Coronado Concert Band at Organ Pavilion August 22: Great Night of Fun and Substance, but Too Many Medleys

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, August 22) I got my husband Charles to come with me for the “Twilight in the Park” concert in Balboa Park featuring the Coronado Concert Band, a larger and more professional-sounding group than the Kearny Mesa Concert Band I’d seen there on August 15. The Coronado Concert Band was led by conductor and musical director Fred Lee, who announced that not only his children but his grandchildren were in the audience. As luck would have it, we were sitting just behind an older woman who had a quite nice and well-behaved dog with her; she explained that her husband of 43 years is in the band. He plays baritone sax, and this irks her no end because they’re currently in the smallest living space they’ve ever shared and the baritone sax (as well as his other saxes) takes up an awful lot of room there. The Coronado Concert Band played quite well – though I think one of their trumpet players was having a proverbial “bad night”; I heard a lot of clinkers from somewhere in their trumpet section – and the only thing I could fault them on was at least four of their selections were medleys. I remember having a similar sense of exasperation with a live recording by Liberace, which had me wondering, “Didn’t he ever play just one song at a time?” Three of their medleys – “Bright Lights on Broadway,” “Big Band Signatures” and “Disney at the Movies” – were by John Higgins, managing producer and editor for the Hal Leonard Corporation, America’s leading publisher of sheet music for bands of all sorts.

The Coronado Concert Band opened with “Bright Lights on Broadway,” which consisted of Irving Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business” from Annie Get Your Gun, Jule Styne’s “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” from Gypsy (so it started with two songs written for Ethel Merman!), Stephen Sondheim’s “Comedy Tonight” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and a reprise of “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Their next selection was “Big Band Signatures,” which consisted of Benny Goodman’s “Let’s Dance” (his theme song, adapted from Weber’s “Invitation to the Dance”), Les Brown’s “Leap Frog,” Stan Kenton’s “The Peanut Vendor,” Count Basie’s “April in Paris” (the one with the many false endings that Basie’s band performs in Mel Brooks’s Western spoof Blazing Saddles), Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” (written by Ellington with his valve trombonist, Juan Tizol) and Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” (which was really Horace Henderson’s “Hot and Anxious,” recorded by Horace’s brother Fletcher Henderson in 1931, eight years before Miller and tenor saxophonist Joe Garland grabbed it and turned it into one of the iconic hits of the swing era). After that came a medley of themes from the various incarnations of the Star Trek franchise, credited to Michael Giacchino as composer and someone named “Bocock” as arranger, but in the middle we heard the familiar opening theme from the original late-1960’s Star Trek TV show by Alexander Courage.

Then the band trotted out “American Originals,” another medley by jazz arranger Sammy Nestico (whom Fred Lee said was a native San Diegan, even though he was born in Pittsburgh, because he died in the San Diego North County city of Carlsbad in 2021), which for some reason Fred Lee introduced as a salute to the so-called “Great American Songbook” – the songs of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer (mostly a lyric writer, though I’d recently seen the 1955 Fred Astaire musical Daddy Long Legs for which Mercer wrote music as well as words), Hoagy Carmichael, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, “among others.” Oddly, he dated the period of the “Great American Songbook” as between 1920 and 1960 – but all four songs in the “American Originals” medley were written before 1920: George M. Cohan’s “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” (1903), Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1913), Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” (the great-granddaddy of the bunch, from 1851) and Cohan’s “You’re a Grand Old Flag” (1906). Then the band played something called “Shoutin’ Liza Trombone,” by Henry Fillmore (1881-1956), which at first I thought would be another medley (of George Gershwin’s “Liza” and Meredith Willson’s “76 Trombones”), but it turned out to be a stand-alone rag from 1920, part of a series of trombone pieces designed to show off the instrument. (Henry Fillmore played trombone as a child, but he’d also played piano, violin, guitar and flute. He’d had to keep his trombone playing secret from his father, who regarded the instrument as immoral.) Naturally the Coronado Concert Band’s arrangement showcased their trombone section – and quite well, too.

After that came the best piece on the program – or at least the one most congenial to me: Sammy Nestico’s “Persuasion,” featuring the alto sax of Larry Okmin. Fred Lee announced that Okmin is one of the few professional musicians in the band and he leads the High Society Jazz Orchestra, San Diego’s top traditional jazz ensemble – though he leads it as a clarinetist, not a saxophonist. Though I’m sure he was playing a written part rather than improvising in jazz style, Okmin was quite moving in “Persuasion,” playing his alto part in a manner between Paul Desmond and Phil Woods. Then it was back to the third of John Higgins’ medleys, “Disney at the Movies,” which was introduced by a pre-recorded voice from Walt Disney himself (a number of the songs were introduced by pre-recordings, most of which didn’t work too well because the sound quality on the tapes was lousy and none of them were well integrated into the live band). It consisted of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” from the 1946 film Song of the South (when I scored a grey-label DVD of this, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/02/song-of-south-suppressed-masterpiece.html, I lamented the “politically correct” madness that has led the current Disney management to suppress it and called it “one of the most remarkable movies ever made, a quiet, slow-moving pastoral about an agrarian community in rural Georgia and the role of culture – particularly African-American culture – in shaping the experiences of its children as they cope with dysfunctional families, bullying and the usual problems of growing up”), “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” from Cinderella (1950), “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from Mary Poppins (1965), “Bare Necessities” from The Jungle Book (1966) – the last movie Walt Disney worked on personally – “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid (1989), the title song from Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Elton John’s stunning “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” from The Lion King (1994). There were also two or three songs in the mix I didn’t recognize, and I was disappointed that the medley didn’t end with “Let It Go” from Frozen (2013), but what we got was fine indeed.

Then there was yet another medley, this time by Warren Barker, called “Broadway Show-Stoppers’ Overture,” consisting of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” (again?), “People” from Funny Girl (1964), “With a Little Bit of Luck” from My Fair Lady (1956), the title song from On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965), “Try to Remember” from The Fantasticks (1960), and “That’s Entertainment!” – which was actually written not for Broadway but for Hollywood. It was from a 1953 musical film called The Band Wagon, based on the 1931 Broadway show that was the last Fred Astaire and his sister Adele did together, but the 1931 version was just a revue (Broadway-speak for a musical without a plot) and the 1953 film not only supplied a story (albeit a familiar one of the trials and troubles of putting on a Broadway musical) but added “That’s Entertainment!” as a new song by the original songwriters, composer Arthur Schwartz and lyricist Howard Dietz. Then came one of the most moving pieces all night, A Ship Emerges from the Mist by L.A.-based composer Rossano Galante, which Fred Lee explained had been commissioned by all eight concert bands in San Diego County as a memorial to influential music educator Warren Tornes. It had a nautical theme because Tornes had spent many years of his youth as a sailor in the Merchant Marine, and its first performance had been by the Summer Winds Orchestra on August 1, 2023 in the same venue. This was the second go-round for it.

The official program closed with a dynamite arrangement of John Williams’ big march from Raiders of the Lost Ark and the subsequent Indiana Jones films, and for an encore the band played a lovely instrumental version of Tony Bennett’s biggest hit, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” by George Cory (music) and Douglass Cross (lyrics). The performance was introduced with an audio clip from Bennett himself explaining how he came to record the song, though it wasn’t the story I’d heard. The version I’d heard was that Bennett got the song from his pianist and musical director, Ralph Sharon, who heard it and thought it might be a nice novelty to add to Bennett’s concert set when he played San Francisco on his next tour. Then Bennett was called in to a studio by Columbia Records to record “Once Upon a Time” from the 1962 musical All American – Columbia had invested heavily in this show, and wanted to get as many of their artists to record songs from it (including an entire album from Duke Ellington) – and because he needed something to put on the flip side, he recorded “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Some D.J. somewhere flipped the record over and played the B-side, it became a mega-hit and Bennett’s signature song for the rest of his career. The Coronado Concert Band’s version was lovely and well played, a fitting capstone to an evening of fun entertainment but also some music of real substance.