Paul Weston born 12 March 1912

 

Paul Weston (born Paul Wetstein, March 12, 1912 – died September 20, 1996) was a US pianist, arranger, composer and conductor. Weston was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1933.
 
Weston became an arranger for Rudy Vallee's Fleischman Hour on radio. In 1936 he joined the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra as chief arranger, holding the position until 1940. He then became Dinah Shore's arranger/conductor and also worked freelance for the Bob Crosby Orchestra. His association with the Crosby unit took him to Hollywood and into film work, starting with Holiday Inn in 1941. Subsequent films as musical director include Holiday Inn (1942), Belle of the Yukon (1944) and Road To Utopia (1945). Weston arranged Ella Fitzgerald's album Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook (1957), devoted to the music of Irving Berlin.
 
In 1942, songwriter Johnny Mercer, Glenn Wallichs and Buddy DeSylva formed Capitol Records and engaged Weston as musical director for the label. Weston also began working on radio with Mercer and Capitol songstress Jo Stafford. Stafford signed with

Columbia Records in 1950 and Weston also joined Columbia. In 1952, Weston and Stafford married and had two children, Tim (born 1954) and Amy (born 1956).
 
Weston's professionalism and organizational talents contributed greatly to Capitol's early success. He experimented with a blend of a string orchestra with swing band musicians, leading to the album, "Music for Dreaming," which featured a sleepy scantily-clad woman on the front cover--setting two standards for a subsequent flood of "mood music" albums over the next two decades: lush string arrangements and "tasteful" cheesecake covers. He went on to record a whole series of "Music for" albums until leaving Capitol in the mid-1950s. 

 

 

 

Here's "Skylark" from "Mood For 12." This 1955 album features some great solos by Ziggy Elman, Eddie Miller, Matty Matlock, Babe Russin, Ted Nash, Clyde Hurley, George Van Eps, Bill Schaefer, Stanley Wrightman, Barney Kessel, Paul Smith, and Joe Howard.

 

Weston had a long career as a musical director for television including The Danny Kaye Show. After hearing a particularly awful cocktail pianist at a Columbia Records sales conference, he decided to record his own pastiche of the whole cocktail scene. Posing as Jonathan Edwards, ham-fisted pianist, he backed

Stafford, who mangled notes and lost the beat in the guise of vocalist Darlene Edwards. Although meant as a joke, "The Piano Artistry of Jonathan and Darlene Edwards" became something of a hit, noted as one of the best pieces of musical comedy of the modern era. As others have commented, it took genuine musical talent to play and sing so badly! Weston and Stafford went on to record four other Jonathan and Darlene albums, all of which are available on Corinthian Records, their private label.
 
Despite the Jonathan Edwards send-ups, Weston was deeply serious about his music and profession. He organized and served as the first president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and composed several large works, including "Crescent City," a musical history of New Orleans, which he recorded with Stafford. In 1971, he conducted his own symphonic work, "Memories of Ireland."
 
The couple retired from performing in the 1970s. Weston died on September 20, 1996, in Santa Monica, California. In 2006, Jo Stafford donated her husband's library and her own to the University of Arizona. She died in 2008. (info edited from Wikipedia & Spaceagepop)