My high school stage band (jazz band) played Cute.
Hefti was best when he worked with Count Basie. His film scores were cutesy, but never made it to the level of a Bernard Herrmann or an Elmer Bernstein.
Everybody's Truckin'--The Modern Mountaineers (1937)
Ella Fitzgerald was Truckin' and Peckin'--dancin' up to date in '38!
A-Tisket A-Tasket--Chick Webb & His Orchestra (1938)
That’s a fantastically interesting post you put up, TT, from Mark Steyn. Thanks!
Swingin’ Brass from ‘62 was an album I had memorized every phrase of Sinatra’s, so that to this day I can sing it note for note. I’m not a musician. I was a 10 year old kid when my oldest brother and hero Pete brought it home from SHAPE Hdqtrs in Paris where he served his 2 years in the army. He WAS Sinatra in my eyes - suave, handsome, musically gifted, lady killer. But he was dead just 11 years later. Hefti’s arrangements on that album are simply the best.
And Girl Talk had always been, for me, one of those that seemed to be on a loop, where you always wanted to keep singing it round and round. I even recorded it with my own lyrics and Basie background, just for fun, and about my sisters, which I titled Sis Talk:
They meet in Mesa, Dublin, LA, and the Windy Town
Pour out their hearts until defenses start to tumble down
Their men, their kids, their friends, their families, and their colleagues too
Alike are marble figurines to hew and make anew
With one great heart
They take apart
Rebuild with art
The art of Sis Talk, Sis Talk
Neal Hefti also wrote the (annoying?) theme to the 70s paramedic drama “Emergency “
The show starred Hefti’s old friends Bobby Troup as world-weary Dr. Joe Early and Julie London as know-it-all nurse Dixie McCall
Theme music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyIvLarYpWw
Wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency!
How interesting - cue the Johnny Carson “I did not know that”
Now I’m going to have to look up and listen to some new music.