One of our musical luminaries in the Valley, Ian Bernard, has parlayed talent and energy into a long and varied career, but he also is simply delightful to be around. His resume lists musical scores, film scores and credits as a conductor, composer, and arranger, as well as teaching credits and all types of involvement in the world of film. Ian was the chair of the Film/ Video Department at Brooks Institute of Photography for seven years. He has written plays, screenplays, and been the writer/producer of many television shows. He has written two books on the subject of film acting and writing comedy.
His description of his unusual path to success is very matter of fact, “I graduated from Santa Monica High School, then I went to work—practically the next day—working in a Burlesque joint in Bakersfield playing piano. I was seventeen at the time. I had studied classical piano with Andre Previn’s father. I studied classical composition with a guy named Mario Tedesco in Beverly Hills who was an Italian composer. As for orchestrating, I took about ten lessons from a man named Ben Alexander who wrote the song, ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket’. He was an orchestrated a great deal of music from the Big Band era and he gave me the fundamentals.”
“From there I started playing in ‘kid bands’ all over California and Los Angeles and by that I mean high school bands. Then I started playing jazz and began working at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach; I played there many times. I started hanging out with trumpet players Chet Baker, Jack Shelton, and we played all over the place. We played for all the way up to $6.00 a night which wasn’t that great even back in those days. We’d drive up to 25 miles to play a gig and I didn’t care... I just wanted to play.
I lived at home until I was eighteen years old and then I moved into an apartment with damp walls – a subterranean den under a house in North Hollywood. I started getting more and more jobs and was able to support myself playing in dance bands, mostly. I went on the road with Jimmy Zito who was a very good trumpet player for about two years. I worked with Skinny Ennis’ band for a while. I had a glorious engagement with Tommy Dorsey; I lasted for one night before he fired me.” I asked Ian to elaborate about that experience and he said, “Not much to tell, he didn’t like me, he didn’t like the way I played. Tommy Dorsey was famous for giving people ‘the ray.’ He’d stare at them and you felt like you were going to be underground.”
“Then I began playing more in the piano bars around Los Angeles and Beverly Hills. I am one of the original be-boppers. I started playing be-bop with Charlie Parker and those guys. In 1947, ’48, and ’49 there were maybe three or four piano players in Los Angeles playing be-bop and I was one of them. You may have heard about ‘the birth of the Cool’ which was how people sometimes referred to the birth of West Coast Jazz, but really you’d go to New York and hear people playing the same thing.”
When asked how that mixed in with playing the more mainstream dance band style of music, he answered, “Well, the commercial stuff, that’s how you made your money, then you’d go out and play your $6.00 a night gig.” “I was about 20 or so when I got a job as a rehearsal pianist for Paramount Studios. I played rehearsal piano for several movies. I got to be a very good friend of Rosemary Clooney, who six years later recorded about sixteen of my songs. She didn’t know that I had written songs for four or five years, I never told her; a friend told her. I only played my songs to people who I was musical director for. I knew Rosemary, Vic Dimone, and Dick Haymes as musical director but Dick never did any of my songs. I did play on a couple of albums with him and by the way the complete Capital Records collection of Dick Haymes has just been re-released and is available through Amazon. I was just twenty-six.
Later on, but not much later on, I was signed as songwriter by Frank Loesser who wrote “Guys and Dolls” not so much for musicals but for recordings and things like that. My songs were not really in the style of pop songs, but were more jazz oriented and complicated…more esoteric.”
Ian gives recent popular music and today’s music industry in general mixed reviews. “I think every once in a while a good song sneaks through in spite of all the garbage. I was listening particularly closely to lyrics the other day. I sat thinking of Gershwin, Rogers & Hart and all those people, and when things really said something in a song. If you take the word ‘baby’ out of the English language, I don’t think anybody could write a song today. I think that there’s less skill involved. First of all, when I think of the old songs that I used to play a lot of—Jimmy Van Heusen for example—the rhymes were perfect. They didn’t use near-rhymes; they knew what they were doing. Sammy Cahn was one of the greatest lyricists of all time. Of all the songs being written these days, country music has got to be the best. Good lyric content and now more and more interesting— they’re getting out of the two chord thing and they’ll use five or six chords. It’s better! That’s about the only thing I ever listen to besides jazz or classical music.”
Ian still practices the piano occasionally, he says, “I’m just now doing my finger exercises. I don’t play the piano for months at a time. A concert comes up and I’ll woodshed for a while. There are so many great pianists these days who are unbelievable. How the technique has improved. I have a classical background, but once you cross over into Jazz, once you make that switch you usually stay with that. I don’t like to play background music. I play where people are there to listen.
There are only one or two good pianos up here in the Valley and the same can be said about Santa Barbara. That could be why we don’t have very much Jazz in our area. I only play for the Jazz Society every few months. I rehearse and write out all my arrangements by hand. I don’t use a computer to write out the parts. I use a copyist if I’m orchestrating something for the symphony. I used to write all my scores in Laguna Beach when we lived down there. I’d be on the beach Tuesday night, Wednesday we’d record them in Los Angeles and I’d be back on the beach by Wednesday night.”
“We moved to Santa Barbara in ’78 and stayed there until 1989 when we came here to the Valley.” Ian pointed to his lovely wife of forty years, Penny, who has always been a horsewoman. He has two grown children, both a daughter and a son, and four grandchildren. “My son is a very talented (musician) but he’s a television news man in Florida. He’s got great ears and could do anything with it, but wanted to be a newsman.”
Ian talks about the books that he’s written and says, “I wrote books because of the challenge. I’ve been a musician since I was about five years old. I’m not saying that music comes easily to me, but it’s much easier. Writing is a challenge to express what you’re thinking and have it come out and make sense. I wrote the first book about film and television acting because I taught graduate classes of film acting at UC Irvine and there were no good books on the subject.” The book is entitled ‘Film & Acting: from stage to screen’. Ian told me, “The second book on comedy writing came out of a variety of experiences that I’ve had. I led the Santa Barbara Writers Conferences for several years and I worked for the television show ‘Laugh In’ for six or seven years. I’ve always written short, humorous pieces. Being an analytical person, I’ve wondered, ‘What makes it work?’ I’ve always leaned toward black humor, or dark humor.” His second book is titled ‘Writing Humor: Giving a Comedic Touch to all Forms of Writing’.