Fancy & Flashy

On the double-jointed tongues of U.S. disc jockeys, the lighted plaques of jukeboxes and the shopping lists of record buyers, one name recurred last week with monotonous frequency. The name was Gordon Hill Jenkins; its owner was a 40-year-old bandleader, composer and arranger who had moved onto the list of the nation's top ten bestsellers with three of his records at once. All tricked out with sobbing, throbbing violins and choruses of female voices, I Wanna Be Loved, Bewitched and My Foolish Heart were proving once again that the U.S. still likes nothing better than the big, lush arrangements of its popular tunes.

Shenanigans in Cleveland. Gordon Jenkins first tried to give Americans the kind of music they wanted in 1920, when he was a skinny ten-year-old, spelling his father at the organ in a Chicago theater. He quit high school to play in a St. Louis speakeasy, wheeling his battered piano from table to table, collecting $40 to $60 a week in tips from enthusiastic bootleg-whisky drinkers. Later he got a job at a St. Louis radio station, singing, playing the organ, piano and accordion to fill in the morning hours before the regular staff straggled in.

His first real break came in 1931 when, the pianist of Isham Jones's big, slick dance orchestra went on an extended binge and Jenkins was hired as a replacement. As pianist-arranger, he got a chance to try out the "fancy and flashy" musical ideas he had been storing up since he was a boy. His shenanigans almost got him fired when a CBS station manager in Cleveland accused Jenkins of "bastardizing the airlanes" by jazzing up the classics, told Bandleader Jones to "get that thin kid out of here."

Embroidery at the Ritz. Jenkin stayed, and he also sold his much-embroidered orchestrations to such other big-name outfits as Whiteman, Goodman, Lopez and Kostelanetz. He also managed to do some composing of his own, turned up a wartime hit San Fernando Valley. Hi biggest single venture to date ("comparing it to all the other things is like stacking a symphony alongside a pack of pop tunes") is Manhattan Tower, a frequently maudlin, occasionally sprightly four-section tribute to the big city, which he wrote in 1945 after a three-week champagne party in a suite of Manhattan's Ritz Tower Hotel. Recorded by Jenkins himself, it is still one of Decca's big sellers.

Last week it looked as if best-selling Gordon Jenkins' formula would keep right on pleasing the U.S. public. In its "Record Possibilities" chart, popularity-wise Billboard picked Jenkins' latest release, Tzena, Tzena, Tzena, a fast-paced Hebrew folk song with a Jenkins lyric, as the week's new record most likely to succeed in weeks to come.

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