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Enrique Renard remembers the Englishman who became
one of the ‘Greats’ of American Light Music
A BUNCH OF HOLIDAYS – THE DAVID ROSE STORY
It was in 1942, the year the USA had just entered World War
II, that a totally unknown young jazz pianist brought to RCA
producers a few light pieces he had composed. He played them
in the piano, but explained that his intention was to orchestrate
and record them with a full ensemble, including strings.
The A & R people at RCA must have been impressed with
what they heard, because a session was arranged to record
Holiday for Strings, Dance of the Spanish Onion,
Our Waltz and One Love. As everyone knows, recording
techniques of those days were very far from what we hear today,
or even from what we heard in the fifties, where the studios’
technological jump was enormous. However, and whoever that
recording engineer was at RCA, he came with the idea of adding
echo effect to the sound by slightly retarding the signal.
The result was a novelty sound that added life to the dull
sound recordings of the period under the primitive technology
available. Nothing of the sort had ever been heard before
in popular light music, not even in classical recordings.
Everyone was impressed, and David Rose’s illustrious
musical career was launched then and there.
Columbia Records, always a pioneer in sound achievement under
men like Goddard Lieberson during the 40s, had a remarkable
recording studio called Liederkranz Hall on 115th
E. 58th St. in Manhattan, NY, famed by its excellent
acoustics. By the late 30s and early 40s Andre Kostelanetz
used to record in that studio using musicians from the NY
Philharmonic playing arrangements from popular tunes as part
of the Kostelanetz effort to acquaint the average American
public with symphonic orchestral sounds. His material was
pop, but his arrangements were symphonic in that he used an
80 piece orchestra with a huge string section. He openly achieved
his purpose… in the east coast, that is. In the west
coast the first one to attract attention in that direction
was David Rose.
At the time, swing was in full blast in the USA spearheaded
by Benny Goodman and his Swing Band, but the times, with all
that nostalgic effect on wives and fiancées with their
men overseas fighting a tough war, popularized sentimental
music. Hence the enormous success of the Glenn Miller Orchestra,
and that of a young skinny singer called Frank Sinatra. The
romantic, sentimental quality of David Rose’s tunes and
string arrangements, evident even in his faster pieces like
My Dog has Fleas (1944), fit perfectly the mood of
the times. But it was Holiday for Strings, a million
seller, that brought him into public consciousness. Given
which, he wrote several other "Holidays": Holiday for Flutes,
Holiday for Trombones, Autumn Holiday, Blue
Holiday, etc. (An aunt of mine who was a pianist, remarked
after hearing Holiday for Strings: "It’s called
‘holiday’ for strings but the only thing you hear
in it is strings!). Tune titles aside, the thing is Rose can
and should be credited with having started Light Music in
the western USA.
David Rose was in fact British, born in London, June 15th,
1910. He was only 4 when his family migrated to the USA and
settled in Chicago. By age 16 he was receiving musical training
at the Chicago Conservatory of Music and starting to play
piano professionally. His first contract was with the Ted
Fio Rito Orchestra, but someone at NBC Radio caught his sound
and in 1936 he was hired as a pianist-arranger by the network.
By 1938 he was hired by the Mutual Broadcasting Service, in
Hollywood, where he set up an orchestra for that network.
There he met singer/comedian Martha Raye and married her.
He provided the arrangement for her only hit, a song with
a telling title: Melancholy Mood. He divorced Raye
in 1941.
The US musical scene suffered a crippling blow through a
strike by the Musicians Union that lasted more than two years.
But through that time, Holiday for Strings, recorded
shortly before the strike, became a huge hit. The 78 carried
Poinciana on the other side with a slow, sensual
arrangement that contributed to the success of the single.
He then did for RCA a set of Cole Porter tunes masterfully
arranged and featuring the same echo chamber sound that so
distinguished his output. Those 78s were transposed into 45
rpms in a box set issued in the early 50’s, when 45s
became popular, and later into LP. Both sets are almost impossible
to find. He recorded Holiday for Strings, his signature
song that sold millions worldwide, about six times, including
an extended concert version he did in 1955 for a long forgotten
MGM movie called "Unfinished Dance" but released on
an LP called "David Rose plays David Rose", MGM
E-3748, long out of print.
But it was not only the sound per se that made his
music sound "different". It was the way he arranged. Steeped
in jazz since his early youth, he phrased the strings using
jazz chords and tempos, enlarging and sometimes bending phrases
and scoring the strings in several voices so as to achieve
a sort of uniform sound particularly pleasant to hear and
very apt in establishing a romantic atmosphere. Many of my
generation of those days felt a debt of gratitude towards
David Rose and his music. Our seductive efforts were amply
rewarded when we placed a Rose 78 rpm record on the turntable.
The problem was one had to get up too often to change the
record, thus spoiling things to some extent…
In 1941 Rose married Judy Garland, of all people! That an
extraordinary ballad singer and the best ballad arranger in
the business would never record together during the three
years their marriage lasted is something difficult to explain.
There were probably contractual situations that made it impossible,
but they would have been a perfect match. Garland’s heartfelt
style coupled with the Rose strings would have been something
difficult to forget. But that perfect matching did not extend
to their marriage. They were divorced in 1945.
Meanwhile, Rose’s career and fame continued to climb.
He was busily arranging for movies and he had his own radio
show California Melodies. For that one he wrote one
of his well known tunes of that same name. The original, seductive
way in which he arranged old songs making them sound new and
different, attracted MGM executives, and he was offered a
contract to write music for movies and record for the label.
At MGM, however, the main preoccupation was with movies, and
Rose ended up scoring over 36 of these! Aware of his talent
and his commercial appeal, MGM gave him the opportunity to
arrange and record several LPs from American standards by
Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Moose Charlap and others,
plus his own compositions including re-recordings of the tunes
he had done for RCA, all in a mood, seductive but vital style
that sold very well. Above all, Rose and his engineers invariably
aimed for the best in sound and his talent, added to the lilting
sound of his arrangements, brought him a measure of popularity,
especially amongst advertisers and broadcasters. Whenever
they wanted something catchy for the public’s ear, they
would use excerpts of David Rose tunes. A survey done around
1963 showed that at every minute of every day at least one
radio station in the USA was playing a David Rose selection!
And his music was being used as theme songs for 22 different
TV shows!
But despite all his musical talent and his success, few people
would imagine that his first love was not music. It
was trains, all sorts of trains! More than everything he wanted
to be a railroad engineer! He owned what was probably one
of the largest collections of miniature trains in the world,
and he had a scale railroad track surrounding his estate in
Sherman Oaks, California, with a train on it, of course.
With his career well launched and his talent in huge demand
from television shows as successful as The Red Skelton
Show, Bonanza, the High Chaparral, The Bob Hope Show,
The Jack Benny Show, etc., plus several movies and
new LPs, he found time to marry once more, this time to Conover
model and actress Betty Bigelow, with whom he had two daughters,
Melanie and Angie.
By the mid fifties, MGM engineers Phil Ramone and Don Frey
engineered Rose’s tour-de-force album in keeping with
his permanent fascination with state-of-the-art recording
technology: 21 Channel Sound. This was one of the first
recording efforts done on a multi channel basis, and the results
were spectacular by any means. Especially a Duke Ellington
piece called In a Sentimental Mood, and another by
Bishop & Jenkins, Blue Prelude, represent two of
the most extraordinary arrangements of tunes ever recorded
in Light Music. For the occasion Rose used an orchestra comprised
of 58 musicians (30 strings: 20 violins, 5 violas and 5 celli,
plus percussion, reeds and brass), and the post mix phase
(a novelty those days) was a painstaking process by him and
his engineers. An electronic gimmick was also used which,
in my view at least, detracts from the brilliance of the record:
the music sweeps from one speaker to another, left to right
and right to left. I feel there was no need for this in an
album where stereo separation was splendidly achieved. Still,
later on Ray Martin did likewise with a couple of LPs recorded
for RCA in the early sixties in the USA.
Then, when it was expected his popularity would wane under
the growing impact of rock-n’-roll, MGM paired him with
another talent: Andre Previn, then in his 30s. They recorded
a set of tunes for an LP titled Like Young. It was
so successful they were asked to do an encore: Like Blue.
Previn was an excellent jazz pianist and arranger, and
Rose used only a string orchestra for the sessions. Both albums
stand as a shining example of light music with a jazz feeling.
Shortly after, something more unexpected came up. The writer
has never found anyone who can explain why Rose, a master
of mood music, wrote The Stripper, a hoochi-coochi
strip-tease song if there ever was one! But the fact is that
the thing shot up to the top of the charts in the USA and
even today there are people who know and remember Rose only
for that song! Public taste is sometimes suspect. But we all
know that. The success was of such magnitude, Rose recorded
The Stripper a whole LP album of standards arranged
in that style, and then a second one, More Music of The
Stripper, to satisfy the demand! Well, one must
admit the man had versatility. He probably wrote the
song as a lark, without imagining it would become a hit.
It is a fact that great musicians, especially great arrangers,
will be imitated. Well… let’s say that some will
be "influenced" by them. It is not merely a question of imitating
that which sells well, but also of being inspired by originality
borne in genuine talent and taste. Humoresque, a song
written by Anton Dvorak, the great classical composer, was
classified by my ears as one of the most trite and boring
things they ever heard. And when I saw the song included in
an RCA LP LPT 1011 (the first compilation of 78s by Rose by
the label transposed into 33⅓ rpm.) I couldn’t
believe my eyes! There was nothing anyone could do
for that regrettable song! I surmised. Boy, was I wrong! Rose
picked up the slow, narcotic main theme, changed it into a
fast tempo played by pizzicato strings, orchestrating the
central motive in the manner of that of his Dance of the
Spanish Onion, adding a romantic twist to it, and a dull
song picked up life and beauty. That requires imagination,
an outstanding feature in David Rose’s musical talent.
It was inevitable that he would be copied. And he was.
By the early 50s when he had scored well with some mood albums,
he started to receive phone calls where all he heard was his
own recordings being played by the caller. This went on for
quite a while and he said it drove him nuts. He just couldn’t
figure out who would do such a weird thing. Suddenly, in one
of the calls a familiar voice came in. "This is Jackie Gleason,
Dave… How are ya!... I just figured I told you we’ve
been listening to your records. They sound wonderful…"
Gleason was known more as a comedian than a musician. He
had never studied theory, to begin with, and couldn’t
read music. He was a good bass player though (he can be spotted
as the bass player in the Glenn Miller Orchestra Wives
movie -1942). The fact is he was a natural musician and also
a shrewd businessman, as we shall see. Fascinated with the
Rose mood sound, he decided to do something similar. He tried
to sell the idea to Mitch Miller, A&R man for Columbia
those days. Miller laughed at it. "Strings and a trumpet?
Are you crazy? I have shelves full of Harry James stock I
cannot sell! Take a walk!" Gleason did, and that was a major
faux pas by Miller, similar to the one he took with
Sinatra before. Gleason went into hock, got together with
arrangers George Williams and Dick Jones and made them listen
to David Rose. "I want it to sound like that…" he explained
to them, "and I got Bobby Hackett to do the trumpet part".
The thing was Hackett played cornet, that smaller kind of
trumpet with the conic tubing that mellows the sound and makes
it languid and intimate. In short, ideal for Gleason’s
concept. Gleason went ahead and recorded a few tunes. Upon
hearing them, the Capitol A&R people got interested and
released the album Music for Lovers Only. It was a
smash hit, worldwide. It sold millions but it was a bad imitation
of David Rose.
The thing was, however, that Rose included variety in his
arrangements and a wide selection of different material. Tempos,
colorings, fast and slow percussion and tone alternated brilliantly
in his records. But Gleason understood that for wide appeal
he had to play the melody straight. Average people simply
did not understand nor musically relate to anything else.
Add a romantic tone to it, and you got it made, he figured.
He recorded over thirty "for lovers" albums, made millions,
and he did change orchestration, sometimes even omitting strings
(his best work, I think), but always playing the melody, and
he got to be better known than Rose himself, who unwittingly
gave him the idea.
The 60s were the last successful decade for David Rose. By
then he recorded again many of his first hit compositions,
using now the better technology available. By 1970 he recorded
a couple of albums in London for Polydor, Portrait and
The Very Thought of You, the latter including one of the
best instrumental versions of the Ray Noble standard that
I have ever heard. There is no indication of any other recordings
after those.
I met David Rose at Epcot Center, in Disneyworld, Orlando,
Florida, in 1985. He had been invited to do a few concerts
with the local orchestra, a relatively small group (no more
than 12 or so strings) that could not fully show his brilliance
as an arranger. I found him to be a person who did not take
himself seriously, humorous and funny. The only sad note came
when he was asked why he wasn’t recording any more. There
was a tone of sadness and frustration in his answer: "I don’t
play rock n’ roll", he said. He was 75 at that moment,
but one could sense he was still young inwardly. He was physically
short, but a giant in talent. And his influence in all light
music arrangers, including British composer/ arrangers such
as Melachrino, Ray Martin, Stanley Black (the mood albums),
William Hill-Bowen, Malcolm Lockyer, etc., was undeniable.
The distinctive Rose sound reached a lot of people, but it
was difficult for me to determine clearly my predilection
for it above all other light music composers. Added to his
taste and brilliance there was another factor I could never
pinpoint, but that attracted me. Then, by 1973, while I was
living in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a while, I was playing
one of his records and a neighbor heard and came to knock
at my door. He introduced himself: "My name is Tom Schaeffer,
and I am a professor at the local university here, and would
you mind telling me what is it that you are playing? It sounds
great". I said, "That’s David Rose, and if you wish to
come in and listen please feel free. He did, and as we listened,
he turned to me and asked me if I had a song called June
in January arranged by Rose. I said I did and I played
it for him. And when the strings were picking up the main
theme with the typical full sound Rose got from them, Tom
turned to me and said: "You know, Enrique, the thing with
David Rose is that his was always such a happy sound! I smiled
in full agreement and thanked him for identifying the main
reason why I liked David Rose above almost all others: his
music made me happy! It conveyed a bubbly feeling of happiness!
And $3 for an LP was an insignificant price to pay for it.
I didn’t pay only for the beauty of his compositions
and arrangements. Unwittingly, I was also paying for happiness.
Davis Rose died in Burbank, California, on 23 August, 1990,
leaving behind not only the David Rose Foundation he set up
in the 1960s, but a splendid collection of recorded music.
His talented output was honored with six gold records and
22 Grammys. Not bad for a British-born kid who would have
preferred to be a railroad engineer. Happily, he went the
way of music to our benefit and listening pleasure.
This article appeared in ‘Journal Into Melody’
December 2005.
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