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Regent Theater 90th Anniversary Voltaic Vaudeville

In the fall of 2006, Heather Kuhn, a programmer for the Regent Theater, the first vaudeville theater in the Boston area, had the idea of using the Regent's 90th anniversary to celebrate the tradition of vaudeville. The Regent commissioned me to compose and arrange music to perform with theater and dance troupes and play between the acts. This gave me a good excuse to assemble an orchestra to perform music from some of the bandleaders who played in the vaudeville houses of the 1920s and 1930s. I chose to select five bandleader/composers of that era:  Hartzell "Tiny" Parham, John Nesbitt, Charlie Johnson, Fess Williams, and Don Redman.

Happy & Gay cartoon score

In the fall of 2004, filmmaker Lorelei Pepi, who was at the time teaching animation at Harvard, contacted me about composing the score for her film Happy & Gay. Happy & Gay is a film based on 1930's b&w cartoon musicals. Lorelei had very specific ideas about the kind of sounds she wanted for the film. I was familiar with the visionary cartoon music composer Carl Stalling and his work for Warner Brothers. But Lorelei was interested in getting an earlier cartoon sound, one which predates Stalling's work with Looney Tunes and goes back to his days with animator Ub Iwerks and early Disney cartoons of the late 1920s and early 1930s. These earlier forms of cartoon music had more of a song-like structure inspired by the Busby Berkeley musicals of that time. I ingested a lot of this material over several months, scored the film, and hired what essentially was a dream band of downtown NYC musicians to record a mostly through-composed score. This band would become the genesis of the Ghost Train Orchestra.