Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) Read Online Free Page A

climb out of his 707 with a copy of
La Nausée
sticking out of his back pocket.
    Mancini didn’t have to look far to find the appropriate sound to enhance Edwards’s vision of anomie deluxe. At the time, West Coast jazz (essentially, white bop) was being offered to college kids as part of the same package that included the Beats, open-toed sandals and psychoanalysis. The white bopper playing a subdued parlor jazz was an easier sell than his black counterpart. Sure, the image spoke, the crew-cut cool-schoolers may be, like the black boppers, wigged out, self-destructive hopheads (something you, the middle class, are fascinated by), but they’re also safely Caucasian and get to spend a lot of time at Hermosa Beach.
    Nevertheless, there were a lot of very talented players on the coast and Mancini was canny enough to bring them into the studio to record the
Gunn
scores. Future film score titan John Williams was the piano player. The studio band also included trumpeter Pete Candoli, brothers Ted and Dick Nash (reeds and trombone), guitarist Bob Bain, drummer Jack Sperling and vibraphonist Larry Bunker. The idiom he used was largely out of Gil Evans and other progressive arrangers plus the odd shot of rhythm and blues. He utilized the unconventional, spareinstrumentation associated with the cool school: French horns, vibraphone, electric guitar and—Mancini’s specialty—a very active flute section, including both alto flute and the rarely used bass flute. Instruments were often individually miked to bring out the detail. For small groups, Mancini hijacked the elegant “locked hands” voicing style associated with pianists Milt Buckner and George Shearing. There was a lot of empty space. It was real cool.
    Mancini’s albums of music from the
Peter Gunn
series and the spin-off show,
Mr. Lucky
, sold in the zillions, and I was one of the proud consumers. The tunes had titles like “Dreamsville” and “A Profound Gass.” The music inspired me to learn more about jazz and the extramusical artifacts of the jazz life. I listened to late-night jazz jocks broadcasting out of Manhattan and got a subscription to
Down Beat
, which had lots of live-action photos of the top players. I tried to get through a few Kerouac novels.
    Out of these fragments of hip and hype I constructed in my mind a kind of Disneyland of Cool. I could imagine musicians cruising up and down Central Avenue in cartoon Studebakers and finally assembling in a large sound studio. Folding chairs, music stands. The cats are sitting in a semicircle around a couple of those enormous RCA microphones on boom stands, some in two-tone shirts with roll collars, others in Hawaiian gear and bop glasses. Horns are slipped out of canvas gig bags. There’s a potted palm in the corner. Hank Mancini walks in, not the tanned, carefully coiffed entertainer of later years, but the introspective young professional as pictured on his late-fifties album covers. Everybody’s smoking Pall Malls or some other powerfulnonfilter cigarettes. Hank hands out the parts. When they run down the chart, a thick membrane of sound flows forth and hovers in the room. It sounds incredibly plush. Behind the glass, the engineers at the console are digging it. Maybe a few smokin’ chicks in black tights fall by. And so on.
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    T he next time I saw Henry Mancini’s name was in the credit roll of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, also directed by our man Blake Edwards. I was thirteen and ready for love. When the venal waif Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) got out of that cab on Fifth Avenue in a black dress and pearls in the early morning, I wanted to sip her through a straw.
    Whenever I mention this picture to someone around my age, a strange, tragic smile flits across his or her face as if in remembrance of an old lover. Even those who dismiss the film as a piece of typical Hollywood fluff that took the sting