Thursday, September 24, 2015

Liberace - again!

I was really lucky too to experience him on stage before he died.

Liberace owed a great deal of his success in the United Kingdom to Her Majesty Queen. On Sunday afternoons in the mid Fifties, he used the same TV sets originally, bought for the 1953 Coronation to seduce a huge new audience with his extravagant clothes and flamboyant manner.

His father wanted him to be an undertaker, HE wanted "to be the piano what Bing Crosby is to the voice". One columnist called him "a cross between movie star Cary Grant and Robert Alda"> The music critics attacked him for fiddling around with the serious compositions of the masters. Liberace,on the other hand, said,  "he was only leaving out the dull bites.

His TV show ran non-stop for five years, after which he toured the USA and the rest of the world extensively. He made a fortune... and never tried of telling his fans it was all due to them.

They, in turn, loved the furs, the sequins and the stories about his piano-shaped swimming pool and his bedroom with its reproduction of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. With his high-camp style, he was even credited by some as a forerunner of glitter rock.

The selections on his different sets in my music library represent the cream of popular music from Strauss to Streisand, Beatles to Bacharach - all played in Liberace's own inimitable style. This is the music with which he was still thrilling audiences in the early 1980s. And this was the music which ensured that, despite his death in February 1987, the Liberace legend would endure.

Liberace: The Weird, Wild and Wonderful


By Mike Walsh

I was lucky enough to see Liberace before he died. The concert was a weird, wild, wonderful spectacle, and it left me awestruck. I couldn't believe that a entire performance (not to mention a several decades long career) could be construed from such unrestrained, indulgent superficiality.
The majority of the show consisted of Liberace parading around the stage in outrageous outfits to the "oohs" and "ahhs" of the audience, which was dominated by women over the age of forty.

You can purchase these Liberace books and CDs fromAmazon.com:Liberace by Jocelyn Faris
A 30-page biography is followed by a chronology, and citations of personal appearances, films, radio and television appearances, recordings, awards and honors, sheet music, and works written about him.
Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace by Scott Thorson
A tell-all by a disgruntled houseguest.
The Best of Liberace
24 of his favorite songs
16 Most Requested Songs
Loungin' with Lee (CD)
 
At one point he appeared in what he claimed was the world's most expensive fur--a Norwegian blue shadow fox cape with a train 12-feet wide and 16-feet long. "There's only two of these in the world," he giggled with child-like glee, "and I've got both."

At another point he pranced around in a pink, glass suit embroidered with silver beads, which lit up during the encore. He was all gooey smiles in dimples, wavy hair, and outlandish rings.

"Well, look me over," he said with a devilish grin. "I don't wear these to go unnoticed." The audience roared with delight. It was a real lovefest. I was stunned by the gleeful absurdity of it all.

His trademark candelabrum with electric lights sat atop a glass-topped piano. A handsome, strapping, young man assisted Mr. Showmanship in changing various coats, robes, and crowns. Liberace made bedroom eyes at him, as did the ladies in the audience.

At least a half dozen times, he left the stage "to go slip into something a little more spectacular." Each time Liberace made another grand entrance in a new outfit, he'd invite a few women on stage to admire the fur and diamonds.

"I'm glad you like it," he cracked, "you paid for it." It was obvious he had used the same jokes countless times before, but the audience ate up every one.

Of course, he played lots of music too, songs like "The Impossible Dream," "Send in the Clowns," "Theme from Love Story," "Close to You," and "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head."

Liberace's piano playing was just like his clothing--showy, sentimental, and absurdly fancy. At every opportunity he ran his nimble fingers up and down the keyboard in endless frills and trills. The audience evidently took this for great skill. Not that the music mattered much. It was just a light diversion to break up the costume party.

At the end of the exhausting two-and-a-half hour show, he cracked, "I've had such a marvelous time I'm ashamed to take the money"--pause, wink, wink--"but I will."

The cheering and smiling and blowing of kisses started all over again. Elderly women filled the aisle in front of the stage to kiss his cheek. Liberace kept grinning like there was no tomorrow. Even his teeth gleamed. Liberace had elevated style over substance until there was no substance left at all.


Liberace was an international superstar dating back to the early 1950s. He averaged $5 million a year in income for more than 35 years. The 1978 Guinness Book of World Records identified Liberace as the world's highest paid musician.

He was born Wladziu Valentino Liberace in a Milwaukee suburb in 1919 to poor parents. He was classically trained on the piano as a youth and made his concert debut as a soloist at age 11. As a teenager during the depression, he played piano in speakeasies to make money for his family.

In 1940, Liberace moved to New York and scrounged for small-time nightclub gigs. His charm and piano playing paid off, and within seven years he was touring the hotel clubs. Liberace's story might have fizzled right there, but he got in early on two gold mines--Las Vegas and TV.

In the late 1940s he began playing extended runs in Las Vegas, which was just becoming an entertainment and gambling center. He would appear at the casinos in Vegas regularly for the rest of his life. And as Vegas grew, so did Liberace's fame and his paychecks.

It wasn't until Liberace was on the tube that he ascended to superstar status. In the early 1950s, Liberace had a variety show on TV, which was in its infancy. He played his fancy piano, did a little soft shoe, spoke to the audience in his hyper-sincere fashion, incessantly praised his mother Frances, who was always in attendance, and joked with his brother, George, the show's band leader. His television show was wildly successful and was carried by more stations than I Love Lucy.

In 1954 he played to capacity crowds at Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden, the Hollywood Bowl, and Soldier Field in Chicago. In 1955 he opened at the Riviera in Las Vegas for $50,000 per week, becoming the city's highest paid entertainer.

He was bonafide superstar with over 200 fan clubs. He received 7,000 fan letters and 12 marriage proposals a week. He also received 25,000 Valentines each year. He bought lavish mansions, remodeled them extravagantly, and filled them with ornate pianos, antiques, and furniture. He even had a piano-shaped swimming pool installed in his backyard.

Liberace's musical repertoire included a unique mix of classical, boogie woogie, movie themes, cocktail jazz, and sentimental ballads. He knew thousands of songs and could play almost any request from the audience.

He freely edited long classical pieces down to four to six minutes. "I took out the boring parts," he quipped. "I know just how many notes my audience will stand for. If there's any time left over, I fill in with a lot of runs up and down the scale."

This approach enraged serious music critics, who were mostly male. They wrote vicious reviews of Liberace's music, particularly in the beginning of his career.

For instance, in 1956 a British tabloid called Liberace a "deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love." In case his position wasn't perfectly clear, the writer concluded that Liberace was "the biggest sentimental vomit of all time."

Liberace's pat response was, "I cried all the way to the bank." (However, Liberace did take that British tabloid and its writer to court for slander, where he won a modest settlement.)

By the end of his career, the critics realized that criticizing Liberace was a fruitless endeavor. The women loved him anyway, and Liberace just didn't care. He was too busy raking in the dough.
He also amended his response to the criticism with this zinger: "Remember that bank I used to cry all the way to?" (Pause, smile, wink.) "I bought it."



Liberace wasn't always so outlandish. In the early 1950s he wore a relatively modest white tux on stage. To get some sparkle off the stage lights, he upgraded to a gold lame jacket. He commissioned more elaborate costumes as the years went by, and soon the man was out of control.

Eventually he was spending tens of thousands of dollars every year on bigger, flashier, and more opulent costumes. On various tours, he wore a cape made with $60,000 worth of chinchilla, a tuxedo embedded with diamonds spelling out his name, and a King Neptune costume covered in pearls and sea shells weighing 200 pounds. He had large rings shaped like candelabrum and a grand piano, each studded with diamonds, of course.

"My costumes have become my trademark," he said, "and trademarks are hard to come by in show business."

It wasn't just the costumes. He added showgirls, jugglers, singers, giant water fountains, light shows, a full orchestra, and even an elephant or two. During many of his shows he flew above the stage from a cable in a feather cape. He toured with a grand piano covered with thousands of glittering mirror tiles. He always sought to top his previous engagements with more outrageous glitz.

"You can't take anything for granted as an entertainer," he said. "You have to be surprising, find new things to make the audience stand up and take notice."

Liberace's millions of female fans were outraged in 1953 when he announced his engagement to a starlet. Women all over the country sobbed and wrote letters of protest. The engagement was quickly called off a few weeks later and is generally considered a publicity stunt. After all, Liberace was gay, which wasn't widely known at the time.

In fact, Liberace emphatically denied his homosexuality throughout his career. He evidently thought that coming out of the closet would hurt his popularity, and his female fans belligerently refused to acknowledge the obvious.

But that balloon burst for good when Liberace was sued for palimony in 1983 by a young man named Scott Thorson, who apparently had been shacking up with Mr. Showmanship for years. Liberace had Thorson on the payroll, dressed him up like himself, and paid for plastic surgery to have Thorson look more like himself. But even this bizarre scandal didn't dent Liberace's popularity.


In the 1970s, Liberace moved to Las Vegas, which was appropriate since he was the highest paid performer in Vegas. The casinos loved him because he generated so much business. In Vegas, the husbands gambled while their wives went to Liberace concerts.

Vegas is a city built on fantasy, superficiality, and profligate spending, and those were Liberace's calling cards. Both Las Vegas and Liberace proved the same motto: Nothing succeeds like excess.
 

Gallery at the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas
In 1978, Liberace built a museum to himself and to his opulent tastes in Las Vegas. The museum contains Liberace's collection of smaltzy cars, a gold casting of Liberace's hands, dozens of candelabra, a painting of his mother, a rotating rhinestone-covered piano, the multi-million dollar stage wardrobe, his collection of rare and antique pianos, the glittering stage jewelry, not to mention the world's largest rhinestone. Almost nine years after Liberace's death, the Liberace Museum remains one of the most popular tourist attractions in Las Vegas.

Liberace reached the pinnacle of his career in the mid-1980s at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Spanning three extended engagements in 1984, '85 and '86, he sold out 56 straight shows. Liberace called his Radio City shows "the fulfillment of a dream and the culmination of my forty years in show business."
Even the music critics were impressed. The New York Times wrote, "Liberace has arrived at a style that is an ornamental genre unto itself. He is a one-of-a-kind musical monument."
He made a grand entrance for each show in a Rolls Royce limo. After it was driven onto the stage, out popped Mr. Showmanship, all smiles and blown kisses, decked out in a naughty red, white, and blue hot pants outfit.

Actor Jeremy Irons summed up Liberace's appeal when he said, "If you want to kitsch, there it is. I couldn't live on it, but it is fun to see."

Just a few weeks after his 1986 engagement in New York, Liberace became ill. By January of 1987, he was confined to bed. His handlers denied that he had AIDS, but the rumor spread, and the media vultures circled. A horde of reporters and onlookers gathered outside his Palm Springs house, where he was bedridden, for the death watch. Liberace departed this world on February 4, 1987, at the age of 67. His burial was postponed until an autopsy was performed, which confirmed that he had died of AIDS. Evidently, the more fame you attain, the less privacy and dignity you are permitted, even in death.

To this day Liberace's astounding success seems puzzling. Why would middle-aged, midwestern family gals, generally an extremely sensible group, swoon like schoolgirls at the sight of an outrageous piano-playing borderline drag queen? The mystery deepens when you consider that he maintained superstar status for almost four decades. Maybe he brought out the maternal instincts of these women with his sweetness, gentle humor, and sentimental nature.

Liberace's appeal couldn't have been related to his talent. He wasn't admired for his singing, songwriting, or acting; his piano playing was ridiculous; and he didn't sell nearly as many albums as other famous musicians. "I'm no good," he once admitted. "I've just got guts."
Maybe the secret of his success had something to do with the fantasy world he created on stage. In that world everything was romantic and fun and silly, no expense was spared for the finest things, and, most importantly, the dirty, ugly aspects of everyday life did not intrude. Only the style, the frilly expensive clothing, the piano fills, the candelabra, and the corny sentiment had any meaning. His female fans, perhaps longing for an escape from the everyday humdrum, bought into this dreamland wholeheartedly.
There's also not much that Americans love more than money and the freedom it brings to overindulge. That was Liberace's cup of tea. He wallowed in his riches, and the audiences loved him for it. Maybe he represented the ultimate possibilities of the American dream to his fans.

Or maybe it's just that every segment of society needs its drag queens, and Liberace was middle America's. Whatever the reason, I'm just happy I got a chance to witness the wild spectacle Liberace created. I count it as a fond memory.


It was astonishing to see the hold he had on the audience - Vegas royalty who could command a room of music fans, pokerplayers, or those lucky enough to happen to be in the right place at the right time to see him in concert and took the opportunity to do so.

Liberace and the London Philharmonic Orchestra

Saturday, September 12, 2015

Count Basie: His Music and His Life

By: 

Count Basie was among the most important bandleaders of the swing era. With the exception of a brief period in the early '50s, he led a big band from 1935 until his death almost 50 years later, and the band continued to perform after he died. Basie's orchestra was characterized by a light, swinging rhythm section that he led from the piano, lively ensemble work, and generous soloing. Basie was not a composer like Duke Ellington or an important soloist like Benny Goodman. His instrument was his band, which was considered the epitome of swing and became broadly influential on jazz.
Both of Basie's parents were musicians; his father, Harvie Basie, played the mellophone, and his mother, Lillian (Childs) Basie, was a pianist who gave her son his earliest lessons. Basie also learned from Harlem stride pianists, particularly Fats Waller. His first professional work came accompanying vaudeville performers, and he was part of a troupe that broke up in Kansas City in 1927, leaving him stranded there. He stayed in the Midwestern city, at first working in a silent movie house and then joining Walter Page's Blue Devils in July 1928. The band's vocalist was Jimmy Rushing. Basie left in early 1929 to play with other bands, eventually settling into one led by Bennie Moten. Upon Moten's untimely death on April 2, 1935, Basie worked as a soloist before leading a band initially called the Barons of Rhythm. Many former members of the Moten band joined this nine-piece outfit, among them Walter Page (bass), Freddie Green (guitar), Jo Jones (drums), and Lester Young (tenor saxophone).Jimmy Rushing became the singer. The band gained a residency at the Reno Club in Kansas City and began broadcasting on the radio, an announcer dubbing the pianist "Count" Basie.
Basie got his big break when one of his broadcasts was heard by journalist and record producer John Hammond, who touted him to agents and record companies. As a result, the band was able to leave Kansas City in the fall of 1936 and take up an engagement at the Grand Terrace in Chicago, followed by a date in Buffalo, NY, before coming into Roseland in New York City in December. It made its recording debut on Decca Records in January 1937. Undergoing expansion and personnel changes, it returned to Chicago, then to the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Boston. Meanwhile, its recording of "One O'Clock Jump" became its first chart entry in September 1937. The tune became the band's theme song and it was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Basie returned to New York for an extended engagement at the small club the Famous Door in 1938 that really established the band as a success. "Stop Beatin' Round the Mulberry Bush," with Rushingon vocals, became a Top Ten hit in the fall of 1938. Basie spent the first half of 1939 in Chicago, meanwhile switching from Decca to Columbia Records, then went to the West Coast in the fall. He spent the early '40s touring extensively, but after the U.S. entry into World War II in December 1941 and the onset of the recording ban in August 1942, his travel was restricted. While on the West Coast, he and the band appeared in five films, all released within a matter of months in 1943: Hit Parade of 1943, Reveille with Beverly, Stage Door Canteen, Top Man, and Crazy House. He also scored a series of Top Ten hits on the pop and R&B charts, including "I Didn't Know About You" (pop, winter 1945); "Red Bank Blues" (R&B, winter 1945); "Rusty Dusty Blues" (R&B, spring 1945); "Jimmy's Blues" (pop and R&B, summer/fall 1945); and "Blue Skies" (pop, summer 1946). Switching to RCA Victor Records, he topped the charts in February 1947 with "Open the Door, Richard!," followed by three more Top Ten pop hits in 1947: "Free Eats," "One O'Clock Boogie," and "I Ain't Mad at You (You Ain't Mad at Me)."
Count Basie Swings, Joe Williams Sings
The big bands' decline in popularity in the late '40s hit Basie as it did his peers, and he broke up his orchestra at the end of the decade, opting to lead smaller units for the next couple of years. But he was able to reform the big band in 1952, responding to increased opportunities for touring. For example, he went overseas for the first time to play in Scandinavia in 1954, and thereafter international touring played a large part in his schedule. An important addition to the band in late 1954 was vocalist Joe Williams. The orchestra was re-established commercially by the 1955 album Count Basie Swings - Joe Williams Sings (released on Clef Records), particularly by the single "Every Day (I Have the Blues)," which reached the Top Five of the R&B charts and was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Another key recording of this period was an instrumental reading of "April in Paris" that made the pop Top 40 and the R&B Top Ten in early 1956; it also was enshrined in the Grammy Hall of Fame. These hits made what Albert Murray(co-author of Basie's autobiography, Good Morning Blues) called the "new testament" edition of the Basie band a major success. Williams remained with Basie until 1960, and even after his departure, the band continued to prosper.
Breakfast Dance and Barbecue
At the first Grammy Awards ceremony, Basie won the 1958 awards for Best Performance by a Dance Band and Best Jazz Performance, Group, for his Roulette Records LP Basie.Breakfast Dance and Barbecue was nominated in the dance band category for 1959, and Basie won in the category in 1960 for Dance with Basie, earning nominations the same year for Best Performance by an Orchestra and Best Jazz Performance, Large Group, for The Count Basie Story. There were further nominations for best jazz performance for Basie at Birdland in 1961 and The Legendin 1962. None of these albums attracted much commercial attention, however, and in 1962, Basie switched to Frank Sinatra's Reprise Records in a bid to sell more records. Sinatra-Basie satisfied that desire, reaching the Top Five in early 1963. It was followed by This Time by Basie! Hits of the 50's and 60's, which reached the Top 20 and won the 1963 Grammy Award for Best Performance by an Orchestra for Dancing.
Ella and Basie!
This initiated a period largely deplored by jazz fans that ran through the rest of the 1960s, when Basie teamed with various vocalists for a series of chart albums including Ella Fitzgerald (Ella and Basie!, 1963); Sinatra again (the Top 20 album It Might as Well Be Swing, 1964); Sammy Davis, Jr. (Our Shining Hour, 1965); the Mills Brothers (The Board of Directors, 1968); and Jackie Wilson (Manufacturers of Soul, 1968). He also reached the charts with an album of show tunes, Broadway Basie's ... Way (1966).
Standing Ovation
By the end of the 1960s, Basie had returned to more of a jazz format. His album Standing Ovation earned a 1969 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group or Soloist with Large Group (Eight or More), and in 1970, with Oliver Nelson as arranger/conductor, he recorded Afrique, an experimental, avant-garde album that earned a 1971 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance by a Big Band. By this time, the band performed largely on the jazz festival circuit and on cruise ships. In the early 1970s, after a series of short-term affiliations, Basie signed to Pablo Records, with which he recorded for the rest of his life. Pablo recorded Basie prolifically in a variety of settings, resulting in a series of well-received albums: Basie Jam earned a 1975 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance by a Group; Basie and Zoot was nominated in the same category in 1976 and won the Grammy for Best Jazz Performance by a Soloist; Prime Time won the 1977 Grammy for Best Jazz Performance by a Big Band; and The Gifted Ones by Basie and Dizzy Gillespie was nominated for a 1979 Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance by a Group. Thereafter, Basie competed in the category of Best Jazz Instrumental Performance by a Big Band, winning the Grammy in 1980 for On the Road and in 1982 forWarm Breeze, earning a nomination for Farmer's Market Barbecue in 1983, and winning a final time, for his ninth career Grammy, in 1984 for 88 Basie Street.
Basie's health gradually deteriorated during the last eight years of his life. He suffered a heart attack in 1976 that put him out of commission for several months. He was back in the hospital in 1981, and when he returned to action, he was driving an electric wheel chair onto the stage. He died of cancer at 79.
Count Basie was admired as much by musicians as by listeners, and he displayed a remarkable consistency in a bandleading career that lasted long after swing became an archival style of music. After his death, his was one of the livelier ghost bands, led in turn by Thad JonesFrank Foster, and Grover Mitchell. His lengthy career resulted in a large discography spread across all of the major labels and quite a few minor ones as well.

Count Basie - In A Mellow Tone

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Ray Conniff - His Music and His Life

 By 

The man who popularized wordless vocal choruses and light orchestral accompaniment on a mix of popular standards and contemporary hits of the 1960s, Ray Conniff was a trombone player for Bunny Berigan's Orchestra and Bob Crosby's Bobcats before being hired as an arranger by Mitch Millerfor Columbia Records in 1954. After he wrote the charts for several sizeable Columbia hits during the mid-'50s, Conniff became a solo artist as well, applying his arranging techniques to instrumental easy listening for the booming adult album market. The result, 12 Top Ten LPs and well over 50 million total albums sold, cemented his status as one of the top LP sellers of all time, but his increasingly watered-down and commercially focused arrangements gained few young fans by the end of the '60s. Though he continued recording and touring the world into the '90s, Conniff's albums slipped off the charts in the early '70s.
Born in November 1916 in Attleboro, MA, Ray Conniff gained much of his musical experience inside the home. His father, a trombone player, led a local band, while his mother played the piano. Raybegan leading a local band while in high school -- picking up the trombone for the first time not long before -- and began writing arrangements for it; after graduation, he moved to Boston and began playing with Dan Murphy's Musical Skippers (besides playing and arranging, Conniff drove the band around). By the mid-'30s, he was ready for the big time, landing in New York just after the birth of the fertile swing era. He comped around Manhattan for several years, and by 1937 landed an arranging/playing job with Bunny Berigan. Two years later, he moved to Bob Crosby's Bobcats, one of the hottest bands of the time, though Conniff stayed for only a year before joining up with Artie Shawand later Glen Gray.
'S Wonderful!
With the advent of American involvement in World War II by 1941, Conniff joined the Army, though the closest he came to Wake Island was Hollywood, where he worked as an arranger with Armed Forces Radio. At the end of the war,Conniff worked with Harry James but lost interest in arranging when bop moved to center stage during the late '40s. Completely divorced from the music business, he studied conducting and music theory during the early '50s, emerging by 1954 to accept a position with Columbia Records and notorious pop producer Mitch Miller. The following year, he put his theories to practice with Don Cherry (the vocalist, not the jazz trumpeter) on a Top Five hit, "Band of Gold." Close on its heels were some more big hits of 1956-1957, including the number ones "Singing the Blues" by Guy Mitchell and "Chances Are" by Johnny Mathis, plus Top Five entries by Johnnie Ray ("Just Walking in the Rain"),Frankie Laine ("Moonlight Gambler"), and Marty Robbins ("A White Sport Coat [And a Pink Carnation]"). Columbia, undoubtedly ecstatic over the success of its arranger, agreed to let Conniffrecord an instrumental album, and the result, 'S Wonderful (1956), spent months on the album charts. With a similar intent (though far tamer results) to Lambert, Hendricks & Ross' album of the same year,Sing a Song of Basie -- which transcribed classic Basie orchestra solos into vocal parts -- Conniffarranged parts for an easygoing chorus of singers just as he had with instrumentalists in the past. 'S Wonderful was background instrumental music for adults who still liked to hear the human voice, and the technique grew to define the "Muzaky" feel of much of the adult pop of the 1950s and '60s.
'S Marvelous
During the rest of the late '50s, four Ray Conniff albums reached the Top Ten, led by the gold-certified 'S Marvelousand Concert in RhythmConniff did well in the early '60s as well, with popular theme albums like Say It with Music (A Touch of Latin)Memories Are Made of ThisSo Much in Love'S Continental, and We Wish You a Merry Christmas, which continued to chart during the holiday season of the next six years after its 1962 release date. The rise of rock & roll in the mid-'60s obviously hurt Conniff's record sales, though in 1966 the inclusion of "Lara's Theme" in the film Doctor Zhivago resulted in Conniff's only significant singles-chart placing at number nine, and a million-selling album with Somewhere My Love. During the late '60s, he began to include the softer side of rock and Bacharach-David pop into his repertoire, with artists from Simon & Garfunkel to the Carpenters and the Fifth Dimension all receiving the Connifftreatment (alongside more questionable attempts, such as "Theme from 'Shaft'"). He continued to record albums and perform to his large Latin American audience into the '90s. On October 12, 2002,Conniff passed away after falling down and hitting his head. He had suffered a stroke months prior, but his health had continued to deteriorate. He was 85.

Ray Conniff's Greatest Hits - 50+ Songs and Over 2+ Hours of Easy Liste...