Sunday at Taronga Park

Today, the 11th April, would have been Tommy Tycho’s 93rd Birthday! In researching his life and music career I come across all sorts of music on a regular basis. Recently, I located recording of piece he composed in 1969 called Sunday at Taronga Park. It’s a light music piece depicting a family walking around at Taronga Zoo, a popular Sunday activity back in the day.

Being light music, the piece features a mixture of classical, popular, and jazz elements. Throughout you’ll hear some jazzy saxophones, walking bass lines, lovely string lines, and delicately dancing woodwind figures (there’s even a quote from Tommy’s “Sydney Suite” at 2:35 - Tommy often quoted other composers in his arrangements so it’s nice to see him quoting himself here!).

The track was featured on an ABC in house transcription disc (2XS3721/RRC, at the time the ABC recorded lots of local composers and arrangers for broadcast use within the light music style due to the lack of commercial recording opportunities in Australia at that time for light music) which was recorded in 1967. It's called "Australian Birthday", recorded in 1967 to celebrate the 179th Australia Day. The recording featured other light music compositions by other local composers including Neil Thurgate, and Eric Jupp. The recording was performed by Jim Gussey and the ABC Sydney Show Band (which used to be the ABC Sydney Dance Band, however the name was changed in 1969 to reflect the fact that they were playing less dance music and more light music, as evidenced by the style of this recording), and featured the Claire Poole Singers, who were working with Tommy at ATN7 at the time of the recording It appears it may have been broadcast as a radio program as the National Film and Sound Archive listing indicates there was a script and narrator (more to be investigated!)

Happy Birthday Maestro! Thanks for the music!

Archival Television Recordings

Well, this week has been pretty exciting! While searching on Ebay I noticed that a seller was auctioning some rare 45’ records that were recorded for ATN7 (now channel 7) studios in the 1960s. These in-house discs were part of the library collection of channel 7. Finding items like these is very exciting both for my research on Tommy Tycho, and adding to his collection of items. It’s extra special to find these as a lot of the television material was destroyed during a fire at the Epping warehouses.

One of the exciting finds on this collection was the theme from Studio A - a variety style show that was created following the success of Revue ‘61, Revue ‘62, Startime, Startime ‘63 , and Music Time. These large scale productions featured dancers, choirs, the ATN7 orchestra, comedy, singing, and special guests, who were usually international stars touring, and a number of local performers. Studio A ran from 1963 to 1964, and was one of the last large-scale variety programs produced by ATN-7. Hosts of the program included the Le Garde Twins, Stuart Wagstaff, and Terry O’Neill.

On the recording is the very hip theme used for Studio A featuring the ANT orchestra and featuring the Claire Poole Singers. You can hear the influence of Henry Mancini as well as the trends in easy listening music of the day to feature wordless vocalists singing tight harmonies.

Studio A Theme

1981 Royal Charity Performance

Here’s a performance Tommy did in 1981 for the Charity Performance. It’s his arrangement and piano performance of the 1973 tune “Love’s Theme”. This was originally a tune written by Barry White and performed by the Love Unlimited Orchestra. It is one of the few instrumental and purely orchestral singles to reach #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States, which it did in early 1974. This arrangement features Tommy’s knowledge of the easy listening format, but he also sneaks in some virtuosic piano passages to show off his virtuosity. This was Tommy’s great skill with arranging and adapting pop tunes to make them sound like classical-esque pieces.

In the early 1980s, Tommy had been contracted by Warner/Wea as their new easy listening arranger and musician. This was to fill the void left by the death of Kostelanetz in 1980. The deal also included arranging pop tunes of the day to appear on American FM Beautiful Music stations. With the death of Tommy’s then-manager Lyn Rich, the deal seems to have fallen through. Instead, the album was released A Little More Love from Tommy Tycho and the Sydney International Orchestra featuring easy listening type arrangements.

Enjoy the performance. You can watch the full video here