Special to the Sun
“You’ve Got a Friend,” the iconic 1971 Carole King song, also a hit for James Taylor and a Grammy winner for both, tops the playlist and shares its title with a Mississippi Symphony Orchestra concert that celebrates their music with guest singers and orchestral flair.
Taylor’s U.S. tour this past summer brought his songs back around and top of mind to the generation that came of age to them, and the generation since. King’s acclaimed concerts and the honors heaped on both cement their role in the canon of American song.
MSO’s Pops Series opener is a chance to hear their long-treasured songs again, and anew.
Ingrained in the memories of millions, these compositions get fresh treatment in “You’ve Got a Friend: The Music of Carole King and James Taylor,” 7:30 p.m. September 23 at Thalia Mara Hall. Tickets are $20 and up for adults, $5 for students; call 601-960-1565 or visit msorchestra.com.
Hit songwriter Kirsti Manna and national recording artist Jonathan Birchfield tap into their own friendship, collaboration and the essence of Taylor’s and King’s songs — “How Sweet It Is,” “Fire and Rain,” “Natural Woman,” “I Feel the Earth Move,” “Sweet Baby James” and more — with the MSO an integral, featured part in the celebration.
“The orchestra is definitely written in to enhance the experience,” says arranger Mariano Longo, by phone from Las Vegas. “They’re not just playing background music.
“It’s going to sound like a fresh orchestral take on these songs,” Longo says. And, “Kirsti and Jonathan are very respectful carriers of the torch” lit by King and Taylor.
Orchestras covering pop songs can bring things a solo voice with a four- or five-piece band can’t, says MSO Maestro Crafton Beck. “At times, it is certainly a matter of sheer power. Of course, a 60-person orchestra can really deliver it when that is needed.
“But, for something like the music of a James Taylor or Carole King, it is more about color and expressiveness. The infinite number of orchestral colors and textures are there to support and even comment on what the solo voice is doing. The sweetness of the flute, the plaintiveness of the oboe, the beauty of the strings can all be used to heighten the expressiveness of what is already a magnificent song,” Beck says.
MSO percussionist Bud Berthold says these songs will hit home and connect, “especially when it comes to folks that are of the age that they can reach back into their past. … It just brings back a lot of good, old memories.” With pops concerts like this, arrangers have a knack for adding parts for symphony orchestra players that don’t lose the original flavor, but enhance, expand and deepen the whole spatial aspect of the experience, “filling up the sound of what they originally had,” he says.
“It’s something you can’t really feel or sense unless you’re actually there in the room with it. .. It’s a full, all-encompassing sort of experience.”
MSO bassiST Richard Brown notes, “The concert is based on popular American music elements of syncopated rhythms, blues and jazz/rock harmonic structures and a improvisational quality that incorporates the entire orchestra.”
For the singers, it’s a thrill, says Birchfield, a North Carolina native like Taylor “and a Southerner at heart. … It’s hard to explain how cool that really is,” walking onstage with an orchestra behind you. He and Manna, his voice coach at one point and longtime songwriting friends (“like brother and sister”) since, were doing an acoustic show — he with guitar, she on piano — inspired by King’s and Taylor’s Live at the Troubadour reunion, when Longo approached with the symphony idea. “When we first started out, it was a good idea, and then it turned into a great dream.”
Long before MTV and music videos, people would hear a song on the radio or on a record and form their own mental picture of what it meant, Longo says. “It was a very personal experience.
“These songs are like that … so valid and well-written that they will be around long after all of us are gone,” Longo says. “It’s really the new American songbook.”
