Howe’s latest adventure has resulted in a show unlike any other. The music of the legendary James Bond series was thrown onto Howe’s chopping block a few years back, and since then, he’s only picked up more steam. “Shaken Not Stirred” now features talented vocalists like Sweet Baby J’ai and Cheryl Bentyne of The Manhattan Transfer.<\/p>\n I had the great opportunity to catch up with Howe last week and pick his brain a little about his arranging techniques. Read on for some seriously geeked-out musical fun!\u00a0<\/p>\n CP:<\/strong> How did you come up with the idea to put this show together?<\/em><\/p>\n TH:<\/strong> Well I have to say that it wasn\u2019t my idea. I got called a few years ago from a friend of mine in New York who books a lot of productions and shows at Hofstra University in New York outside of New York City. Every year they do a symposium for a week for somebody big, like Frank Sinatra, things like that. Every year they do one, and this year it happened to be James Bond [laughs]. They bring in all the actors that are available\u2014 the stunt people, the cars, all the gadgets, and all that stuff. It goes on for a week. They wanted to wind it up with a concert of Bond music presented in a different way\u2014 not the usual orchestral stuff. So I wrote this show for that particular symposium, and it wound up belonging to me even though I was commissioned to do it, but it is my show so I started taking it into theaters and clubs. It has been very successful for me.<\/em><\/p>\n It was kind of like an accident. I was traveling around with this Duke Ellington show, and I was looking for something else to do. I had some ideas, and this thing came along I said, \u201cWow! I\u2019m getting paid for it too [laughs]!”<\/em><\/p>\n CP:<\/strong> [Laughs] That\u2019s always a bonus right?<\/em><\/p>\n TH:<\/strong> Yeah!<\/em><\/p>\n CP:<\/strong> Excellent! I personally know your background just from going to Berklee; your name gets thrown around a lot. I would love let our readers in on a little bit of your background in music. How did you get your start and became such an incredible arranger?<\/em><\/p>\n TH:<\/strong> Actually it started late! I didn\u2019t start until I was about fourteen. I loved music, and back in the 50’s, I had a HiFi system. They didn\u2019t have stereo yet, and all I ever bought were jazz records\u2014 just jazz LPs, you know, Dave Brubeck, Charlie Paker, and Oscar Peterson. My sister was taking piano lessons at this time, and her teacher came to the house. He was a great piano player in Boston. He\u2019s still alive and still teaching there in his late 80’s. Long story short, she came up the stairs one day and said, \u201cI don\u2019t want to do this anymore!\u201d She then slammed the door, and went into her bedroom. The teacher, seeing my record collection and my HiFi system, said, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you come down and finish off her lesson? You should be playing something.\u201d I went down and spent the last 20 minutes with him, and then he started coming twice a week. Then I wound up taking lessons at Berklee when I was still in high school.<\/em><\/p>\n CP:<\/strong> Wow!<\/em><\/p>\n TH:<\/strong> Yeah, I studied with that teacher back in the old days on Newberry street.\u00a0I wound up going to the army and playing piano in the third army band in Atlanta, Georgia during the Vietnam years, and I didn\u2019t have to go over there and fight.<\/em><\/p>\n So I got out of the army and went back to Boston and started working at a supper club in Boston playing all these major acts, and then I got a gig teaching at Berklee. I was there for about 9 years before I moved to Atlanta in the early 70’s. So it\u2019s been quite an interesting career, I\u2019ve done a little bit of everything\u2014 arranging, accompanying people, teaching at three different colleges, two others beside Berklee: Georgia State University in Atlanta and LaGrange College just outside of Atlanta. \u00a0I’ve been working here with Cheryl Bentyne and Lainie Kazan. I still work with her, but right now at this point in my life the main thing I\u2019m doing is all the shows that I have. I travel all over the country doing my James Bond show and my Duke Ellington show. I do a little bit of arranging producing here too for people in Los Angeles. You know CD producing for singers and instrumentalists here, just to keep busy.<\/em><\/p>\n CP:<\/strong> Right on. I know the thing that I most recently heard was your Elton John record. <\/em>(Author’s note: Listen to this on Spotify ASAP! Your ears will thank me).<\/strong><\/p>\n TH:<\/strong> Oh you heard that?<\/em><\/p>\n CP:<\/strong> It is beyond incredible. How did that kind of come about?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n TH:<\/strong> I have always loved his music, and I always felt that jazz artists neglected him. There are very few people who covered his music, you know? When it did it at the time, nobody I researched had ever done a whole complete CD of Elton\u2019s music.<\/em><\/p>\n So I\u2019m with Summit records, and so I told them about the idea and they said, \u201cDo it! sounds great!\u201d So I got two of the best guys on the planet to accompany me and arranged the music. We still kept it recognizable, I didn\u2019t do what a lot of jazz guys do and take it so far out that people don\u2019t know what you\u2019re playing [laughs]. You might as well write your own music if you do that. It was successful for me. It did great though. It didn\u2019t do really well on the radio because some of the \u201cjazz police\u201d or DJs that would not play Elton John on a jazz station, which I found to be snobby. But, it does well when I go out on tour. I sell CDs, and I have all three with me and people go right for that one. They always buy the Ellington stuff, the one that I\u2019m doing, and I have them all on the table and the other ones go like crazy. So it was a lot of fun, I took a chance with it. I knew I might get in trouble with the DJs\u2014 especially since my Ellington CD did really well when it first came out but it didn\u2019t get to #1, it got to #5 on the charts. Elton stayed down in the 40s.<\/em><\/p>\n CP:<\/strong> When you\u2019re arranging, what\u2019s your process for taking something like that and breaking it down? Where do you really start with that\u2014 the harmony? The melody?<\/em><\/p>\n TH:<\/strong> Well I start with the melody. Thats what I love about Elton\u2019s music. If you stop and listen to it melodically and get rid of the antics of the piano and the glasses and all the visual things and listen to the music, that\u2019s what attracts me\u2014 the melodic content. If that\u2019s there, then I start fooling around and changing the harmonies around so it will sound more in the jazz genre. Then I turn it into something that it wasn\u2019t before. If it was a hard rock tune, I might turn it into a samba. That one from The Lion King, “Circle of Life”, I turned that into a Cuban dance feel. When you mess with the harmonies of the tunes, you can take them anywhere. My whole concept has always been that. What I like arranging for people now is taking a tune, just wrapping it up and taking it somewhere it\u2019s never been before. That\u2019s what I love to do when covering other people\u2019s material because it\u2019s so much fun to take something that\u2019s really great to start with and not necessarily make it better, but present it in a different way. <\/em><\/p>\n People say, \u201cWow, I\u2019ve been listening to that song for 30 years,\u201d in fact one of the reviewers said, \u201cThis whole CD sounds like standards that I\u2019ve missed,” [laughs]. You know, it\u2019s even better because I did some obscure Elton that not a lot of people know. When I stopped and thought about it, I thought, \u201cGee, most jazz people don\u2019t know a whole lot about Elton.\u201d They may just know “Bennie and the Jets”, or “Your Song”, and that\u2019s about it.\u00a0 But they listen to this, they think, \u201cWell who is this? Is that a current tune? Gershwin tune? Broadway tune? Boy what is it?\u201d I was getting that all the time from people.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n CP:<\/strong> That\u2019s awesome. What are you most looking forward to about bringing your Bond tribute show to Anthology?<\/em><\/p>\n TH:<\/strong> Working that room! I\u2019ve seen so many videos of friends of mine that have played there. God, they have a gorgeous piano, and I hope that we\u2019re going to get a nice crowd. They also have that big screen in the back we\u2019re going to be showing a little slideshow here and there of some of the pictures of some of the Bond movies while we\u2019re playing. I\u2019ve never played in a club yet, this is the first time I\u2019m playing this show in a club. I\u2019ve been doing it in theaters all over the country. I\u2019m really curious to see how it\u2019s going to go over in a club, and that\u2019s a pretty big room. I haven\u2019t been in it, but from what I understand from the pictures is that it\u2019s pretty big. I\u2019m just looking forward to it to see how it goes with more of a jazz audience present. When I do it in a theatre, we call it the performing arts business, we describe the series and they don\u2019t always know what they\u2019re going to hear and sometimes they\u2019re not jazz fans, but they just come because they just want to get out on a Saturday night. My shows always go over really well, so I\u2019m really curious to see how this one goes over at a club that I think would be way more of a hip audience than I get in the theaters and performance centers I work at all over the country. It\u2019s going to be fun.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Special thanks to Ted, Sweet Baby J’ai, and Cheryl Bentyne for their time and contributions to this three-part interview series! Come out and join us tonight for their incredible tribute to the music of James Bond, and if you feel so inclined, why not throw on your best suit and order up a martini at the bar\u2014 shaken, not stirred of course. WHAT: <\/em>Shaken Not Stirred: The Music of James Bond with Ted Howe & Company featuring Cheryl Bentyne and Sweet Baby J’ai<\/strong><\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An Interview with Ted Howe By Casey Pukl Pianist and arranger extraordinaire, Ted Howe, is no stranger to turning classics upside down. From Duke Ellington to Elton John and everything in between, Howe’s imagination runs wild turning ballads into sambas and rock tunes into swing. Howe’s latest adventure has resulted in a show unlike any […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1442],"tags":[11512],"class_list":["post-6747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artists","tag-artist-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthologysd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthologysd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthologysd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthologysd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthologysd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6747"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/anthologysd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32889,"href":"https:\/\/anthologysd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6747\/revisions\/32889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthologysd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthologysd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthologysd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/anthologysd.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/5.jpeg\" "\\"5\\"")
<\/a>Pianist and arranger extraordinaire, Ted Howe, is no stranger to turning classics upside down. From Duke Ellington to Elton John and everything in between, Howe’s imagination runs wild turning ballads into sambas and rock tunes into swing.<\/p>\n
\nTed Howe on Spotify<\/a><\/p>\n
\nWHEN: <\/span>Thursday, July 5, 7:30pm <\/strong><\/em>
\nTICKETS: $10-$35 <\/span>Buy Tickets<\/a><\/em>
\nMORE INFO: <\/span>Artist Profile<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n