Edward William "Billy" May, Jr., better known as
Billy May (10 November 1916 – 22 January 2004) was an American composer,
arranger and trumpeter.
May was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He started out
playing the tuba in the high school band. At the age of seventeen May 
began
playing with Gene Olsen's Polish-American Orchestra. After playing for a few
local bands, May heard Charlie Barnet's band on the radio in his hometown of
Pittsburgh.
began
playing with Gene Olsen's Polish-American Orchestra. After playing for a few
local bands, May heard Charlie Barnet's band on the radio in his hometown of
Pittsburgh.
May approached the bandleader and asked if he could write
arrangements for the band. This happened in the summer of 1938. From 1938 to
1940, May wrote arrangements and played trumpet for Charlie Barnet's big band. His arrangement of the Ray Noble composition
Cherokee became a major hit of the swing music era.
During the Barnet days, May revealed a significant flair for
satire on a composition titled The Wrong Idea that ridiculed the bland 
Mickey
Mouse style of safe big band music with specific musical mockery of bandleader
Sammy Kaye, known for his swing and sway trademark. May's caustic lyrics to the
song called it swing and sweat with Charlie Barnet.
Mickey
Mouse style of safe big band music with specific musical mockery of bandleader
Sammy Kaye, known for his swing and sway trademark. May's caustic lyrics to the
song called it swing and sweat with Charlie Barnet.
May worked as an arranger for the bands of Glenn Miller and
Les Brown before being hired as staff arranger first for the NBC radio network,
then for Capitol Records.
He also attempted to make a name for himself as a
bandleader, with limited success. By the time he formed his own ensemble in
1951, the big-band boom had peaked; although his band attracted some interest,
keeping it together was a struggle, and he was not temperamentally suited for
the demands of life on the road.
He continued to release albums as a leader
from time to time, but after the mid-1950's the Billy May Orchestra existed
only in the recording studio. In 1959, May won the Grammy Award for Best
Performance by an Orchestra.
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 (all his work
with Cole being packaged later on the 2CD set The Billy May Sessions); Stan
Freberg, with whom he was a long-time collaborator, featuring on many of the
artist's comedy recordings; Peggy Lee, Sue Raney, Vic Damone, Jeri Southern,
Keely Smith, Bobby Darin, Nancy Wilson, Matt Monro, Bing Crosby and Rosemary
Clooney, ; and Sir George Shearing on the albums Satin Affair and Burnished
Brass, co-arranged with 
Shearing (May also conducted Shearing's album Concerto
For My Love, on which Shearing had sole credit for the arrangements).
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 (all his work
with Cole being packaged later on the 2CD set The Billy May Sessions); Stan
Freberg, with whom he was a long-time collaborator, featuring on many of the
artist's comedy recordings; Peggy Lee, Sue Raney, Vic Damone, Jeri Southern,
Keely Smith, Bobby Darin, Nancy Wilson, Matt Monro, Bing Crosby and Rosemary
Clooney, ; and Sir George Shearing on the albums Satin Affair and Burnished
Brass, co-arranged with 
Shearing (May also conducted Shearing's album Concerto
For My Love, on which Shearing had sole credit for the arrangements).
May's charts often featured brisk tempos and intricate brass
parts. One distinctive feature of his style is his frequent use of trumpet mute
devices; another, a saxophone glissando, is widely known as his "slurping
saxes". However, May was also an accomplished writer in slower tempos,
sometimes using string arrangements. Good examples of this aspect of his work
include his brass chart for "These Foolish Things" on the Cole album
Just One Of Those Things and his string arrangement of "April In
Paris" on Sinatra's Come Fly With Me album.
Mr. May also wrote for television and film. He composed the
themes for the television series ''Naked City,'' ''The Mod Squad'' and
''Emergency'' and the scores for ''Sergeants Three'' (1962), ''Johnny Cool''
(1963), ''Tony Rome'' (1967), ''The Front Page'' (1974) and other movies.
He was relatively inactive in recent years, but occasionally
resurfaced if a project interested him. In 1979 he reunited with Sinatra, providing
arrangements for an ambitious three-disc set ''Trilogy.'' In 1996 he reunited
with Mr. Freberg for the equally ambitious, and long-delayed, sequel to the
1961 album ''Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Vol. 1.'' He conducted
a number of pops concerts for the BBC in Scotland and England around the same
time.
The veteran arranger died of heart failure at the age of 87
in his home in San Juan Capistrano, California.
2 comments:
For “Billy May – A Band Is Born & Big Band Bash” go here:
http://www77.zippyshare.com/v/1VWoyI2A/file.html
1. All Of Me
2. If I Had You
3. Charmaine
4. Unforgettable
5. Fat Man Mambo
6. Lean Baby
7. My Silent Love
8. There Is No Greater Love
9. I Guess I'll Have To Change My Plan
10. Mayhern
11. When My Sugar Walks Down The Street
12. Lulu's Back In Town
13. You're Driving Me Crazy
14. When Your Lover Has Gone
15. Perfidia
16. My Last Affair
17. Easy Street
18. Gone With The Wind
19. Diane
20. Please Be Kind
21. Tenderly
22. Orchids In The Moonlight
23. Romance
24. From The Land Of The Sky Blue Water
A big thank you to Ludovico @ Entre Musica blog for original link
Two fine Billy May Capitol LPs from the early 1950s remastered onto CD and released in 2000. The Big Band Bash is typical big band music in the Billy May style with a fair measure of his distinctive `slurping saxes'. Most of the tunes are perennials and I doubt if any will be unfamiliar to listeners. A Band is Born was Billy's first LP release. It opens with the distinctive Billy May arranging sound on `All of me' but the second track, `If I had you', is interesting because it's arranged in the Glenn Miller style. Billy May was arranger and trumpeter for Miller in the early 1940s after he left Charlie Barnet. In fact he can be seen playing in the trumpet section of the orchestra in both of the Miller films, Sun Valley Serenade and Orchestra Wives. There are 24 tracks in all on the CD.
Excerpt from My Singing Teachers by Mel Torme (book, 1994).
‘Billy May is some sort of genius. In the early Sixties, I made a record with Billy called, “Olé, Tormé”. One night, he picked me up at my house, on the way to the recording session at Radio Recorders.
As I came down the stairs, he slid his way into the passenger seat and asked, “Would you mind driving?”
I got behind the wheel and headed for the studio. Billy sat next to me, writing furiously on a scorepad.
“What’s that,” I asked, “something for another session?”
“No,” he replied. “This is for tonight.”
After I got my jaw rehinged, I stammered, “B-b-but we’re going to be recording in fifteen minutes.”
“No problem,” he said laconically. “While we’re doing the first few tunes, my copyist will get this done, and we’ll do it last.”
I sat there amazed. He was writing an arrangement, completely transposed for every instrument, without a piano! Sure enough, we got to the studio, recorded three songs, and then his “automobile chart” was placed before the musicians and we proceeded to put it on wax.
P.S It was excellent! Fully realized, brilliantly written, and a joy to sing with.’
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