Ray Conniff, the American musician probably best known for his 1966 album, Somewhere My Love,with its title track, Lara's Theme, from the film version of Dr Zhivago, died last weekend in California aged 85.
It's hard to imagine now, but at one time in the mid-1950s to the end of the 1960s, arranger, composer and trombonist Conniff was a household name. That was when he seemed to have cornered the market in wallpaper music, using his trademark sound of wordless male voices blended seamlessly with brass instruments in meticulously arranged and executed versions of well-known standards.
It was tuneful stuff, utterly professional and reassuringly middle-of-the-road, the musical equivalent, in a way, of the kind of clean-cut all-American boy anxious parents would like to see their daughter bringing home. But if it didn't frighten the horses or cause rumblings of discontent below stairs, there was no denying either the skill with which it was carried out or its appeal with the general public.
The formula was a winner, applied as successfully to albums he did for some of the biggest names on the Columbia label, which gave him his first major break, as to the string of best sellers he produced under his own name for the company. Between 1957 and 1968 he had 28 albums in the US Top 40, making his music one of the sounds that evoked, if not an era, at least a notable part of its aural signature.
For people of a certain age and taste, 1966 is as much defined musically by his million-selling album, Somewhere My Love, as anything else around at the time, including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan or Joan Baez. The album's title track, Lara's Theme, from the movie version of Boris Pasternak's celebrated anti-Soviet novel, Dr Zhivago, even made it into the Top 10 in the US charts that year.
A thoroughly schooled musician who had worked and studied for years to perfect his skills and get to the top, Conniff was born into a musical family in Attleboro, Massachusetts,in 1916. His father, a trombonist, taught him to play. While he was still at college, where he formed and led a dance band, he studied arranging with the help of a mail-order course. It was to pay off with a vengeance later on.
After graduating in 1934 he worked as a trombonist, touring the Midwest with the quaintly named Dan Murphy's Musical Skippers. His next musical stop was anything but quaint. Looking for work in New York in 1936, he joined Bunny Berigan on a jam session, and the great trumpeter, a hard drinker and genial bandleader, offered him a job there and then. Despite the band's reputation as a good-time outfit fuelled by alcohol, Conniff stayed there until bandleader Bob Crosby, brother of Bing, enticed him to join the Bobcats. After that he went to clarinettist Artie Shaw's orchestra. Conniff stayed with Shaw, a perfectionist who hated the music business, for four years, featuring on some of his hits, including Concerto For Clarinet, Dancing In The Dark and St James' Infirmary, while also finding time to study at the famous Juilliard School of Music in New York.
After war service, he worked as an arranger for trumpeter Harry James's big band, but quit in 1949 because he disliked the boss's interest in the then new sound of bop. He freelanced for a while and even gave up music for a spell to support a growing family. But all the time he was studying pop records to see if he could identify the factors that gave them public appeal and commercial success.
Reunited briefly with James in 1951 to do some arrangements for Frank Sinatra, he caught the eye of Columbia's producer, Mitch Miller. A man of whom it was once claimed that he did more than any other individual to infantilise the taste of the American public, Miller became synonymous with commercially successful trivia such as Guy Mitchell's Singin' The Blues, Johnny Ray's The Little White Cloud That Cried; the titles say it all.
Conniff attracted Miller's attention again when he arranged singer Don Cherry's Band Of Gold, a million-seller in 1954. Less than two years later Miller gave him his big break to make an album using the "new" sound that was to become Conniff's trademark.
Ray Conniff: born November 6th, 1916; died October 12th, 2002