Shelly Manne was one of many best jazz drummers in historical past, showing on greater than a thousand information and having fun with a celebrated profession as a Hollywood film musician. Manne performed with a blinding array of musicians, together with Invoice Evans, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie, and ran his personal hip nightclub within the Nineteen Sixties.
Though Manne, who was born in New York on June 11, 1920, began out taking part in the alto saxophone, he was destined to be a percussionist. His father Max, who produced exhibits on the Roxy Theatre, was an acclaimed drummer. And Max’s pal, Billy Gladstone, a high drummer within the theatres of New York, confirmed the younger Shelly the way to maintain the sticks and arrange a package. “Then he put Count Basie’s ‘Topsy’ on the phonograph and, as he walked out of the room, said, ‘play!’ That was my first lesson,” Manne as soon as recounted within the e book Shelly Manne: Sounds of the Completely different Drummer, by Jack Model and Invoice Korst.
Though Manne was a proficient runner – he was a New York Metropolis cross-country champion in highschool – his need to be a musician was sealed by a go to to Golden Gate Ballroom in Harlem to listen to Roy Eldridge’s band. “I felt what they were doing so strongly that I decided I wanted to do that,” he recalled in an interview with Trendy Drummer’s Chuck Bernstein in 1984.
Musical Beginnings
Manne spent his late teenage years taking part in for bands on Transatlantic liners. He made his recording debut with Bobby Byrne’s band in 1939. In 1942, Manne signed up for army service and assigned to the US Coast Guard Band in Brooklyn. The posting meant he was a brief subway experience from the jazz golf equipment of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Nonetheless sporting his service uniform, Manne would sit in for his drummer hero Max Roach alongside trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. He jammed with saxophone greats Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster. “Although I was in my early twenties, I looked like I was 15,” Manne recalled in Ira Gitler’s e book Swing to Bop: An Oral Historical past of the Transition in Jazz within the Forties. “Ben used to take care of me like a guardian. If anyone offered me a drink at the White Rose Club, he’d get mad.”
After the tip of World Battle II, Manne went on the street with Stan Kenton’s band – chopping the 1950 Capitol album Stan Kenton Improvements in Trendy Music – and labored with trombonist Kai Winding and bandleader Woody Herman. He stated speaking to all these high musicians, together with a stint on a Jazz on the Philharmonic tour with Ella Fitzgerald, was a priceless apprenticeship.
The West Coast
In 1952, Manne made the important thing determination of his life: he and spouse Florence “Flip” Butterfield, a former dancer, relocated to California. It was there that the drummer turned the main gentle of the West Coast Jazz motion. He fashioned his personal small combos, together with the acclaimed Shelly Manne and his Males. “Because of my reputation, more jobs were accessible to me, so I became leader. But like most drummer-leaders, I don’t put the drums in the forefront of the group,” he was quoted in Swing to Bop: An Oral Historical past of the Transition in Jazz.
Manne’s rendition of Bud Powell’s “Un Poco Loco“ for Up to date in 1956, wherein he performed the three-minute solo with just one brush in his proper hand and a small ground tom-tom drum – making a theme-and-variation solo that cleverly leads again to the unique rhythm of the piece – is taken into account one of the artistic drums solos of the period.
That yr he additionally teamed up with composer André Previn to supply the primary jazz album of a Broadway rating. Shelly Manne and Associates – Songs from My Truthful Woman turned the best-selling jazz album for 1956 and included one other dazzling drum solo on “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” The album earned Manne a Grammy nomination. “Shelly was always flawless,” stated Previn. “He can sit in any rhythm section, from a trio to the biggest band, and make it swing. He is an experimenter and an innovator of the highest order.”
By this level, Manne’s repute preceded him. Actually. After Manne’s modern drum work lit up Peggy Lee’s hit 1958 single “Fever,” Manne was subsequently referred to as in to play on the identical tune for singer Jimmy Bowen. “It actually said on my part for Jimmy, ‘play like Shelly Manne.’ So I played it just like I played it originally,” Manne recalled, in a narrative instructed in The Penguin Jazz Information: The Historical past of the Music within the 1000 Greatest Albums. “The producer stormed out of the control room and said, ‘Can’t you read English? It says ‘play like Shelly Manne.’ When I told him I was Shelly Manne, he turned and went back into the booth. I think he’s selling cars now.”
Manne’s collaborations are too quite a few to listing in full. It’s a veritable who’s who of the period: Lalo Schifrin, Ornette Coleman, Chet Baker, or Mahalia Jackson. Explaining his philosophy, Manne stated that “when I play with [keyboard player] Teddy Wilson, I don’t play the same as I would with Dizzy Gillespie. It’s a matter of listening, knowing the music, and how to play a particular style, feeling, and the energy level. You have to be able to adapt.”
The Movie Business
His means to tailor his abilities to the job made him a favourite with Hollywood. In 1954, Manne was employed to play some “complicated” issues for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. “Shelly just sat down, read them off, and played them perfectly,” stated orchestra contractor Bobby Helfer in Drummin’ Males: The Heartbeat of Jazz, The Swing Years, by Burt Korall. Manne may be heard on the soundtrack of classics akin to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Some Prefer it Scorching, and Physician Zhivago.
His adventures in movie didn’t cease there. Manne suggested Frank Sinatra on drumming approach for his position in The Man with the Golden Arm and received his personal probability to shine in entrance of the digital camera when he acted within the Oscar-winning 1958 image I Need to Stay! and The Gene Krupa Story.
The Jazz Membership
By the tip of the 50s, Manne was trying to develop previous merely taking part in on information and soundtracks. In 1959, throughout a tour of Europe, he dropped into the newly-opened Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Membership in London. “I’m pretty certain that Shelly’s enthusiasm for the club’s atmosphere prompted him to open his Manne Hole Club,” Scott wrote in his memoir A few of My Greatest Associates are Blues.
Manne opened his Los Angeles membership in the summertime of 1960. The diner, close to Hollywood’s Sundown Boulevard, had images and album covers on the partitions and an illuminated drumhead above an indication saying “Shelly Manne: Founder and Owner, 1960 A.D.” Over the subsequent 12 years, this crowded, smoky membership turned a magnet for jazz greats together with John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Elvin Jones, and Thelonious Monk. Manne performed there most weeks, ending units by modestly exclaiming, “Do I sound O.K.?”
The Later Years
Manne continued to work arduous within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties – he branched out and appeared on two albums with Tom Waits and, together with Gerry Mulligan, one with Barry Manilow – and stated that late in life he loved most taking part in in a small trio, explaining to Drummer Journal that it was “because I guess now that I’m getting older, my hands get a little tired.” His spouse later revealed to the Percussive Arts Society web site that “just before his death he remarked that there were so many new young lions playing drums, he didn’t think anyone knew who he was any more.”
On September 9, 1984, he was honored by Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley and the Hollywood Arts Council, who declared it Shelly Manne Day. Sadly, only a few weeks later, the 64-year-old suffered a coronary heart assault at house and died on September 26 at Serra Medical Clinic. Manne was buried at Forest Garden Memorial Park within the Hollywood Hills. Each musician at his funeral had private tales of his wit, outstanding generosity, and kindness.
But for all his fame and fortune, the drummer was happiest merely taking part in jazz. “All I cared about was swinging,” Manne stated within the Trendy Drummer interview three months earlier than his dying. “That’s the one thing I felt inside my body from the moment I started playing – the feeling of swing, the time, and making it live.”
Take heed to a West Coast Jazz Necessities playlist on Apple Music and the most effective of Shelly Manne on Spotify.
