Johnny Green birth centennial
Topic: Johnny Green
Johnny Green was born October 10, 1908, in New York. He entered Harvard at age 15, and while there, played piano and saxophone and led the Gold Coast Orchestra. Guy Lombardo heard the band and hired Green to write arrangements for his own band. This he did during summer vacations while eventually earning a master’s degree in English literature, and it was while working for Lombardo that he wrote his first hit song, “Coquette”. At his father’s insistence, Green got a job as a stockbroker, but soon left Wall Street to pursue a full time music career. In the early 30's, he worked as an accompanist for Ethel Merman, Gertrude Lawrence and James Melton, and also worked as a pianist for Leo Reisman. He was pianist and assistant conductor for Buddy Rogers, spent much of 1933 in London writing for musical productions at the London Hippodrome and for the BBC, then had his own band back in the U.S. (1933-41). With this band, he frequently appeared on radio, on his own show as well as the shows of Ruth Etting (1934), Ethel Merman (1935), Jack Benny (1935-36), Fred Astaire (1936-37) and the Philip Morris Show (1939-40). Beginning in 1942, he settled into the Hollywood studios, and was musical director for MGM from 1949 into the 60's. He won an Oscar in 1968 for his work on the movie Oliver!. As chairman of the music branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Art and Sciences, he conducted the orchestra for 17 Oscar telecasts. He also guest conducted several symphony orchestras. Among the songs he wrote are “Body and Soul”, “Out of Nowhere”, “I Cover the Waterfront”, “Weep No More My Baby”, “You’re Mine You” and “I Wanna Be Loved”. He died in 1989.

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Topic: Jeff Beal
Ed Harris Takes On The Bad Guys, Directing -- And Singing -- With New Film Soundtrack Available Here Historically Westerns have produced some of the most memorable music in cinema history. Composer Jeff Beal's take on the genre is featured on the Lakeshore Records soundtrack for APPALOOSA, available via Amazon Digital. In addition to Beal's score, the album will feature the track, "You'll Never Leave My Heart" sung by the film's director and co-star Ed Harris. Composer Jeff Beal first worked with director Ed Harris on Harris' feature film directorial debut, Pollock. A three-time Emmy Award® winner for the main title of Monk, the original dramatic score of TNT's telefilm Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King, and most recently for The Company, Beal has also been Emmy-nominated five other times, including three nods for the HBO series Rome and one for Carnivale. Beal composed the score for the upcoming film Salomaybe?, directed by Al Pacino. His other film composing credits include the documentary The Pixar Story, Ping Pong Playa, Spirit of the Marathon, and The Passion of Ayn Rand. Steven Schneider (regular contributor to the NY Times) wrote of "...the richness of Beal's musical thinking - the ways in which he conceives of his solos as fully-developed mini compositions, while his compositions often capture the liveliness and unpredictability of the best improvisation."

Topic: Rachel Portman
Soundtrack Features Original Music by Academy Award® Winner Rachel Portman AVAILABLE HERE Lakeshore Records releases the soundtrack for THE DUCHESS. The soundtrack contains original music composed by Rachel Portman (Emma, The Cider House Rules). Academy Award® nominees Keira Knightley (Atonement) and Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient, Schindler's List) head the international cast, which also includes Dominic Cooper (The History Boys), and Charlotte Rampling (Swimming Pool). The film is based on Amanda Foreman's biography of Georgiana Cavendish, the scandalous Duchess of Devonshire. In 1996 Rachel Portman became the first female composer to win an Academy Award® for her score to the film Emma. The British composer studied at the University of Oxford. She earned the British Film Institute's Young Composer of the Year Award in 1989 for the mini-series "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit". After several years composing for TV movies and BBC series she scored her first Hollywood feature film with 1992s Used People. Since then she has composed music for a variety of films including The Joy Luck Club, Benny & Joon, Emma, The Cider House Rules, The Legend of Bagger Vance, Chocolat, and more recently Infamous, The Lake House, Mona Lisa Smile, and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. THE DUCHESS is based on the story of an extraordinary woman who rose to fame by staying true to her passions in a world of protocol, gossip and social rules - and paid the price. Long before the concept existed, the Duchess of Devonshire (Knightey) was the original 'it girl'. Like her direct ancestor Princess Diana, she was ravishing, glamorous, and adored by an entire country. Determined to be a player in the wider affairs of the world, she proved that she could out-gamble, out-drink, and outwit most of the aristocratic men who surrounded her. But even as her own power and popularity grew, she was haunted by the fact that the only man in England she seemingly could not seduce was her very own husband, the Duke (Fiennes). And when she tried to find her own way to be true to her heart and loyal to her duty, the resulting controversies and convoluted liaisons pushed her to the brink of risking banishment by her husband, family and all of London society.

Topic: BOOKS
Scarecrow Press will release the autobiography of six-time Academy Award® nominated composer Lalo Schifrin this summer. Mission Impossible: My Life in Music, edited by Richard Palmer, is a journey from Schifrin's formative years in Argentina to the classical and jazz atmospheres in Paris in the 1950s; from his jazz career with Dizzy Gillespie to his development as a film composer. Organized in eight parts, the book reflects on Schifrin's cosmopolitan experience providing impressions and vignettes of the extraordinary people with whom he worked. His music bridges three styles-jazz, classical, and film/TV-his autobiography offers insights on all three genres, as well as politics, literature, and travel. It includes over 30 photos, appendixes listing Schifrin's works, a discography, and an audio CD featuring some of Schifrin's greatest compositions. As a young man in his native Argentina, Lalo Schifrin received classical training in music and studied law. He came from a musical family, and his father was the concertmaster of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Buenos Aires at the Teatro Colon. After his studies at the Paris Conservatory, Schifrin returned to Argentina and formed his own big concert band. Dizzy Gillespie heard Schifrin perform and asked him to become his pianist, arranger, and composer. In 1958, Schifrin moved to the United States and began his remarkable career. Since then Schifrin's career has taken him in many directions. As a jazz musician he performed and recorded with Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Count Basie, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and George Benson. His classical activities include Zubin Mehta, The Three Tenors, Rostropovich, Barenboim, and others. His longtime involvement in both the jazz and symphonic worlds came together in 1993 as pianist and conductor for his on-going series of "Jazz Meets the Symphony" recordings, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and jazz stars like Ray Brown, Grady Tate, Jon Faddis, Paquito D'Rivera and James Morrison. Schifrin has written over 100 film and television scores including Mission Impossible, Mannix, Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt, The Cincinnati Kid, Amityville Horror, four of the Dirty Harry films, and more recently Abominable and the Rush Hour trilogy. To date, Lalo Schifrin has won four Grammys® (twenty-one nominations) , one Cable ACE Award, and six Academy Award® nominations....Available Here

Topic: MUSICALS
Alan Jay Lerner, American songwriter, lyricist. (August 31, 1918 – June 14, 1986)
Together with Frederick Loewe, he created some of the world's most popular and enduring works of musical theatre. Lerner wrote the lyrics for some of the theatre's most famous songs. He won three Tony Awards and three Academy Awards, among other honors. Born in New York City, he was the son of Joseph Jay Lerner, the brother of the owner of the Lerner Stores, Samuel Alexander Lerner. Alan Jay Lerner was educated at Bedales School, Choate Rosemary Hall, and Harvard, where he befriended classmate John F. Kennedy. Following graduation, Lerner wrote scripts for radio, including Your Hit Parade, until he was introduced to a down-on-his-heels Austrian composer Frederick Loewe, who needed a lyricist, in 1942. They scored My Fair Lady, Camelot, Brigadoon, Gigi, others.

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Topic: Ray Heindorf
Oscar winning composer Ray Heindorf (August 25, 1908 - February 2, 1980)...was born in Haverstraw, New York, he grew up on the town of Mechanicville and played piano in local movie houses, and was educated at the Troy Conservatory of Music. From the late 20’s to the early 70’s, he was a composer-arranger-conductor- musical director for numerous movies, having worked on more than 150 of them throughout his career. He was nominated for 18 Oscars, and won three for scoring: Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942),This Is the Army (1943) and The Music Man (1962). Other movies he worked on included The Cabin in the Cotton (1932), Captain Blood (1935), Blues in the Night (1941), Kings Row (1942), Young Man with a Horn (1950), A Street Car Named Desire (1951), The Jazz Singer (1952), A Star Is Born(1954), Finian’s Rainbow (1968) and 1776 (1972). While much of the music he composed was for film background scores, he wrote “Pete Kelly’s Blues”, “I’m in a Jam”, and “Melancholy Rhapsody”, among others. He died in 1980.

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Topic: Carmen Dragon
CARMEN DRAGON conductor, arranger –received an Oscar for best score (w/Morris Stoloff) for “Cover Girl” (1944) – musical director for films “Lovely To Look At” and “The Kid From Brooklyn” -rec. w/Hollywood Bowl Symphony for Capitol. Conducted radio orchestra for many Hollywood based network shows in the 1940's. Carmen Dragon was born on July 28, 1914 and died March 28, 1984. Dragon was born in Antioch, California. He was very active in pops music conducting and composed scores for several films, including At Gunpoint (1955), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Night into Tomorrow (1951), and Kiss Tomorrow Good-bye (1950). He conducted the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, and they performed on the "Standard Oil Hour," broadcast on NBC for elementary schools in the late 1940s through the 1950s. The show was sponsored by Standard Oil Company of California, but other than the name there were no commercials. The program featured a high quality introduction to classical music for young people growing up in the 1940s and early 1950s. Dragon made a series of popular light classical albums for Capitol Records during the 1950s with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. Some of these recordings have been reissued by EMI on CD. Carmen Dragon is the father of harpist Carmen Dragon and Daryl Dragon of the 1970s pop music duo The Captain & Tennille.

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Topic: Ginger Rogers
16 JULY 1911 - Birthday Ginger Rogers (Virginia Katherine McMath), Academy Award winning American actress, singer and dancer who partnered with Fred Astaire...("Did everything he did but backwards and in high-heels" ;-)

Died 25 April 1995. Rogers introduced some celebrated numbers from the Great American Songbook, songs such as Harry Warren and Al Dubin's "The Gold Diggers' Song (We're in the Money)" from Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), "Music Makes Me" from Flying Down to Rio (1933), "The Continental" from The Gay Divorcee (1934), Irving Berlin's "Let Yourself Go" from Follow the Fleet (1936) and the Gershwins' "Embraceable You" from Girl Crazy and "They All Laughed (at Christopher Columbus)" from Shall We Dance (1937). Furthermore, in song duets with Astaire, she co-introduced Berlin's "I'm Putting all My Eggs in One Basket" from Follow the Fleet (1936), Jerome Kern's "Pick Yourself Up" and "A Fine Romance" from Swing Time (1936) and the Gershwins' "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" from Shall We Dance (1937). Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her starring role in 1940s Kitty Foyle...dramatized on radio's Lux, Presents Hollywood:

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Topic: Ronald Binge
15 JULY 1910 Birth of British arranger and orchestra leader Ronald Binge. Was chief arranger for Mantovani (1935-1954), where he developed Mantovani's "cascading strings" sound. Binge was also a film composer who wrote for UK films "Desperate Moment", "Our Gal Friday" and composed many light music works. Died 1979.
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Topic: James Newton Howard

Available here

WARNER BROS. RECORDS TO RELEASE THE DARK KNIGHT ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK ON JULY 15, 2008. Soundtrack to Highly Anticipated Summer Release Scored by Acclaimed Film Composers Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. The Dark Knight Original Motion Picture Soundtrack - the haunting score to the hotly anticipated feature film The Dark Knight - will be released by Warner Bros. Records on July 15, 2008, three days before the movie opens nationwide on July 18th. Composers Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, who collaborated on the score for the 2005 blockbuster Batman Begins, were asked by director Christopher Nolan to work together again, scoring its follow-up, The Dark Knight. The duo recorded the orchestral soundtrack for the film in London this April. Zimmer and Howard are among the film industry's most respected and sought-after composers. Each has a career encompassing well over 100 film and television scores. Zimmer won an Academy Award for his score for The Lion King, and has earned six additional Oscar nominations for his work on Gladiator, The Thin Red Line, Rain Man, As Good as It Gets, The Preacher's Wife and The Prince of Egypt. He includes among his more recent film credits Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, The Simpsons Movie, and the Spanish-language Casi Divas.