Watching the film "BUGSY" starring Warren Beatty the other day, I heard something I hadn't heard when I saw it years earlier. In a scene set around 1945, Tanga is playing in a nightclub while Siegel (Beatty) beats a man. It is a recording with Flip Phillips (who also recorded with Charlie Parker John's original composition "No Noise" (1949), aka "Killer Joe" (1947)) on sax, done a few years after Benjamin Siegel died in 1947. This recording, like others, closely reflects the original score turned over to Jack Robbins Music Publisher in 1943. The Arrangement... if not the complete composition, is one of nearly 200 arrangements that John Lewis Bartee did for the Machito Orchestra, as stated in a 1946 letter to Billboard magazine by Jack Robbins. Also... it wasn't the first time Mario Bauza received full artistic credit & ownership of some of John's work, dating back to some work for Cab Calloway. About the same time John was blackmailed in California.
Fitting that the music is in Bugsy, where a picture is painted of criminals & police thriving in a world of corruption and dishonesty... A world in which the legitimate illusion of today's music & film empires was built.
No comments :
Post a Comment