Classic Ross Amico

John Dankworth’s Experiments with Mice

by

Ross Amico

September 20, 2026

in Daily Dispatch

13 responses

Whenever I hear the name John Dankworth, my thoughts travel back to Philadelphia’s late, lamented classical music station WFLN. Dankworth was one of the leading lights of British jazz, but he recorded an album with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1986, one of the cuts from which found its way onto the playlists of WFLN’s “Morning Potpourri” and “Afternoon Pops.” The piece was called “Further Experiments with Mice.” Dankworth wove the nursery tune “Three Blind Mice” into familiar classics from Beethoven to Gershwin and provided his own sly narration. WFLN changed format in 1997, and I haven’t thought of “Further Experiments with Mice” in years. Now, thanks to the internet, I was able to call it up on YouTube.

I knew that Dankworth was a jazz artist – a composer, saxophonist, clarinetist, and bandleader, who married Cleo Laine and served as her music director – but it was only yesterday that I found out why the classical parody is called “FURTHER Experiments with Mice.” 30 years earlier, in 1956, Dankworth and His Orchestra released a hit single in the U.K. called “Experiments with Mice,” in which he sent up a number of jazz bands and artists after the same fashion, including Billy May, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Stan Kenton, Sauter-Finegan, and others. If you’ve never heard it, here it is.

The entire London Symphony Orchestra album, “Symphonic Fusions,” has also been posted.

Dankworth died in 2010 at the age of 82. Remembering him with a smile on his birthday.
“Totally Awesome” on “The Lost Chord”

by

Ross Amico

September 19, 2026

in Daily Dispatch, The Lost Chord

2 responses

Yom Kippur begins tomorrow night at sundown. The Day of Atonement marks the culmination of ten days of awe and repentance. Observed with fasting and prayer, it is the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.

This week on “The Lost Chord,” we offer best wishes for a happy, healthy, and sweet new year with two complementary works inspired by the High Holidays.

Jacob Weinberg’s String Quartet, Op. 55, of 1950, falls into three movements: “Rosh Hashana” (the Jewish New Year), “Yom Kippur,” and “Sukkot.” “Yom Kippur” is based on the cantorial chant “Kol Nidre.” You know, the same melody employed by Max Bruch in his famous cello piece.

Ernest Bloch’s “Israel Symphony,” composed between 1912 and 1917, is more like an orchestral rhapsody in three sections – “Prayer in the Desert,” “Yom Kippur,” and “Succoth” [sic] – played continuously and culminating in parts for four vocal soloists.

Sukkot, which follows Yom Kippur by only five days, is the harvest festival, during which temporary dwellings (or sukkot) are erected to commemorate the Jews’ 40 years wandering in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt. In modern times, these are decorated with fruits and vines. In contrast to the austerity and fasting of Yom Kippur, Sukkot is a celebration of life and abundance. But in ancient Israel, it was a solemn affair, with sacrifices offered at the temple.

Welcome the year 5787, with musical reflections of the High Holidays, and then some, on “Totally Awesome,” on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon.

G’mar chatima tova.

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Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link.

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/
The Importance of Being Ernest (Tomlinson) on “Sweetness and Light”

by

Ross Amico

September 19, 2026

in Daily Dispatch, Sweetness and Light

This week on “Sweetness and Light,” I can confidently say all the music will be Ernest! The focus is on Ernest Tomlinson. Tomlinson, extraordinarily long-lived, was born on this date in 1924. He died in 2015 at the age of 90.

Not only was he a light music master, he was also something of a patron saint of the genre. In 1984, when he was about 60, he learned that the BBC was disposing of its light music archive. He stepped up and founded the Library of Light Orchestral Music, rescuing an estimated 50,000 pieces, which he kept in a farmhouse on his family’s property.

Among his own light music classics are 100 pieces of library music – music to be licensed to film, television, and radio. He also composed thirteen orchestral suites, symphonic works (including works for symphonic jazz), works for solo instrument and orchestra, choral music, a one-act opera, and music for brass band.

I hope you’ll join me for one of his most popular works, his “Suite of English Folk-Dances,” after John Playford, three dances from his ballet “Aladdin,” and selections from a BBC radio play about Cinderella, broadcast on Christmas Eve 1955. It was the success of latter that secured Tomlinson the freedom to devote himself to full-time, freelance composition.

Learn more about the importance of being Ernest, on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!
‘
Stream it, wherever you are, at the link:

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

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Tomlinson’s website

https://ernesttomlinson.com/

The library he founded, now maintained by The Light Music Society

https://www.lightmusicsociety.com/

Fun and informative 2007 documentary about British light music, featuring Tomlinson and other light music luminaries
Inspired by Hemingway on “Picture Perfect”

by

Ross Amico

September 18, 2026

in Daily Dispatch, Picture Perfect

Nick sat down against the charred stump and smoked a cigarette. He lit a match and watched it burn and as it burned he thought of boxers and marlins and the Spanish Civil War. The stories were brave and strong and good. He ordered a mojito and prepared to face the music.

This week on “Picture Perfect,” the focus is on Ernest Hemingway.

Seemingly at odds with Hemingway’s minimalist, “iceberg” style, big screen adaptations of the writer’s work show what the stories don’t tell. In the case of 1946’s “The Killers,” the screenwriters unapologetically just made stuff up, an entire back story explaining the motivations for the hit of boxer “Swede” Anderson. Fortunately, those screenwriters happened to include an uncredited John Huston, who virtually codified noir with “The Maltese Falcon.”

“The Killers” provided Burt Lancaster with his break-out role. It also features a knock-out score by Miklós Rózsa, in which he uses the dum-dee-dum-dum motto later made famous by the television series “Dragnet.”

In 1977, George C. Scott reunited with his “Patton” director, Franklin J. Schaffner, for an adaptation of Hemingway’s posthumously published novel, “Islands in the Stream.” Scott gives one of his best performances as a Hemingway-like figure living on a Caribbean island. “Patton” composer Jerry Goldsmith wrote the music. Goldsmith spoke of it often as his favorite score.

Hemingway himself handpicked the leads for the 1943 adaptation of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman falling in love against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. The music was by the prolific and versatile Victor Young.

And finally, Spencer Tracy is the whole show, as he faces off against a large marlin, in the 1958 version of “The Old Man and the Sea.” Dimitri Tiomkin’s music earned him his fourth Academy Award.

Join me for an hour of laconic grace and stoic manliness on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!

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Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/
The Untimely Ends of Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Coleridge’s Pleasure Dome

by

Ross Amico

September 17, 2026

in Daily Dispatch

5 responses

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree…”

Sounds good to me! As I sit here like Sardanapalus luxuriating amidst my musical treasures, I contemplate the short life and creative promise of Charles Tomlinson Griffes.

Griffes’ was a unique voice in American music. At the beginning of his life, our native composers mostly emulated Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms; by the end, they were starting to gravitate toward jazz. By contrast, Griffes, like the painter Mary Cassatt, was attracted to French Impressionism (oddly, he studied in Germany with Engelbert Humperdinck, of “Hansel and Gretel” fame), yet the weird incense of Scriabin also permeates his work.

He is best known for dreamy meditations like “The White Peacock” and “The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan,” after Coleridge.

Griffes was born in Elmira, NY, on this date in 1884. He died of influenza in 1920, aged only 35 years. (No flu vaccine then.) Elmira was Mark Twain’s home from 1870. Twain was in Elmira putting the finishing touches on “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” the year Griffes was born. I’ve sometimes wondered if the two ever met. It has been documented that Griffes saw Twain there when moving about the streets. They certainly adhered to very different aesthetics.

It was Pierre Monteux, who introduced Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe,” Debussy’s “Jeux,” and Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” and “The Rite of Spring” with the Ballets Russes, that unlocked the Pleasure Dome for the first time, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1916.

You’ll recall Samuel Taylor Coleridge launched into his famous poem one night in 1797, after waking from an opium-induced dream, only to be interrupted by a knock at the door. When he returned to his desk, he was unable to pick up the thread. According to Coleridge, he envisioned the work as two or three hundred lines, but he found he’d forgotten the words! (Oh, how I can relate to this…) We can thank Lord Byron for convincing him to publish it, finally, in 1816.

Here’s Coleridge’s phantasmagoric fragment, to refresh your memory.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43991/kubla-khan

Give yourself over to absolute pleasure with Charles Tomlinson Griffes’ musical impressions of “Kubla Khan.”

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IMAGE: Delacroix, “The Death of Sardanapalus.” It’s good to be the king.