The Good Life (22 page)

Those two albums were the beginning of a beautiful personal and musical relationship with the Count. Over the next twenty-five years we worked together many times and hung out together whenever we got the chance. I’d gotten in the habit of bringing home my musician friends at all hours of the night, and Patricia got used to expecting the unexpected. One night she woke up and wandered into the living room in her nightgown, where she saw not only Bill Basie himself but all
sixteen members of his band sitting around jamming. Not your usual domestic scene!

We once played the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, and our combined act was so hot the audience went absolutely crazy. We got ten standing ovations—it was phenomenal. After the show Basie and I were standing in the parking lot and a white guy came up to Basie, threw him a set of keys, and said, “Hey, buddy, get me my car, will ya?” He thought Basie was a parking attendant! The Count replied, “Get your own car; I’m tired. I’ve been parking them all night.” Basie always had a great sense of humor, and working with him was truly one of the highlights of my life.

Beat of My Heart
and my two records with Count Basie earned me a whole new audience: true jazz fans. Jazz critics question my validity as a jazz artist, and I don’t label myself as one. But personally I love jazz more than any other form of music. It’s spontaneous, honest, and natural. Every civilization is known by It’s culture, and jazz is America’s greatest contribution to the world, and I’ve always surrounded myself with jazz performers because they understand that the
moment
is the most important thing: they improvise, they reinvent the music every night. I know how to improvise too. I sing in the tradition of Bing Crosby: if I like a song, I sing it, and I never sing a song the same way twice.

My most vivid memories from the late fifties are the great years I spent in Chicago. Those were tremendous days. My favorite Chicago hangout was the Black Orchid. It was owned by Paul Raffles, and it was the hippest place in town. He hired singers and brilliant comics like Larry Storch and Jack E. Leonard, there was a chorus line of scantily clad girls, and he always had a great piano player like Ace Harris in the lounge.
When the show was over, we’d go to Paul’s apartment and jam until morning.

I met Hugh Hefner around this time. He was on the scene, just getting started with
Playboy
. He liked to hang out at the Black Orchid, and though he was basically a shy, introverted guy, he knew a good thing when he saw it. His plan was to take all the fun we were having in Chicago in those days and mass-produce it in his magazine, in his clubs, and on his TV show. He refined his idea into a million-dollar concept that’s still going strong today. I got to know Hugh during those nights at the Black Orchid, and I was a guest on his TV shows,
Playboy’s Penthouse
and
Playboy After Hours
.

One night after my show at the Chez Paree I was hanging out with the guys in the band. Suddenly there was a banging on the front door of the club and some guy yelled, “Open up! FBI!”

Two agents muscled their way into the club, lined us up against the wall, and frisked us, but there was nothing to be found. We were really shaken up and figured the incident would hit the papers the next day.

The next night, we were at a party at Hef’s place when in walked Lenny Bruce with his arms around those two “FBI agents.” The whole thing was a joke! Lenny wanted to get us, and he did.

When I think back to my days in Chicago, I can’t help but remember my great friend, the miraculous piano wizard Erroll Garner. The Chez Paree had a joint within a joint, a little piano room in the back called the Key Club, where Erroll would play until all hours. He loved playing the piano so much that even after the regular audience went home, he kept playing for the bosses, the entertainers, and the chorus girls.

We often met in his studio at Carnegie Hall and jammed for hours, and sometimes we hooked up when we were on the road.
One time he told me he thought I should open my show with the song “When You’re Smilin’.” I told Erroll that everybody opens with that song, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer, I didn’t give in, though, because I felt sure the song was overdone, so I turned his request down. At the same time, I heard everybody raving about Judy Garland’s new live album from Carnegie Hall. I bought the record. It starts with an exciting announcement, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Judy Garland...” There are deafening cheers and Judy begins singing, in ballad tempo, “When You’re Smilin...” Once again I learned my lesson.

Erroll was a great musician, and his classic album
Concert by the Sea
showed Columbia just how well a jazz album could do. Before then everybody thought 75,000 was a good figure for a pop (let alone jazz) album to sell. But
Concert by the Sea
sold 250,000 copies. That was an astonishing figure for a jazz album, and it helped Columbia reach a whole new legion of fans.

I made my next album,
Hometown, My Town
, with the great orchestrator Ralph Burns. This and other albums I made with Ralph are a great example of the musical scene that was flourishing in New York in the late fifties and early sixties. This was the time when all the very best musicians were working in the city. Many of them—like Al Cohn, Urbie Green, and Zoot Sims—had started with Woody Herman and other big bands, and when they came off the road, they settled in New York. I’d see them in the recording studios, in the pit bands on Broadway, and jamming in the jazz clubs.

It’s significant, then, that our first album together had New York City as It’s theme. It consisted of only six songs, some of which directly refer to the Big Apple, but most simply reflect a New York mood. I wanted a rich, lush, orchestral sound, but I didn’t want anything that sounded like “easy listening” music. I knew Ralph Burns was the perfect guy for the job.

He had an apartment on Fifty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue, and
I’d
go up there every day and wed work out the songs on the piano. And that’s the way I still work with Ralph Sharon today: we sit at the piano, figure out the tempos, the keys, and how the orchestration should go, and then we present it to the orchestrator and he does the rest. I told Ralph Burns that this might be the only “pop vocal” album he’d ever do where the overall quality of each track was the most important thing. I didn’t want to worry about making a commercial album filled with the standard three-minute pop songs. This was to be an album with no limitations.

I included some of the songs from
Hometown
in my live appearances. I did “Skyscraper Blues” and “The Party’s Over” when I played the Copa in March 1959. It was customary to introduce fellow performers who were out in the audience, and on opening night Joey Bishop, whom I’d recently worked with at the Sands in Vegas, and many other performers were in the house. I introduced them all, and they stood up and took a bow. I started a song, and I looked over and saw Jack Carter sitting ringside and realized I hadn’t introduced him. So I decided to do it during the instrumental break in the middle of “Skyscraper Blues.” I gave the usual spiel: “Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a great comedian in the house tonight. How about a big round of applause for Jack Carter!” When I went back to the song, the next line was “When you’re walking in the streets of New York and you haven’t got a friend in town...” I sang that right after introducing Jack, and the whole place collapsed in laughter! Sorry Jack!

Patricia and I finally moved into our first house. I was looking forward to having a home to return to for some sense of stability, and I thought it would do Patricia and me some good. It
was a beautiful sanctuary. We designed the house after the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, building it mostly of redwood and glass. We were literally surrounded by nature. I had an art studio and a recording studio built in the basement, so I had a place to jam with my colleagues.

In the early part of 1960 I recorded two more albums with Frank DeVol;
To My Wonderful One
and
Alone Together
. Later on that year I did my first, and for many years my only, songbook album,
A String of Harold Arlen
. The son of a cantor, Harold grew up in Buffalo. He became the musical director of the Cotton Club and originally wrote many jazz compositions. But his pop songs were dramatic and right up my alley. Arlen was known for the jazzy quality of his melodies, but Mitch thought it would be novel to give his songs a lush, symphonic treatment. He brought in Glenn Osser, a veteran record and show orchestrator, and his charts were just right. I felt free singing to Glenn’s arrangements. We used a big orchestra of mainly classical players, and they really enjoyed the recording session. That’s the only album I ever made where the musicians actually applauded after each take. Glenn and I did some singles together, and he came up with a lovely, quasi-oriental treatment of Richard Rogers’s “Love Look Away,” the lament from
Flower Drum Song
.

I loved “When the Sun Comes Out,” and I thought that was a perfect opener for the Harold Arlen album. Then again, you can’t go wrong with any of Harold’s songs. His songs are perfect for an interpretive performer like me; I just love the tools he gives me to work with. You can give virtually any treatment to an Arlen tune. They can be sung dramatically or “straight out,” exactly as written.

Harold’s attitude was the opposite of Richard Rodgers’s, who always insisted that his songs be performed exactly as he
wrote them. Harold loved improvisation. He said, “Hey, change it anyway you want, as long as it works.” Anything you did was okay with him as long it pleased the audience. That was the most important thing to him. I’ve sung the music of so many wonderful composers that I’d rather be diplomatic and not name any one of them as the best, but I’d be lying if I said the songs of Harold Arlen didn’t occupy a very special place in my heart. He was a very debonair man, with a thin “French style” mustache, and he always kept a fresh flower in his lapel; he was the consummate artist. He wrote his own music, sat down and played a mean piano, and performed his own songs as well as anyone.

In 1963 Harold wrote a song with André Previn’s wife, the lyricist Dory Langdon, called “So Long Big Time,” and I recorded it with Ralph and Marty Manning. Harold hadn’t attended any of the tapings for
A String of Harold Arlen three
years earlier, but he came to this session, probably because this was a new song. We were working with the song when Harold interrupted and started showing me more things I could do with the lyric, how I wasn’t getting enough out of it, how I could emphasize certain words. I liked what Harold told me so much that when the album,
The Many Moods of Tony
, came out, I gave Harold credit on “So Long Big Time” for conducting his own composition.

I always wanted to be unpredictable, and so for my next project, I decided to go in the opposite direction from the big orchestral albums I’d been doing lately and cut an intimate piano-vocal album with Ralph Sharon. We booked time in the studio and pored through music books, trying one tune after another. The arrangements were spontaneous, and we finished each song in one or two takes. In one afternoon we laid down sixteen tunes—which must be some kind of record—twelve of which made it onto the album, which became 1961’s
Tony
Sings for Two
, Mitch Miller showed up at the start of these sessions, furious that I was really going through with it. When he saw that there was no dissuading me, he turned to Frank Laico and said, “I’m leaving. I can’t support this.”
Tony Sings for Two
turned out to be one of my finest records ever.

Ralph Burns and I got together again to do some singles, including “Smile,” and for our next album we changed gears again. Instead of the lush, ballad-style arrangements we had used on
Hometown, My Town
, we switched to a cookin’ jazz sound. The album is called
My Heart Sings
, and I simply love Ralph’s writing on this one. It’s really beautiful music.