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| The Desert Sun April 6, 2005 | |
| Caballeros director to devote a show to Manilow After an 'epiphany,' Caballeros director Alan Scott decides to devote a show to Manilow Bruce Fessier lan Scott at work reflects Alan Scott at play. His workplace is his living room. His primary tool is a Boston grand piano, which he uses to manufacture choral arrangements for Caballeros, the Gay Men's Chorus of Palm Springs. Sprinkled around his workplace in his Desert Hot Springs home is an East-West dichotomy. An Old Testament verse in Vietnamese hangs on a wall. His home entertainment center includes a picture frame containing Asian symbols representing "Happiness, Harmony, Tranquility, Integrity." And Barry Manilow sheet music is on his piano. Scott, 40, doesn't consider himself a real Manilow fan. He always appreciated him musically, but he never bought the albums that made Manilow the best-selling adult contemporary recording artist of all time. He doesn't know why the Palm Springs-based singer-songwriter is so popular. "Except he really connects with his music," Scott says after some reflection. "He gets so into the music he takes you into the music, and I think that touches a part of people that somehow other artists aren't doing." Scott grew up loving classical music and the Great American Songbook. Nevertheless, he's spent 50 to 60 hours a week since December poring over Manilow music to prepare Caballeros for this week's spring concert at the Annenberg Theater: "One Voice: The Music of Barry Manilow." It's Caballeros' first contemporary pop concert and its first concert devoted to one composer of any genre. Scott can't figure out what inspired him to do this, but he says the idea came to him last summer as "sort of an epiphany." He was attending the Gay Association of Choruses conference in Montreal as a guest conductor for Caballeros. He had been directing a chorus at Temple Isaiah, doing freelance music gigs and making his real money designing kitchens for Lowe's of Palm Springs. He also was making plans to build a house. He didn't have time for a big project for Caballeros, but something compelled him. "I was literally on the balcony of my hotel room one morning, overlooking Montreal, and out of the blue the idea came to me," Scott said. "I knew immediately that was it. I don't know why." Scott had conducted Manilow's 1977 song, "One Voice," for voice and chorus for his University of South Alabama choir in Mobile as a final project for his undergraduate degree in voice performance. But most of the nonclassical music he liked was Sweet Adelines and barbershop quartet stuff his parents sang. Scott had sung in choirs since he was 12, when he was in the children's chorus of the Mobile Opera. He made all-Alabama state chorus in high school and earned bachelor degrees in church music and voice performance. He earned a master's in choral conducting. But he never saw Barry Manilow in concert. His epiphany started to turn real when the past president of Caballeros, Chris Griffin, took Scott's idea to a Manilow assistant he had known since working on the "Copacabana" movie. Griffin got Manilow's blessing on the concert and the Caballeros board of directors were thrilled. "It certainly sounded like a fun thing to do," said current board president Gordon Wolf. "Alan undertook a terrific challenge, but the board was excited about it, the chorus has been excited about it and it's a wonderfully fun show to do because Barry's music is so fantastic and so singable." Scott was named artistic director in September and the first thing he did was buy the $50 Manilow boxed set, "The Complete Collection and Then Some." He did it to familiarize himself with Manilow's catalog. Manilow's people opened their vaults to Scott, offering music to any song he wanted. But there were no four- or eight-part vocal arrangements to anything except "One Voice." Scott would have to do all the arrangements himself, with just the help of two associates who would write three vocal charts for him. Scott decided to showcase only the music Manilow wrote, which eliminated some of his biggest hits, and he decided to devote the second half of the show to songs from Manilow's first Broadway musical, "Copacabana." That made the challenge less wieldy, but he also had to prepare a Christmas concert. He didn't start on the Manilow project until late December. "It's been a harrowing experience in some ways," said Scott, a tall, trim man with a graying beard. "I shouldn't have done it this year, frankly. I'd have less gray hair if I had waited until next year because the first month of rehearsals I was still writing arrangements, getting printing done and securing music and all that stuff." But, as he took the music apart, substituting voices for instruments, and restacking notes to compensate for half-step differences in voices and instruments, his respect for Manilow grew. "Whenever you take anything apart, you get a better understanding of how all of it works," he said, "and by doing the arrangements I get the chance to find the craftsmanship that is really there and the number of times he quotes things out of classical music, the intricacies of the work he does, the way he flips melodies around on themselves to express a different side of a text. He's very good at that." He recognized Manilow's formula to thrill audiences with triumphant key changes leading to big climaxes, but he also admired the way he could work with Johnny Mercer's sophisticated lyric on "When October Goes." "'When October Goes,' for my money is the best thing he ever wrote," Scott said. "But it was not hugely popular. It's because the chord structure is not at all what people expect it to be. It does have the standard key change and nice little interlude for the piano player, but it's not structurally according to the pop lyric. I think it has a lot to do with the lyric because the lyric is not formulaic, either. A lot of Mercer's stuff wasn't. That lends itself well to a nonformulaic composition." Not surprisingly, he discovered many of his singers didn't know some Manilow songs that had become his favorites, such as "When October Goes," "New York City Rhythm" and an adaptation of George M. Cohan's "Give My Regards to Broadway." But Scott had found a balance in the pop and the art of Manilow, just as he had found a balance in the decor of his living room. From not being a Manilow fan, Scott found himself championing Manilow's best music. He obsessed about finding ways to express Manilow's gifts just as Manilow obsessed about finding what his producer had told him was "the hit in that song." A Manilow assistant said Manilow can't attend the Caballeros concerts because he's playing Las Vegas, but Scott is excited about showing fans the composer he has come to know by getting inside Manilow's music. "I love the real musicality of a lot of his stuff, even the hits," Scott said. "(But) I wanted to show off his musicianship, really stick to the stuff he did and not the stuff he sold for somebody else." | |
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