• Genre: Jazz
• Instrument: Piano

Biography

Frank Leithner was one of the earliest instrumentalists on the West Coast to establish a career as a session man on all the available fronts of radio, television, movies, and recording. He was a wholesome, low-key, and reliable fellow, born out by the fact that he was a boyhood chum of no less a Mr. Nice Guy than Ozzie Nelson. As a young musician he was one of Rudy Vallee's Connecticut Yankees. Leithner's sense of humor began showing in the early '30s, when he left Vallee to join the band of ragtime and swing artist George Olsen. It was here that Leithner first used what would become on the most famous sneezes in show business. This sneeze, combined with his superior sight-reading abilities on piano, led to frequent employment on radio shows such as Burns and Allen, the Red Skelton Show, and the Great Gildersleeves. Both George Burns and Red Skelton tried in vain to learn his sneeze. The reaction of bandleader Spike Jones when he met Leithner sneezing on the Eddie Cantor Show in 1942 was simply to hire him, but that may have been because he was between piano players. A first-class sneeze would have had to have been an asset in an ensemble where others were prized for their "glugs" (kind of an extended gulp) or other body noises too impolite to mention in a serious essay. Or perhaps not, since musical research should not be restrained by boundaries of decorum. Jimmy Thomasson, for example, was a trombonist that was hired by Jones just to belch, at ten dollars a burp, to be exact. As for Leithner, trumpeter Don Anderson recalls "Boy, could he sneeze...Anytime he wanted." From 1942 through 1944, Leithner was the main sneeze and kind of a second pianist with Jones. The pianist was not at all interested in hitting the trail on an endless series of one-nighters, especially since the renumeration was less than a third of what he could make as a session player in Hollywood. Leithner was even not always present at Jones' gigs in the Hollywood area, at least not physically. He contributed quite a few arrangements to the Slickers repertoire during his tenure. On the road, the apparently incompetent Carl Hoefle was his replacement, while Herman Crone was a local keyboard substitute. Leithner did take part in the NBC broadcast Bob Burns and Furlough Fun, a great source of transcription recordings of the City Slickers from an intensely creative period.

Eventually Leithner opted for a more sedate creative environment and went to work with his old friend Nelson on the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. He also played music on the Curt Massey Show, and bounced back into the wild world of Jones from time to time for special projects. In 1946 he created the "sneezeaphone" (what else?) part for the hilarious Jones version of "Flight of the Bumbleebee." He also recorded with Frank Sinatra, Billy Vaughan, and the Los Angeles conductors Ray Noble and Carmen Dragon. He died of a heart attack. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, All Music Guide