Sassy sophistication: Deceased Artiste Sir John Dankworth

Catching up to another, vastly different, musical death, I should definitely salute Sir John Dankworth, British jazz legend, composer, and big-band leader. Dankworth had a very accomplished career in jazz, having worked with icons from Ellington and Parker to Herbie Hancock and my personal favorite-named musician Zoot Sims. He is best known to American audiences, though, for his work as arranger and bandleader for his wife, Dame Cleo Laine, and for his terrific Sixties movie soundtracks.

His music created moods and punctuated action in kitchen sink classics, timeless character studies, and truly camp creations. The titles include Darling, Morgan!, and Modesty Blaise, but two of the finest films he scored were Joseph Losey’s perfect Pinter visualizations, The Servant (1963) and Accident.

The trailer for The Servant shows off Dankworth’s score:



But let’s backtrack to Dankworth’s jazz career before going back to his scores. First, a 78 of a song called “Marmaduke”:



Then, a terrific tune called “African Waltz” that Dizzy Gillespie later had a hit with (with the same Dankworth arrangement):



A sample of the five-decade long collaboration between Dankworth and Laine, the song “Woman Talk”:



And, since I can’t resist, back to scores. A TV theme that we never heard over here, the music for the original 1961 Avengers before the female agents hit the scene, and it was simply Patrick Macnee and another guy, Ian Hendry:



The Modesty Blaise theme, highlighting the drum break. Great stuff:



A bossa nova number from the score for Fathom, largly known as “that Raquel Welch bikini movie”:



A TV theme from Britain, for Tomorrow’s World in 1978:



Definitely my personal favorite Dankworth score, as it is burnt into my brain from repeated viewings of the film as a teen. The jaunty yet resolute horns heard in the finest (my opinion) kitchen sink/"angry young man" film of the early Sixties, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning:



And just ’cause I can, you can hear the Dankworth score for the Sammy Davis-Peter Lawford hip-detective vehicle Salt and Pepper here in the trailer for the film, but you really need to see this scene wherein Sammy rocks the fuck out in Swinging Sixties London. I note on the Funhouse quite often that it doesn’t matter how long Sammy’s been dead, the dude can still kick my ass with some hitherto unknown all-out performance, and here’s another one:

A “Psycho” passes: Deceased Artiste Bingo Gazingo

I can’t quite calculate the amount of brilliantly twisted entertainers (or just downright eccentrics) that I became acquainted with through the legendary Manhattan access show Beyond Vaudeville (which later transformed into Oddville on MTV). The series featured some major stars of long ago, but perhaps the greatest revelations were the performers who were genuinely off the map in terms of what they did — I am not alone in my continued love for a man named “Tray man” (unfortunately no clips of his amazing act have reached YouTube), who sported a tray (in fact a variety of different nicely-colored trays) atop his dome and then sorta… well, he sorta walked around. As a friend of mine explained it to me when we saw him do his act live, “if he spun the tray or danced around, Ed, now that might be considered a talent…”

I won’t say that the now-departed Bingo Gazingo was akin to (the also departed) Tray man — Bingo was a poet/singer/wildman who pretty much knew that his audience expected him to be over the top. And that he was, providing a crazed version of Beat poetry that he deemed song lyrics, to the extent that he performed with various musicians who tried to “flesh out” his tunes. Here is a 1997 New York Times article, in which Bingo is on the verge of “discovery,” as the Oddville folks had him on their pilot for the MTV series.

The Times piece reveals his real name (Murray Wachs) and some background: he worked for BMI as a song-logger (listening for BMI songs on the radio) and then had a longstanding berth at the U.S. Post Office. Once he retired from the post office, he devoted himself to his poems/lyrics and would appear around NYC at open mic nights. He became a cult figure and a regular fixture at the Bowery Poetry Club on Monday evenings. Very sadly, he was hit by a cab traveling to the Bowery Poetry Club and died in late 2009, but his death didn’t reach the attention of those of us who had been blown away by his maniacal art until New Years Day of this year. No category can contain him, least of all the fabricated label “Outsider Music” which oddly mixes the primitive (Shags, Hasil Adkins) with the musical sophisticate (Captain Beefheart). Like so many true primitives, he was sui generis, and so the time has come to celebrate the special man who wanted to be known as Bingo Gazingo!

First, Bingo performing at the Astor Place station on my subway line, the 6. He’s singing his masterpiece “JLo.” He wrote many tributes to contemporary pop performers. I don’t think anyone has summed up her sex appeal with the kind of perception that Bingo did, as with “You smell like a kosher deli/I want to put a baby in your belly”:



Another ode to a contemporary mainstream musician, this time Kenny G. Bingo is backed here by the band My Robot Friend, who gives his maniacal lyrics a high-tech sheen. Again, who can argue with “I can relax and take my Ex-Lax… we can reach our climax with Kenny G.”?



More Kraftwerk Gazingo, as Bingo sings” You’re out of the Computer,” again with My Robot Friend:



Perhaps the craziest clip of Bingo to be found on the Net is this slice of him performing at an atmospherically lit Halloween show in Bushwick, Brooklyn. This show took place in Halloween of last year (yes, folks, he’s 85 here!!!), and his performance consists of a medley of his “greatest hits,” including a new song about Beyonce and Jay-Z that was news to me:



There is no other way to close any discussion of Bingo than to spotlight his chef d’oeuvre, his own “Howl”-like anthem of the disturbed mind, “Psycho.”:



The photos of Bingo used above come from the Life Just Bounces blog