Mort Garson

Mort Garson (20 July 1924^[1] – 4 January 2008)^[2] who was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, was an electronic musician best known for his albums that predominantly feature Moog synthesizers.

Early life

Mort Garson studied music at Juilliard and worked as a pianist and arranger before getting pulled into the Army near the end of World War Two. He could carry out any or all of the musical chores on any given session: composer, arranger, orchestrator, conductor, and even pianist if that was required. He conducted the "Love Strings" on Liberty Records, arranged for the Lettermen on Capitol Records, provided background to Laurence Harvey reading poetry on Atlantic Records, accompanied Doris Day on Columbia and experimented with the Moog synthesizer on A&M Records, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. With lyricist Bob Hilliard, he wrote one of the great lounge hits of the 1960s, "Our Day Will Come", a hit for Ruby & The Romantics and more recently covered by K. D. Lang and Take 6 for the soundtrack of the movie Shag.

Early career

Garson spent the mid-1960s on a rapid succession of accompaniment jobs: two Doris Day albums (Sentimental Journey and Songs for Latin Lovers), Mel Tormé's great Right Now! album of contemporary covers like "Secret Agent Man," Glenn Yarborough's highly successful cover of Rod McKuen songs, The Lonely Things, and Glen Campbell's even more successful "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." He also appears to have been a favorite of producers when the job involved soft pop vocal groups and string ensembles, since his handiwork appears on albums and singles by the Lettermen, the Sandpipers, the Sugar Shoppe, the Hollyridge Strings, the Sunset Strings, and the Love Strings.

Highly prized albums among collectors and exotica fans are Garson's electronic albums from the mid to late 1960s. The Zodiac : Cosmic Sounds - Celestial Counterpoint with Words and Music, a suite of Garson originals released on Elektra Records includes tracks for each of the 12 signs of the zodiac, and features Paul Beaver on a variety of electronic instruments with voice-overs by Cyrus Faryar. Zodiac was the first album recorded on the West Coast to make use of Robert Moog's new Moog synthesizer. Another moog album, Electronic Hair Pieces, covered songs from the hippie-influenced musical, Hair. The mod album cover art for Electronic Hair Pieces featured a model with a wired-up skull; liner notes were provided by Tom Smothers of the Smothers Brothers. Another album, The Wozard of Iz, a psychedelic satire based on The Wizard of Oz featured Bernie Krause providing a rich array of environmental sound effects and Suzy Jane Hokum voicing Dorothy. (The widely repeated claim 'Suzy Jane Hokum' is a pseudonym for Nancy Sinatra is untrue.)

With the success of the original Zodiac LP, Garson went on to compose and arrange a 12 album series of zodiac albums for A&M Records, one album for each sign. Like Zodiac, each album contained original tunes with heavy use of electronics. In 1974, Mort Garson composed the electronic music score for the 18th Annual Grammy Award winning Best Children's Recording of The Little Prince narrated by Richard Burton. He released an album in 1976 called Plantasia that you were supposed to play to make your indoor plants grow better. Garson also released a record of music-and-moans to capitalize on the best-seller at the time, The Sensuous Woman by "Z". He wrote an electronic Black Mass album under the pseudonym Lucifer that again featured the Moog. Garson followed Black Mass with an album titled Ataraxia designed to accompany meditations to the mantra of the listener's choice.

Film composer

Garson also worked in television and film, scoring a wide variety of music for many different movies and TV shows, from Beware! The Blob! to Kentucky Fried Movie to National Geographic specials, although it is Elmer Bernstein who is credited with composing the well-known National Geographic orchestral theme that first appeared in on the magazine's TV specials in 1966.

Garson was very closely associated with Heatter-Quigley Productions, creating the theme songs for the following TV game shows:

• "Amateur's Guide to Love"
• "Gambit"
• "Runaround"
• "Baffle"
• "The Magnificent Marble Machine"
• "Battlestars"

The music for the first five featured Garson playing synthesizers, but the "Battlestars" used more conventional marching band orchestration.

Musical Theatre composer

Garson composed the score for the 1983 West End musical Marilyn! The Musical which opened at the Adelphi theatre on 17 March 1983. Jaques Wilson wrote the lyrics for the show which starred Stephanie Lawrence as Marilyn Monroe.

Cultural references

A sample from Garson's "Planetary Motivations (Cancer)" was incorporated into DJ Shadow's 1996 song "Building Steam with a Grain of Salt," from the album Endtroducing.....'

Discography

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

• The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds (Elektra Records, 1967)
• The Wozard of Iz: An Electronic Odyssey (Elektra, 1968)
• Signs of the Zodiac (12 LP) (A&M Records, 1969) U.S. #147^[3]
• Black Mass Lucifer (1971)
• The Little Prince: Narrated by Richard Burton (1974)
• Ataraxia: The Unexplained (Electronic Musical Impressions of the Occult) (RCA Records, 1975)
• Plantasia (1976)

Note

References

• Associated Press (2008-01-08). "Composer Mort Garson dies at 83" (HTML). Variety. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117978685.html?categoryid=16&cs=1&nid=2568. Retrieved 2008-01-09. 
• Jaques Cattell Press (ed.) (1980). ASCAP Biographical Dictionary (4th edition ed.). R.R. Bowker Co. p. 177. ISBN 0-8352-1283-1. http://books.google.com/books?id=-1kYAAAAIAAJ&q=Mort+Garson&dq=Mort+Garson&lr=&pgis=1. Retrieved 2008-01-09.