News from the darkest corners...

After a long illness, Freddy Biehnstock, a music publishing industry legend and founder of Carlin Music, died September 21, 2009 at his Manhattan home. He was 86.

During his career Bienstock worked with such songwriters and music business executives as Leiber & Stoller, Cliff Richards, Bobby Darin, Ray Davies, U2, John Sebastian, Tim Hardin, Eric Burdon, James Brown, Peter Allen, William Bolcom, Ernesto Lucuona, Norman Dello Joio, Carol Bayer Sager, Kander & Ebb, Koppleman & Rubin, Marvin Hamlish, Stephen Sondheim and, Elvis Presley. According to his company bio, Bienstock worked closely with Presley, who often relied on the publisher to choose the songs he recorded.

After emigrating to the U.S. before the start of World War II, Bienstock began his career in the stock room of publisher Chappell and Company, later becoming its chairman. Bienstock, who served on the National Music Publishers Assn.’s board of directors for nearly 20 years, founded Carlin Music in 1966 by acquiring the Belinda Music catalog and built it into a catalog with more than 100,000 songs.

“More than an icon and leader in the music publishing industry, Freddy was a cherished friend and colleague,” said NMPA chairman Irwin Robinson. NMPA president and CEO David Israelite, added, “Freddy’s passion for music and commitment to artists and songwriters made him a giant in our industry, and his legacy will not soon be forgotten.”

Today, the Carlin catalog has an extensive catalog of classical, country, classic pop and standards as well as being a leading Broadway musical publisher.

Bienstock is survived by his wife Miriam, who co-founded Atlantic Records; his daughter Caroline, who is COO at the company; Caroline’s husband Douglas Rodriguez; his son Robert, who is senior VP of business at Carlin, and his wife Ellen; and five grandchildren.

Arthur Ferrante, one half of the piano duo Ferrante and Teicher whose lush orchestral recordings of 1960s movie themes propelled them to popular and commercial success, has died. He was 88.

Ferrante died of natural causes early Saturday at his home in Longboat Key, Fla., his manager, Scott W. Smith, said Sunday. Lou Teicher died in August 2008 at age 83.

“Although we were two individuals, at the twin pianos our brains worked as one,” Ferrante said last year after Teicher’s death.

The classically trained pair met and became friends at the Juilliard School in New York, where they both had enrolled as children.

A few years after graduating, they rejoined as a piano duo and toured the country throughout the 1950s, playing 9-foot concert pianos while facing each other on stage. The pianists relied on their classical repertoire during the main concert performance but skipped to pop songs and novelty tunes for encores.

Over the course of their 40-year partnership, the “Grand Twins of the Twin Grands” recorded 150 albums, racking up 22 gold and platinum records and selling 90 million records worldwide, and performed 5,200 concerts before retiring in 1989.

In 1960, Ferrante and Teicher teamed with producer Don Costa to record their arrangement of the theme to the Billy Wilder film “The Apartment.” The single shot up to Billboard’s Top 10, as did their next movie recording that same year, the theme to “Exodus,” based on Ernest Gold’s soundtrack music. The duo continued to please their audience with embellished versions of movie music performed on their twin pianos along with a full orchestra and chorus.

They soon became known as the Movie Theme Team after releasing themes from “One-Eyed Jacks” (1961), “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962), “Cleopatra” (1963) and others. They finished the decade in 1969 by earning a Top 10 hit with the theme from “Midnight Cowboy,” based on John Barry’s soundtrack tune.

Arthur Richard Ferrante was born Sept. 7, 1921, in New York City. Three years older than Teicher, he entered Juilliard at age 9. They both studied piano with Carl Friedberg, and Ferrante graduated in 1940.

He returned to Juilliard a few years later as a piano instructor and played at night in clubs with Teicher. In the late ’40s, the duo began touring the United States and Canada and in 1952 made their first recordings.

Showmen from the start, they weren’t content to merely play notes from a sheet of music. They began altering their pianos, adding mutes and other objects such as metal chains, glass, wood and cardboard to the strings to create different sounds. And they didn’t only strike the keys, they would pluck, pound or strum the strings inside the piano to make alternative sounds.

These “gimmicks,” as they called them, landed them spots on the leading TV variety programs of the day, including “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Tonight Show,” “The Dean Martin Show,” and invitations to perform at the White House for presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan.

Jimi Hendrix’s sister Janie Hendrix has stated that there is still “another decade” of unreleased music and video to come from the guitarist. Janie Hendrix, president and CEO of Experience Hendrix and Authentic Hendrix (the companies that deal with his legacy), revealed that she wants to release new material every 12 to 18 months for the next ten years.

“We probably have another decade of music, including video. Every 12 to 18 months we’ll continue to have new releases and official bootlegs. Jimi was a workaholic. After Electric Lady studios was built he was able to record constantly for as many hours as he wanted to. It’s almost as if he knew he had only four years to accomplish everything that he did. We have an amazing amount of original masters, including a lot of material that hasn’t been previously released.”

Hendrix added that the tapes featuring the unreleased material are currently stored in two separate locations in the US. “We keep them in a temperature-controlled vault. We have a set of everything in Los Angeles and a set in New York in the event of something catastrophic happening. We have duplicates of everything.”

Columbia/Legacy presents Miles Davis – The Complete Columbia Album Collection, a deluxe, limited edition retrospective of the iconic music Miles Davis created during his 30 years with Columbia Records.This exquisite package, comprised of 70 CDs and 1 DVD, contains all 52 of Miles’ Columbia recordings in Japanese-styled mini LP jackets and includes a 250-page book with a biography, a fully annotated discography, a complete song index and rare photos. PLUS a previeously unreleased DVD of Live in Europe ‘67 and the first-time audio release of the full Isle of Wight 1970 festival performance. Bonus tracks and other rarities that have been added to the CD reissues of individual albums in past years are also included.

This limited edition box set will be released on november 24th, 2009.

Preorder The Complete Columbia Album Collection from Amazon.com

Dutch jazz composer and arranger Jerry van Rooyen (birth name Jerry van Rooijen) died on September 14th. He was 80 years old.

Van Rooyen was born on December 31st, 1928 in the Hague, the Netherlands. Jerry took his first music lessons at age eight and immediately joined a brass band in his hometown as a trumpet player.

Van Rooyen studied for several years with the lead trumpet player of the Netherlands Symphonic Orchestra and further studied music at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where he eventually graduated as a music teacher. In 1944 Van Rooyen joined a Dutch revue show as first trumpet player. He toured Indonesia, America and Scandinavia with such famous Dutch and Scandinavian musicians as Ernst Van’t Hoff, Boyd Bachman, Bengt Hallberg, Ake Persson and Lars Gullin. In 1955 Jerry signed on as first trumpet player and arranger for the Dutch radio orchestra the Ramblers and performed with his own jazz combo in numerous Amsterdam nightclubs. Van Rooyen went to Paris, France in 1959, where he was a conductor and arranger for Fantana Records and worked with such artists as Michel Legrand, Claude Bolling and Gilbert Becaud.

In 1965 Jerry moved to Berlin, Germany and became the arranger for the S.F.B. Dance Orchestra. Van Rooyen composed the wonderfully groovy and offbeat experimental jazz scores for the Jess Franco pictures “Succubus,” “Red Lips,” and “Kiss Me, Monster.” Moreover, he also supplied the funky music for the films “The Vampire Happening,” “Castle of the Creeping Flesh,” “Death on a Rainy Day,” and “How Short is the Time for Love.” His marvelously hip composition “The Great Train Robbery” was used as the opening credits theme for the hilarious cult indie comedy “Free Enterprise.”

Van Rooyen wrote the opening theme of the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. He then returned to the Netherlands, where he worked as both a producer and program director for the AVRO radio station as well as continued producing and arranging for various jazz orchestras all over the world. In 1985 Van Rooyen became the director of the WDR Radio Big Band and toured all over Asia. Jerry van Rooyen’s brother Ack Van Rooyen is a renowned trumpet and flugelhorn player.

Sex Pistols legend John Lydon has announced that he is reforming his other 70s band Public Image Ltd for a series of UK live gigs at the end of the year.

PiL celebrate the 30 years since the release of their Metal Box in November 1979 with five live shows announced so far.

Public Image Ltd will see John Lydon joined by Damned guitarist Lu Edmonds, former Slits drummer Bruce Smith and bassist Scott Firth.

The revived version of Public Image Ltd will play the following UK live dates, tickets on sale on Friday September 11 at 9am.

(source: Uncut.co.uk)

According to director Tony Palmer’s official YouTube channel Frank Zappa’s movie “200 Motels” will be officially released on DVD soon.

There is no release date yet, but apparently the DVD will use the original master tapes of the movie, which were rumoured to be lost.

200 Motels is a 1971 musical film featuring Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, produced at Pinewood Studios, England. Directed and written by Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer. Actors included Ringo Starr, Theodore Bikel and Keith Moon. A double album of the soundtrack was released in the same year.