Two days of Mancini, done with style

A quartet will pay tribute to the late composer by performing arrangements of his tunes in paired concerts on Saturday, Nov. 3, at Congregation Nahalat Shalom and Sunday, Nov. 4, at the Santa Fe Center for Spiritual Living.

“He had so many great hits. He won 20-plus Grammys,” said Cal Haines, the Santa Fe-based drummer in the quartet. “So there’s lots of nostalgia.”

	Bobby Shew & John Proulx: Henry Mancini Tribute WHEN and WHERE: 7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 3, at Congregation Nahalat Shalom, 3606 Rio Grande NW; and 4 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 4, at the Santa Fe Center for Spiritual Living, 505 Camino de los Marquez, Santa Fe HOW MUCH: $25 at www.brownpapertickets.com or at the door

Haines will be playing with trumpeter Bobby Shew, vocalist-pianist John Proulx and bassist Michael Glynn.

Proulx said he and Shew each did half of the arrangements for the 16-some tunes on the program.

“Some of the recordings of Mancini’s music are orchestrated. Basically, I took the ones that I vocally wanted to do and arranged those,” Proulx said in a phone interview from his home in Pasadena, Calif. “I asked Bobby to arrange the instrumental tunes.”

In addition, Proulx said he changes the musical approach to some numbers.

“For example, we’re doing ‘Slow, Hot Wind,’ which normally is done as a ballad but I’m doing it as a straight-eighth feel. … It makes the arrangement interesting and takes it out of context and into a different style,” he said.

And with two other Mancini numbers, “Moment to Moment” was originally a ballad but Proulx arranged in a funk version, and “Charade,” which was composed as a waltz, will be played as a samba.

However, Proulx said that Mancini standards like “Baby Elephant Walk” and the theme from “Peter Gunn” will be performed as the composer wrote them.

Mancini, who died in 1994, earned four Oscars.