THE RAIN IN SPAIN
PERCY FAITH’S
ORCHESTRA
SONGWRITERS: ALAN JAY
LERNER & FREDERICK LOEWE
COUNTRY: CANADA
ALBUM: PERCY FAITH’S
GRATEST HITS
LABEL: COLUMBIA
GENRE: INSTRUMENTAL
YEAR: 1987
Percy Faith (April
7, 1908 – February 9, 1976) was a Canadian bandleader, orchestrator, composer and conductor, known for his lush arrangements of pop and Christmas standards. He
is often credited with popularizing the "easy listening" or "mood music" format. Faith became a staple of American popular music
in the 1950s and continued well into the 1960s. Though his professional
orchestra-leading career began at the height of the swing era, Faith refined
and rethought orchestration techniques, including use of large string sections,
to soften and fill out the brass-dominated popular music of the 1940s.
Faith was
born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was the oldest of eight children. His
parents, Abraham Faith and Minnie, née Rottenberg, were Jewish. He played violin and piano as a child, and played in
theatres and at Massey Hall. After his hands were
badly burned in a fire, he turned to conducting, and his live orchestras used
the new medium of radio broadcasting. Percy moved from Canada to Great
Neck, New York
and became a U.S. citizen.
Beginning
with stations CKNC and CKCL, Faith was a staple of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's live-music broadcasting from 1933 to 1940, when he
resettled in Chicago, Illinois. In the early 1940s, Faith was orchestra leader for
the Carnation Contented program on NBC. From 1948-1949 he also served as the orchestra
leader on the CBS radio network program The Coca-Cola Hour (also called The Pause That
Refreshes). The orchestral accordionist John Serry Sr. collaborated with Faith in these
broadcasts.
In 1945, he
became a naturalized
citizen of
the United States. He made many recordings for Voice of America. After working briefly for Decca Records, he worked for Mitch Miller at Columbia Records, where he turned out dozens of albums and
provided arrangements for many of the pop singers of the 1950s, including Tony Bennett, Doris Day, Johnny Mathis for Mathis's 1958 Christmas album
titled Merry Christmas, and Guy Mitchell for whom Faith co-wrote with Carl Sigman Mitchell's number-one single, "My
Heart Cries for You".
His most
famous and remembered recordings are "Delicado" (1952), "The Song from Moulin Rouge" (1953) and "Theme from A Summer Place" (1959), which won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year
in 1961. Faith remains the only artist to have the best
selling single of the year during both the pop singer era ("Song
from Moulin Rouge") and the rock era ("Theme from A Summer
Place"); and he is one of only three artists, along with Elvis Presley and The Beatles, to have the best selling single of the year
twice. The B-side of "Song from the Moulin Rouge" was "Swedish
Rhapsody" by Hugo Alfvén. In 1961 his fame in Sweden rose exponentially
as his work Mucho Gusto became the theme music for the sports broadcasts of Sveriges Radio.
Though Faith initially mined the worlds of Broadway,
Hollywood and Latin music for many of his top-selling 1950s recordings, he
enjoyed popularity starting in 1962 with his orchestral versions of popular
rock and pop hits of the day. His Themes
for Young Lovers album was a top seller during this era and introduced the
Faith sound to a younger generation of listeners. With the success of Columbia
record-mate Ray Conniff's chorus and orchestra during this same time,
Faith began using a chorus (usually all female in most of his recordings, but
used a mixed chorus on his albums Leaving on a Jet Plane and I
Think I Love You, which were released in 1970 and 1971 respectively) in several
popular albums from the mid-1960s on. Faith's first single with a female
chorus, "Yellow Days," was a substantial hit in the MOR (Middle
of the Road) easy listening radio format of the mid-1960s. Faith
continued to enjoy airplay and consistent album sales throughout the early
1970s, and received a second Grammy award in 1969 for his album Love Theme
from 'Romeo and Juliet'.
Though best
known for his recording career, Faith also occasionally scored motion pictures,
and received an Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of the song score
for the Doris Day musical feature, Love Me or Leave Me. His other film scores included romantic comedies and dramatic features
such as Tammy
Tell Me True (1961),
I'd
Rather Be Rich (1964),
The Third Day (1965) and The Oscar (1966). Faith also composed the
theme for the NBC series The Virginian.
With the
advent of harder rock sounds in the 1970s, Faith's elegant arrangements fell
out of favour with the listening and record-buying public, although he
continued to release albums as diverse and contemporary as Jesus Christ
Superstar and Black Magic Woman. He released one album of
country music and two albums of disco-oriented arrangements toward the end of
his forty-year career, his last recording being a disco-style reworking of
"Theme from a Summer Place", titled "Summer Place '76", which
was a minor and posthumous hit. Faith
died of cancer in Encino,
California,
and was interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver
City, California.
Postagens
