GORDON JENKINS
Bowie, Sinatra, Nilsson, Garland and Johnny Cash (sort of)
Like a lot of people at the time of David Bowie’s death, I found myself looking for Bowie-related music and things I might have missed. Two of the most affecting were lists: one was a guide to Bowie’s favourite books – Billy Liar among them – and the other was a long list of his favourite albums, one of which was something called Manhattan Tower by someone called Gordon Jenkins. I downloaded a copy and I fell for it. Manhattan Tower, recorded in the 1950s, is a lush, orchestral concept record about a man and a woman falling for each other in a New York skyscraper where all they do is sing and drink Martinis all day long. I imagined the young Bowie in Bromley listening to this and dreaming of owning his own Manhattan apartment: which in fact he did, a penthouse at 285 Lafayette Street, New York, his final address.
Perhaps this association – the young, aspirational Bowie and the older, dying man – explains why, whenever I listen to Gordon Jenkins now, I feel a mixture of excitement and sadness, brittle pleasure and melancholy. In his time, which was a long and fruitful time, Gordon Jenkins was a highly successful, highly respected composer and arranger with his own individual style. He worked as an arranger with Frank Sinatra (It Was A Very Good Year) and Nat King Cole (When I Fall In Love), and he made his own records like the afore-mentioned Manhattan Tower - and the fantastic Seven Dreams.
A concept EP about seven people on a train journey, Seven Dreams sounds like the kind of music suburbanites would play at an Eisenhower-era cocktail party yet is run through with a strange, narcoleptic quality (at one point a handsome baritone sings, “I live among the dead”). It also featured the gorgeous Crescent City Blues, a song which Johnny Cash mined so thoroughly for Folsom Prison Blues that he had to pay a $75,000 settlement.
Jenkins’ work – lush arrangements with a wink in their eyes,, spoken word interludes (most notably on Judy Garland’s The Letter album) and a great ear for the small intimate voice at the eye of the orchestral storm – stands up now and stands out among his contemporaries. And you can see him here, later in life, conducting the orchestra for Harry Nilsson’s A Little Touch of Schmilson In The Night -
. Class, strangeness and charm.