[78-L] Listen, all you New Yorkers .....

[DAVID BURNHAM]

This year, on May 12, it will be Gordon Jenkins' 100th birthday.  I'm wondering if "Manhattan Tower" still has a life.  (I realize many people would answer, "Did it ever have a life?")  Recently, I was watching an episode of CSI NY, and during the opening montage music, which is always pretty dense, there was this snippet from Manhattan Tower - nothing more or less than "Listen, all you New Yorkers".  Strangely that line was sung by a man, although in the work it is sung by the woman, (Julie).  I was curious how anyone young enough to work on that show would be old enough to even know Manhattan Tower.  I only have two recordings of it: the two record set by Decca and the much longer version which came out about 10 years later on Capitol using the same cast, (Elliott Lewis and Beverly Mahr).  I think an ideal length for the piece would be somewhere between these two.  The first omits the love story completely while the second has some, (IMO),
 tedious songs - "Happiness Cocktail", "Repeat After Me" and "Once Upon a Dream", which puts words to the theme tune of the piece, including such meaningless metaphors as "a dawn without a sunrise", (hello Mr. Jenkins, a dawn IS a sunrise).  But let me not ridicule the piece.  I do enjoy it and I found a pristine copy of the Capitol LP in a used record store in Ann Arbor which I have mastered onto a CD, since no commercial CD exists, and occasionally play in the car.  Some, (I think), excellent songs added in this version are "learnin' my Latin" and "Married I can always get".

According to the notes on the LP, the piece has enjoyed a huge success, (at least up to 1956), being played annually in Atlanta (?!) as well as many other venues around the country.  I don't know if the original Decca version was abridged at the time or if that is all there was to the piece then.  That version has been issued by Decca on a CD but the booklet belittles the piece, "...the written narration is so hokey it's hysterical."  Also, surprisingly for Decca, the remastering is very slip-shod.  The sound quality isn't great and each side of the 78s is left hanging for several seconds before it carries on.  Anyone who knows the work and the recording knows that side 1 ends with a musical phrase which is repeated at the beginning of side two, an easy edit and side two ends on the same note as starts side three, once again, child's play to put together, (sides three to four can just be joined).  In the booklet for this version it calls Manhattan
 Tower one of the "signature works of the LP era" and mentions that Patty Page and Robert Goulet also recorded full length versions of it.  These are recordings I have never seen.

(Later the same day)

I have just gone to e-bay and discovered that the Capitol version has just come out on CD, but no label is mentioned so it might just be the product of a free-lancer like myself who has copied the LP.  I wish a label like "Oldies" would issue it from the master tape.  The Robert Goulet version was issued on a stereo Columbia LP, but I can't find anyone selling a copy of it, and I just purchased the Patti Page version on a Mercury LP.

db