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Next Time on ATJ: Assorted Jazz Greats Doing Henry Mancini's Compositions

The late composer/arranger/bandleader Henry Mancini would've turned 90 last month; he died at 70 of pancreatic cancer. Much like Quincy Jones, who turned 81 in March, Mancini had a legendary and stylistically diverse tenure in American music, from hip jazz and chart-topping pop to crossover projects and big-band charts and configurations extraordinaire, with lots of award-winning TV and film scoring along the way. Little wonder, then, that both of these multifaceted musicians had careers which first took hold in the immediate wake of the Swing Era; Mancini was about 22 when he joined the postwar Glenn Miller outfit under the direction of Tex Beneke, while Jones was 19 when he signed on with Lionel Hampton in 1952.

We do intend to program a "Quincy Jones hour" sometime soon, but for the time being, Mancini's Music will be the second-hour theme on our next installment of All This Jazz, beginning on Saturday the 17th at 10pm on Public Radio 89.5 KWGS-FM (and also available as a "live stream" at publicradiotulsa.org).

Many of Henry Mancini's tunes have, of course, become jazz standards by now. "The Days of Wine and Roses" and "Moon River" and "Dreamsville" come to mind, as do the popular themes for "The Pink Panther" (for the big screen) and "Peter Gunn" (for the small one). We'll hear each of these compositions in the latter-half of our show --- and several others --- as rendered by the likes of (to name a few) Dexter Gordon, Bill Frisell, Steve Kuhn, and (no surprise here) Mancini himself.

Hope you can join us. It's all to the good. It all sounds great. It's All This Jazz.

(The fine print: ATJ airs every Saturday night on Public Radio 89.5, from 10pm till midnight. We always thereafter offer a 7pm re-airing of the program on Sunday evening, on Jazz 89.5-2, which is our station's all-jazz HD Radio channel. Each week, we spin modern jazz, both recent and classic --- from Geri Allen to John Zorn, Louis Armstrong to Joe Zawinul. And the second half of our two-hour program, beginning at 11pm, invariably carries a theme. Also, please note: All This Jazz now has a Facebook page. And you'll find the ongoing playlist data for our radio show here...be sure to scroll down a bit.)

Scott Gregory started working at Public Radio Tulsa in 2006; he started listening to public radio circa 1980, when he and NPR both marked their tenth birthdays (although only one of them commemorated the occasion with a party at Skate World). Scott became this radio station's Operations Director in the summer of 2023; he also hosts and programs All This Jazz, which airs every Saturday night on Public Radio 89.5-1 from 9pm till midnight.