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.