Yes, Frank was the chief arranger for Les' band throughout the late
'40's and well into the '50's. Those fabulous arrangements for the Hi-
Lo's! are where I first took note of him too. He did a fair amount of
film scoring, not so much as a composer under his own name but as an
orchestrator and arranger, primarily for Warner Bros. A great example
of his brilliance there is the "Marian, the Librarian" dance sequence
from "The Music Man," which is all his work. He did a great deal of
television work, primarily for Jack Webb, writing for dozens of shows.
Believe it or not, he's writing again now at the age of 87, after a
twenty-year hiatus. Brian Setzer has "discovered" him; he's done
arrangements for Brian's last couple of CDs.
He's an amazing talent. I'm honored to be a friend of his.
Glen Daum
On May 28, 2010, at 2:56 PM, dalvin boone wrote:
Didn't Frank Comstock write arrangements for the Les Brown Band?
Dalvin Boone
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of
John Howell
Sent: Friday, May 28, 2010 1:24 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Finale] O.T. Secco recitatives
At 10:56 AM -0400 5/28/10, David W. Fenton wrote:
They may not have physically studied with Schoenberg, et al., but the
film composers in Hollywood definitely studied and absorbed many
aspects of the sound (if not the specific techniques) of then-avant
garde composers, and used them in film. I have read, in fact, that
different film composers were known for being good at imitating
particular composers/styles and were the "go-to" composers when a
film score needed a particular atmosphere.
Isn't "a particular atmosphere" a sine qua non
for film music? I'm constantly knocked out by
the totally different concepts John Williams has
come up with over a long career, each one
seemingly crafted specifically for the movie at
hand--which of course they were!
The name Frank Comstock isn't especially
well-known even among musicians. (I was aware of
him and his creative writing from his work with
The Hi-Los starting in about 1960.) But he was
also a film composer, AND one of the ones who
would be called in to "fix" badly-conceived music
that didn't work in setting "a particular
atmosphere," sometimes having to write a patch
from the end of one cue to the beginning of
another after the final cut, exactly matching the
style of the existing music. And such superb
craftsmen often got no screen credit at all, just
large and very welcome paychecks! That's an
industry that pays for results, not for your
resumé or a list of your teachers.
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[email protected])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
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