The man behind the music

When Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga collaborate on their upcoming jazz album, Marion Evans will be prominently involved. The Bucks County resident has been composing and arranging music for famous entertainers for more than 60 years.

The phone rang at 2 or 3 in the morning, but when its Tony Bennett on the other end, you dont mind being roused from a sound sleep.

We finally signed Gaga, Bennett told his longtime friend that night in 2011. Weve got to get into the studio to record her.

For some, such news would have been mind-blowing. For Marion Evans, it was business as usual.

Evans, 86, and his wife of 22 years, former Miss America runner-up Terri Rinaldi-Evans, are perhaps Bucks Countys most musically gifted couple, with rsums that include Grammy nominations and gold records for him and numerous stage and screen appearances for her. They moved to the area from Connecticut about five years ago, living in the Regency at Northampton retirement community in Holland.

Not that Evans is close to retired.

The veteran music arranger and composer arranged five songs on Bennetts platinum-selling, Grammy-winning 2011 album Duets II, including The Lady Is a Tramp with Lady Gaga. The first song on the disc was the last to be recorded, coming after lengthy contractual wrangling and only a few days before the cutoff date for the albums completion, prompting Bennetts urgent, middle-of-the-night phone call.

Evans worked on the arrangement through the night and into the next day, a band was booked to record the music and, soon after, Lady Gaga arrived to lay down her vocal track.

I couldnt figure out how she would do a song like this, Evans recalls. But shes a fabulous musician. She walks right in, picks up the music, hears the track one time and the next time, thats it. One take. She was fantastic.

Overall, Evans wrote 18 arrangements for the album, but only five were actually recorded.

Im thinking about h! aving an arrangement garage sale, he quips.

But thats to be expected, especially for a project involving so many celebrity egos. More than 40 singers were initially invited to participate.

For a recording project that included getting stood up by multiple artists for personal or contractual reasons, Cher and Bette Midler both wanting to record the same song (neither ended up on the album) and contending with an 11-member PBS film crew that, Evans says, couldnt keep quiet, Gagas participation couldnt have gone any smoother especially in a business where, Evans points out, nothing ever runs smooth.

So smooth, in fact, that Bennett and Lady Gaga are planning to record a big-band jazz album together, a project Evans will be a big part of.

Evans teaches a class in composition to professional musicians every other Saturday at Arcadia University. But he expects much of his time in the near future to be consumed by the Bennett/Gaga album.

I dont know at this point exactly how many songs will be on the CD, but Im sure well have about four or five different-sized orchestras or bands, he says. Itll turn into a giant panic, I can assure you. Thats just how this business is.

Small-town boy hits the big time

Evans list of collaborators reads like a whos who of 20th-century entertainers: Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Judy Garland, Eydie Gorm and Steve Lawrence, Sammy Davis Jr., Perry Como, Helen OConnell, Carole King, Bennett and many others.

He wrote arrangements for 65 gold records and 17 TV shows (writing the closing theme for the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson) and orchestrated 11 Broadway shows.

So how did the native of Goodwater, Ala., a town near Birmingham so small that, Evans jokes, the youre now entering Goodwater sign says the same thing on the other side end up working alongside some of the biggest names in show business?

A trumpet player as a kid, he grew up in a musical environment and attended what is now Auburn University for! a year b! ecause of the schools renowned college dance band and reputation for launching professional music careers. Ironically, the school did not have a music program (Evans studied engineering).

Thats one of the reasons the band was so successful, he says. They didnt have a bunch of music professors looking down their noses at playing jazz.

He played trumpet and wrote arrangements for the band, and, after serving in the Marines through the end of World War II, used the benefits from the G.I. Bill to pursue a music career at The Juilliard School in New York. In the late-40s, a sax-playing friend of his still at Auburn took an arrangement Evans had written for the school band from the library and sent it to the Glenn Miller Band, then led by Tex Beneke. (Miller had died during the war.)

When I found out, I wanted to kill him, Evans says. It was very upsetting and embarrassing. How could he do that to me?

His anger didnt last. A few months later, Evans got a letter from the Miller band, offering him a job.

A career was born.

The same day Evans joined the band as arranger, Eydie Gorm successfully auditioned for an open singers slot at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. Their professional relationship would prove fruitful. In 1964, Evans received a Grammy nomination for best background arrangement for his work on Gorms hit Blame It on the Bossa Nova. (A year earlier, he was nominated in the same category for Go Away Little Girl by Gorms husband, Steve Lawrence.)

Evans moved to New York City after joining Millers band, where one of his earliest jobs was working with Garland during her vaudeville-style shows at Broadways Palace Theatre.

My favorite singer I worked with as far as talent was Judy Garland. She was amazing, he says.

Some celebrities were more difficult to work with than others. Actor-singer Gordon McRae, who starred in the 1955 film version of Oklahoma!, was an alcoholic whose work habits led to Evans walking out in the middle of making an album.

! Everybody! has a different story, he says. When I look back, for every person I can name who you know, I can name dozens you never heard of, who for whatever circumstances, never quite made it. Some people didnt want the intensity of it, while some people are naturals for it.

Marriage made in musical heaven

Dont feel bad if youve never given much thought to the importance of a musical arranger.

For a while, Evans future wife didnt, either.

Terri Rinaldi grew up in Birmingham, the daughter of an Italian opera singer. She was Miss Alabama in 1960 and a semifinalist at the 1961 Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City before pursuing a career as a singer and actress, performing on Broadway stages and in nightclubs in New York and Las Vegas and appearing in movies such as The Detective with Frank Sinatra.

I never dreamt Id go in that direction. I had dreams of being an opera singer like my father, she says. I heard opera every Saturday; I was brainwashed. But I got tired of singing in six languages. And there werent that many opera houses. I figured Id better find something else to do, and Broadway beckoned.

In New York in the 1960s, she looked up Evans, the famous guy from Goodwater, and the two became close friends.

He taught me a lot about singing, how to communicate pop music and how important having good arrangements was, Terri says. I had thought you just go to the concert with the orchestra, you bring your sheet music and high heels and a gown, and that was it. I didnt know there were supposed to be arrangements, where each instrument has a part.

He was a great teacher, but we went our separate ways, and I didnt see him for a while after I moved to California. But every time Id sing, Id use his arrangements, and people would just rave about them. I kind of got tired of it, so I called him and asked him, How long do I have to be second place to your arrangements? We started laughing and talking, fell in love and got married. That was in 1990.

Like her husband! , Terri s! hares her musical knowledge with others. The former NYU professor of voice, who has a masters in Spanish concert music from the school, teaches singing out of the couples home. She enjoys singing for senior citizens and still occasionally performs outside the area.

Ive got a bit of classical in me, but I also sang with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra and (other) big bands, she says. And why not I have a husband with 1,000 arrangements. Im a very lucky girl.

Still working

Marion Evans cant remember the last time he picked up the trumpet.

I made a lamp out of my trumpet years ago, he says.

But his contributions to the music business are as vital as ever, thanks largely to Bennett. In addition to Evans work on Duets II and the upcoming Lady Gaga project, he worked with Bennett on Christmas and Latin albums.

Its a working relationship that goes back more than 60 years, when Bennetts stage name was Joe Barry.

Hes just an extremely talented person, Evans says of Bennett. And that voice ... he never took lessons, its just completely natural. And no matter what youre doing, he knows how to work with you. A lot of people are more difficult to work with, especially in their declining stages. But Tony is still really fun to work with.

The feeling is obviously mutual, given Bennetts desire to have Evans work with him on the Lady Gaga album.

Not a bad gig for a small-town boy from Alabama who has been rubbing shoulders with the greats for more than six decades.

Evans credits his career longevity, in part, to caring more about the music than the lifestyle.

I spent a lot of years running around looking for hit records, that sort of stuff, he says. I was never much into the party-going type of thing. I was always writing arrangements for somebody.