brass, co-arranged with Shearing.May's orchestra was featured on many Capitol Records children's projects, including cowboy star, Hopalong Cassidy. He worked closely with early 1950s satirist Stan Freberg, using his arranging skills to help Freberg create his spoofs of current hits by creating musical backing often stunningly close to the original hit single.
On Freberg's Wun'erful, Wun'erful! a lacerating spoof of bandleader Lawrence Welk, May hired some of Hollywood's best jazz musicians, who relished the idea of mocking the financially successful but musically mediocre Welk sound, which they considered the epitome of "square". The result was a note-perfect recreation of Welk's sound as Freberg and a group of vocalists performed parodies of Welk's "musical family". Freberg recounted that Welk was less than amused by the recording.
May also composed and conducted the music for Freberg's short-lived comedy radio series on CBS, which ran for 15 episodes in 1957. His sendup of trashy horror-film music is notable.
May won two Grammy Awards, including Best Performance by an Orchestra in 1958 and Best Arrangement in 1959. Much of his work for Capitol has been reissued on the Ultra-Lounge CD series.
In the late 1960s into the early 1970s, May conducted many recreations of big band era classics, recorded by Capitol. May transcribed note for note from the original recordings of big band legends such as Charlie Barnet, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and others and then conducted a group of all-star veteran musicians on the sessions, including some of the original performers such as singers Helen Forrest, Helen Ward and Tex Beneke. The Time-Life label released these as boxed sets titled as "The Swing Era," whose marketing was focused on the fact that these high-fidelity stereo recordings allowed listeners to enjoy the music with a depth and realism that the 78 rpm recordings of that era had never been able to fully capture.
Other record labels
The Crosby-Clooney collaboration was a sequel to their earlier, more successful album on RCA Victor, Fancy Meeting You Here, also arranged by May, whose other non-Capitol work included another Bing Crosby duet album, this time with Louis Armstrong, entitled Bing & Satchmo; a further duet album twinning Bobby Darin with Johnny Mercer ; the sixth in Ella Fitzgerald's acclaimed series of Song Books for Verve Records, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Harold Arlen Songbook; similar dips into Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart with Anita O'Day ; Mel Tormé's Latin-flavoured album ; Jane Russell's self-titled album on MGM Records in 1958; early albums by Jack Jones and Petula Clark ; one solitary session with Sarah Vaughan for Roulette Records in 1960, to record the single "The Green Leaves of Summer" and three other tracks. May arranged and conducted Once More with Feeling, a 1960 studio album by singer Billy Eckstine on Roulette.May also arranged and recorded one album in Cleveland with Cosmic Records; Guess Who for artist Jerry Lee at the Golden Key Club; and two more albums with Keely Smith, recorded nearly 40 years apart: CheroKeely Swings from 1962; and Keely Sings Sinatra, one of May's last projects, from 2001.
After Sinatra left Capitol to start his own label, Reprise Records, May continued to provide arrangements for him, off and on, for nearly thirty more years, working on the albums Sinatra Swings, Francis A. & Edward K. and Trilogy 1: The Past, as well as two charts for one of Sinatra's last ever solo recording sessions, "My Foolish Heart" and "Cry Me a River".
May arranged Sinatra's knockabout duet with Sammy Davis Jr., "Me and My Shadow", which was a hit single on both sides of the Atlantic in 1962, while he contributed to Sinatra's ambitious "Reprise Musical Repertory Theatre" project, providing a few arrangements for three of its four albums, South Pacific, Kiss Me, Kate and Guys and Dolls, May's charts being variously performed by Sinatra, Davis, Crosby, Dean Martin, Jo Stafford and Lou Monte and yielding a perennial Sinatra concert favourite, "Luck Be a Lady" from Guys and Dolls.
In 1958, May arranged a Christmas album on Warner Bros. Records featuring The Jimmy Joyce Singers, titled A Christmas to Remember. In 1983, May arranged the song "He Came Here For Me" for the Carpenters' An Old-Fashioned Christmas album on A&M Records.