'S Wonderful

Happiness Is Music For Arranger/Conductor Ray Conniff

The following article on Ray Conniff was originally published in the June 2000 issue of Jazz Connection Magazine.

 If you ask trombonist/arranger Ray Conniff to sum up his career in music, he'll probably say it's been  "'S Wonderful."

The King of Easy Listening Music who blended voices with big band instrumentation and whose record sales are at 78 million, made a conscious choice to stick with a formula that guaranteed commercial success beginning with his first LP for Columbia in 1956,  'S Wonderful.

"Music has been wonderful to me," said Conniff, 83, during a recent telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles, CA.  "I'm very fortunate.  I don't think too many guys have something in life that they like doing and are are able to do that pays them well and gives them a wonderful living."

In his over 60-years as a musician/arranger/conductor, Conniff has played with and scored for many of the top bands of the Big Band era like Bunny Berigan, Bob Crosby, Artie Shaw and Harry James.  As chief arranger for Columbia Records during the 1950s, he worked with such artists as Don Cherry, Johnnie Ray, Frankie Laine, Guy Mitchell, Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis.  As a recording leader, he has recorded 103 albums earning him 10 national gold and two platinum records and 20 foreign gold records, a Grammy Award, two Grammy nominations, a spot on Billboard's all-time Top 10 albums list, and a fanatical international following.

"I think timing had a lot to do with it," Conniff said about his commercial success.  "If I came out now with those kind of songs, I don't think it would be successful.  For the time when those songs came out, it was a big band sound with voices."

Born on November 6, 1916, in Attleboro, MA, Conniff was exposed to music at an early age by his father, the leader/trombonist of the local Jewelry City Band, and by his mother, who played piano.

Conniff took up the trombone at age 9 because his father played the instrument, Conniff said.

During his junior year in Attleboro High School, some kids up the street heard Conniff practicing his trombone one day and they talked him into joining their band.

"I told them I wasn't good enough, but they still wanted me," Conniff said. "At rehearsal, I was the best one in the band and I couldn't play very good, so you can imagine what the band sounded like."

As a teen, Conniff and friends would go see the name bands of the day that would come through their area like the Cosa Loma band, Mal Hallet and Tommy Dorsey.

"I would stand at the front of the stage to hear Tommy play," he said.

Always fascinated as to how songs were played in bands, Conniff noticed a Billboard magazine on his father's desk opened to a page with an ad for a "lightning arranger" that read, "learn to arrange quickly."  It was a musical slide rule, costing $1.  With it, he wrote his first arrangement, Sweet Georgia Brown, using this simple transposing device, and the guys in the band loved it, Conniff said.

Out of high school, Conniff got his first professional job with Dan Murphy's Musical Skippers, out of Boston.  Staying with Murphy for six months, Conniff then started working for society bands in Boston. 

He was encouraged by fellow musicians to leave Boston and go to New York where his musical talents would be better appreciated.

"I would bring my arrangements to bands just to hear them rehearsed," Conniff recalled. "I didn't care if I got paid.  I just wanted to hear how the arrangement sounded."

One day in 1938, Conniff ran into Joe Dixon, an old friend from Boston who was now playing clarinet with trumpeter Bunny Berigan's band.  He invited Conniff to try out for the band and to sit in at a rehearsal that evening.

"When I tried out, this was the first time I ever played in a band where the musicians were better than me,"  he said.  "What a thrill it was!"

Working in the band at the time were Buddy Rich on drums, Georgie Auld on tenor sax, Gus Bivona, clarinet and alto sax, and Joe Bushkin on piano.

"Suddenly, I thought, 'Wow! This is the way it's suppose to be!'" Conniff said.

During the try out, while the girl vocalist was singing her refrain to It's Wonderful, Berigan asked Conniff to solo during the next chorus.

"Most bandleaders, especially Bunny, had someone in the band whom they respected," Conniff said.  "While I was playing my solo, I could see Bunny out of the corner of my eye looking at Georgie Auld who was nodding in approval.  Then Bunny looked over to Joe Bushkin and he also nodded, so I knew I was in.  It was one of the highlights of my whole life."

Conniff waxed his first commercial cuts with the Berigan band for RCA-Victor on Sept. 13, 1938 with Livery Stable Blues, When A Prince of A Fella Meets A Conderella, Let This Be A Warning To You, Baby and Why Doesn't Somebody Tell Me These Things? (three vocals by Jane Dover), High Society and Father, Dear Father.

During his ten-month stint with Berigan, Conniff helped record 26 sides, including Sobbin' Blues and Jelly Roll Blues (both Nov. 22, 1938), Jazz Me Blues and Gangbusters' Holiday (both March 15, 1939).

He also recorded six tunes with a small group led by Berigan, called Bunny Berigan and his Men:  In A Mist, Flashes, Davenport Blues and Candlelights (all Nov. 30, 1938), and In The Dark and Walkin' The Dog (both Dec. 1, 1938). Other personnel on these recordings were Berigan and Irving Goodman, trumpet; Gus Bivona, clarinet and alto sax; Georgie Auld, tenor sax; Joe Lippman, piano; Hank Wayland, bass; and Buddy Rich, drums.

In July 1939, Conniff joined Bob Crosby, who was leading one of the hottest bands of the time.

"Bunny had a great band but there were always problems like finances and Bunny's alcoholism, so when the opportunity came, I went with Bob Crosby," Conniff said. "It was a better job for me."

Conniff played with Crosby's band for almost a year-and-a-half even though it was a different style then what he was used to playing, he said.

"Bunny's style of music was patterned after the black bands like those of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Jimmy Lunceford," Conniff said.  "Crosby was more Dixieland-oriented.  Although Crosby's style of music wasn't the type I liked as opposed to Bunny's band, it was a really great band."

Also playing in Crosby's band at different intervals during this period were Max Herman, Zeke Zarchy and Billy Butterfield, trumpets; Warren Smith and Floyd O'Brien, trombones; Irving Fazola, Matty Matlock and Hank D'Amico, clarinets; Bill Stegmeyer, George Koenig and Doc Rando, alto saxophones: Eddie Miller and Gil Rodin, tenor saxophones; Joe Sullivan and Jess Stacy, pianos; Nappy Lamare, guitar; Bob Haggart, bass; and Ray Bauduc, drums.

From July 10, 1939 until Sept. 10, 1940, Conniff helped cut 71 sides with the Crosby band and was part of the Camel Caravan radio show which featured the Crosby band.

With Conniff's reputation growing as an arranger and soloist, he joined clarinetist Artie Shaw's band in December1940.

"Actually, I was with two different Artie Shaw bands," Conniff said.  "The first band had a string section. Georgie Auld was in it. 'Hot Lips' Page and Billy Butterfield were on trumpets. Johnny Guarnieri was on piano/harpsichord, Dave Tough on drums, Al Hendrickson on guitar and Jack Jenny was on trombone. I sat beside Jack in the band. Then I played in the1944-1945 Shaw band."

Conniff was part of a number of the major hits that Shaw recorded with his string band, including Concert For Clarinet, Parts 1 & 2 (Dec. 17, 1940); Dancing In The Dark and Moonglow (both Jan. 23, 1941); Nocturne and Blues In The Night (both Sept. 2, 1941, with vocal by "Hot Lips" Page on Blues); Take Your Shoes Off, Baby (Oct. 30, 1941, with "Hot Lips" Pages on the vocal); Deuces Wild and St. James Infirmary, Parts 1 & 2 (both Nov. 12, 1941, with vocal by "Hot Lips" Pages on St. James).

Conniff also recorded three small group session sides with Shaw accompanied by 15 string instruments on Sept. 3, 1941: Is It Taboo?, Beyond The Blue Horizon and I Ask The Stars. Other sidemen on that session included "Hot Lips" Page, trumpet; George Auld, tenor sax; Johnny Guarnieri, piano; Mike Bryan, guitar; Eddie McKinney, bass; and Dave Tough, drums.

While Shaw lead a great band, the leader was very difficult to know, Conniff said.

"Artie didn't socialize with the guys in the band, at least he didn't with me," he said.  "He'd have a cool hello every night.  He was an excellent musician and a very learned man.  He invited me up to his room one time to play chess.  He beat the heck out of me, two games in a row!  That was the only time I really ever got to talk with him."

Shortly after Shaw made his final recordings on Jan. 21, 1942, he disbanded and went into the Navy to lead the Navy Ranger Band, until he was medically discharged in 1944.

After Shaw disbanded, Conniff gigged with the Glen Gray Casa Loma Band. When Shaw reorganized his band 1944, Conniff was there to play trombone, composed and arrange for the "King of the Clarinet.".

Shaw's new band was very contemporary sounding and had in its ranks the exciting talents of trumpeters Roy Eldridge and Ray Linn, tenor saxophonists Jon Walton and Herbie Stewart, baritone saxophonist Chuck Gentry, pianist Dodo Marmarosa, guitarist Barney Kessel, and drummer Lou Fromm.

The first sides Shaw waxed for RCA-Victor were on Nov. 23, 1944 with Lady Day, an instrumental tribute to jazz singer Billie Holiday, who worked with Shaw in 1938; and a pair of Conniff charts: Jumpin' On The Merry-Go-Round, which was composed and arranged by the trombonist, and an arrangement of I'll Never Be The Same.

Six weeks later, Shaw recorded Conniff's arrangement of the George and Ira Gerswhin tune, S' Wonderful, on Jan. 9, 1945. The tune turned out to be a smash hit and one of the best of a batch of sides the new Shaw band recorded  -  32 sides in eight months.

"I got paid for the arrangement but Artie got the success off the record," Conniff said.  "As far as I was concerned, the arrangement was a great success.  I'm a perfectionist.  It was one of the few arrangements I wrote that I really liked that turned out great.  I said to myself, 'If I ever have a band of my own, I'm going to record this same arrangement for myself.'  I did so eleven years later. It was the title song of my first album for Columbia.  It was practically the same arrangement."

A short time after S' Wonderful was recorded, Conniff served in the Army arranging for the Armed Forces Radio Services in Hollywood. Shaw recorded another swinging Conniff composition and arrangement with this band: Lucky Number on June 14, 1945.

After his discharge from the Army in 1946, Conniff  went to work arranging for trumpeter Harry James.

"Harry was even more distant than Artie was an employer," Conniff said.  "But, I think he liked my work."

One of the songs Conniff arranged that James went nuts over was September Song, playing it every night without fail, Conniff said.

"Harry was an arranger himself," Conniff said. "I think he sensed that September Song was a great arrangement.  For me to say that it was a great arrangement is very unusual.  I don't think many of the things I did could described as great.  As I look back, I don't know how I ever thought that one up."

Living in Hollywood while the James band was on the road, Conniff would get calls from James telling him to go to Columbia Records to pick up tunes that the band would be recording when they returned.

"Harry would leave it up to me to put my ideas into these arrangements," Conniff said.

When "be-bop" hit the musical scene in the late 1940s, Conniff's  musical tastes did not connect with the new music, so he stopped arranging for a while.

"Harry also wanted me to write some things in bop style, but I couldn't," Conniff said. "I didn't like it and I didn't 'feel' it, so I got out."

Conniff found himself digging tract-housing ditches for two years while reinventing his music by studying the elements of hit songs and teaching himself how to conduct.

Conniff bumped around the studios for a few years until Mitch Miller hired him as a house arranger with Columbia in 1951.

For five years, Conniff wrote back-up arrangements for vocalists, and took the assignments other Columbia arrangers were too busy to write.

In 1955, Miller asked Conniff to arrange a single, Band Of Gold, for crooner Don Cherry (no relation to the late jazz trumpeter who worked with Ornette Coleman).  Recorded on Oct. 17, Conniff used a tightly harmonized chorus in place of a string section, and the sound was an instant hook, taking the single to Number 5 on the Top 40 and giving Cherry his biggest hit.

This led to a series of Conniff-arranged Columbia recording sessions, which resulted in many hit records such as Johnnie Ray's Just Walking In The Rain (1956), Frankie Laine's Moonlight Gambler (1956), Guy Mitchell's Singing The Blues (1956), Marty Robbins' A White Sport Coat, and Johnny Mathis' Chances Are, Wonderful, Wonderful and It's Not For Me To Say.

While Miller was difficult to get along with at times, Conniff and he developed a mutual admiration for each other.

"I got along great with Mitch even thought we fought a lot," Conniff said.  "The differences we had with each other were well taken and one of us would catch something the other would have missed."

Conniff recalled one such incident with Miller on June 25, 1956, when Johnnie Ray recorded Just Walking In The Rain. Listening to the playback, Conniff told Miller that the recorded take needed reverb and echo.  Miller yielded to Conniff's suggestions.

Also, while working on the 'S Wonderful album, Miller wanted to have voice doubling on the song, Sometimes I'm Happy. During the scheduled three-hour recording session, Conniff spent the first two hours and 15 minutes rewriting the arrangement to include voice doubling, he said.

"I was thoroughly disgusted, but Mitch was right!" Conniff said. "The singles I previously did under my own name (Begin The Beguine and Stardust) were getting fantastic airplay and he wanted the same sound."

Conniff's success arranging for other recording artists prompted Columbia to let him record an album under his own name.

He was the first to use voices and vocal arranging as part of the instrumentation.  His formula was to use female voices to double with trumpets, high saxes and clarinets and male voices with trombones or saxes in the lower register.

'S Wonderful was in the Top 20 for nine months, ultimately selling 15 million copies. It was followed by 'S Marvelous (1957) and 'S Awful Nice (1958).

Cash Box voted Conniff  "the most promising up-and-coming band leader of 1957."  In 1959, disk jockeys voted the Ray Conniff Orchestra and Singers "the most played orchestra on the air."

Conniff recorded with two groups:  his "Orchestra and Chorus" and his "Singers."  The former was a typical big band line-up of saxes, trumpets, trombones, and rhythm section and a chorus of four men and four women.  The latter was a chorus of 25 singers  -  12 women and 13 men  -  with minimal instrumental backing.

Conniff produced 28 straight Top 40 albums for Columbia from 1956 to1968, including It's The Talk Of The Town (1959), Say It With Music (A Touch Of Latin) (1960), Memories Are Made Of This (1960), Rhapsody In Rhythm (1962), and Invisible Tears (1964).  Although the first were strictly compilations of standards, be began introducing current pop hit songs in the late '50s and within a few years had made those the mainstay of his repertoire.

"I picked songs that people had fallen in love with," Conniff said about his formula of success.  "All the songs in those early days were songs that were in the Top 10 at one time or another.  I thought that if I did songs in the Top 10, I'd strike people's heart strings when they first fell in love."

In addition to the choice of material and the particular use of voices and instrumentation, Conniff's final ingredient to his successful formula included the use of simple rhythmic sounds.

"Everything in life is rhythm from the seasons of the year to our heart beats," he said. "The rhythm sound was predominate in my recordings as is the use of reoccurring patterns."

A 1962 article in McCall's Magazine described Conniff's band as "singers who 'play' their voices as though they were instruments, more like subtly fluted woodwinds than singing." During that same year he was named "Best Selling Artist" for CBS Records for the recording, We Wish You A Merry Christmas.

In 1966, Conniff won a Grammy Award in the category of "Best Performance By A Chorus" for Somewhere My Love, an adaptation of Maurice Jarre's composition of Laura's Theme from the movie, Doctor Zhivago.

During the 1960s, Conniff brought to the public his Concert In Stereo, the first live stereo concert ever to take place in the world.

During the 1970s, Conniff performed throughout South America, Japan and England.  He also performed at the White House.  In 1974, Conniff was the first pop artist from the West asked to go to the Soviet Union to record an album, Ray Conniff In Moscow, using a local chorus. 

Conniff has developed a major following over the years in Brazil and tours there quite often.  He is scheduled to tour that country during September and October of this year, he said.

"I'm still doing an album or two a year but that's with Abril Music, a Brazilian record company," Conniff said.  "You don't hear much about my records here in the States."

In 1997, after 40 years with Columbia Records/CBS Records/Sony Music, Conniff signed on with Polygram Records and recorded three albums for them:  Ray Conniff Live In Rio, I Love Movies and My Way, a tribute to the late Frank Sinatra.

Conniff's two most recent albums, both recorded in July of last year on Abril Records, are Ray Conniff  'S Country, featuring Brazilian Country music, and Ray Conniff  'S Christmas,  his fourth Christmas album. 

"Abril Records wanted me to do the Brazilian songs to sell down there," Conniff said.  "They don't have a lot of value up here."

Fans of Ray Conniff  make sure that the general public is kept aware of news concerning their musical idol.  The Ray Conniff Fan Club operates an official web site at  http://mywebpages.comcast.net/dmitchell9/index.htm

The president of the fan club, Manfred Thoenicke of Germany, also hosts a Ray Conniff web site at:  http://mthoenicke.privat.t-online.de/rayconniff/index.htm  

When not recording or touring, Conniff and his Swiss-born wife of 32 years, Vera, and their two dogs and two cats, spend time traveling in their motor home, logging almost 20,000 miles a year.

"My life has settled into a routine," Conniff said.

During their RV travels, the Conniffs often hook up with their children, son Jimmy, who drives an 18-wheel semi, and daughters Patti and Tamara, and his three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Conniff is rather modest about the contributions he has made to the history of American popular music.

"I don't think my peers think of me as having made a great contribution," he said.  "My wife gets sore that my peers don't give me some kind of recognition.  I don't think I have a legacy. I do know that I came up with a sound that was a little different.  Maybe that's the legacy."

*****

***  Coda:  In September 2001, Conniff returned to Brazil to give a series of concerts. In March 2002, Conniff honored an invitation by Liza Minnelli and David Gest to perform his greatest hit, Somewhere My Love, at their wedding in New York. It would be his last public performance. Shortly after that wedding performance, Conniff suffered a stroke. He was making good progress during a stay at the Palm Springs Stroke Center and was making plans for another tour and new recordings. After falling down and hitting his head at the Palomar Medical Center in Escondido, CA, Ray Conniff died on Oct. 12, 2002. He was 85. ***