PORT TOWNSEND — When Johnny Mandel was small, his family would say that he was nothing but a haircut.
“The fact that I was born was the product of a deal between my mother and father,” Mandel said during an interview Friday.
“They had one child that was already 6 years old, and my mother was already quite happy with the way things were,” Mandel said.
“But my dad wanted another kid and started to make less than subtle suggestions.
“So my mother, who had this long red hair, said she’d agree to have another child if she could cut her hair and go out dancing with her friends.”
The “haircut” grew up to become a key figure in American music, arranging tunes for Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand and Paul McCartney, among others.
He also left his mark as a composer with his best-known compositions being “The Shadow of Your Smile” and the M*A*S*H theme, “Suicide is Painless.”
Mandel, 86, was a special guest at last week’s Jazz Port Townsend, where he taught arranging to an eager group of aspiring musicians looking to learn from a master.
On Friday afternoon, he took a break from class for a public interview in the Wheeler Theater, conducted by the festival’s musical director, John Clayton.
When Mandel was first getting interested in music, radio stations would run a wire into every cafe or hotel where a big band was playing for live broadcast,
Each band would play for 30 minutes, and they’d all play the same 10 songs from the current hit parade.
“One band would come on, and I’d wonder why they played this song all the time because it kind of sucks,” Mandel said.
“Then another band would come on and play the same song, and it would sound wonderful.
“A couple of weeks later, a light bulb went off in my head, and I realized that it’s not the song: It’s about how the band plays it.”
This led to Mandel’s awareness of the role of the arranger.
“No one knew what an arranger was,,” he said.
“They thought it was someone who moved the chairs around.”
During Friday’s presentation, Clayton played songs from Mandel’s career on a Mac laptop as part of the lesson, beginning with Sinatra’s “Ring a Ding Ding.”
“He could hear all the songs once and visualize exactly what the final record was going to sound like,” Mandel said of Sinatra.
“He had a total grasp of everything. I’ve never worked with anyone like that.
“Most of the fine singers around hear the arrangement and figure out where their place is and where the vocal should be,” Mandel said.
“They get to know it. They study it and eventually begin recording.
“Without hearing [the arrangement, Sinatra] knew what it was going to sound like,” he said.
This was even more remarkable because Sinatra didn’t read music, Mandel said.
Mandel has both worked with lyricists and written the lyrics himself.
“They used to ask Sammy Cahn, who had many songs to his credit, what came first, the music or the words,” Mandel said.
“Sammy used to say it was the check, and he amended that to say what really came first was the phone call.”
Mandel has written songs both ways: beginning with a lyric or with a melody.
A good song always results from a connection between the composer and the lyricists.
On two occasions, this bond assumed an uncanny spin.
“I was working on a song called, ‘Where Do You Start’ that came lyric first, and the lyric wasn’t very good,” he said.
“I realized that the bridge needed a different twist, so I took the music to Alan and Marilyn Bergman, some of the great lyricists of the century, and they wrote a lyric that was almost identical to the original lyric.
“I told them nothing about it, but they must have picked up something from the music — but I never showed them anything.”
This happened again with Peggy Lee, when Mandel was writing the music for 1966’s “The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming,” scoring a scene where a soldier and a girl walked along the beach.
Mandel gave Lee the music, and she wrote a lyric that reflected everything that he had seen on the screen when he wrote the music.
Mandel took Lee to a screening.
“It was a way of asking her out,” he added.
“We got to that point, and her mouth dropped open, and she said, ‘How the hell did I do that?’”
Mandel also provided some technical advice, how adding more woodwinds and brass makes everything louder, while adding more strings has another effect.
“The loudest string sound can be made by a string quartet,” he said.
“When you add more strings, it doesn’t get louder; the sound gets rounder.”
Mandel, who was walking on crutches, has been out of commission for a year.
He fell and broke his hip while arranging Paul McCartney’s standards album, “Kisses on the Bottom.”
“I was in the hospital for the better part of a year with this hip, and I haven’t written a note,” Mandel said.
“I’m just about ready to get back to work.”
Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
