The things you find on the Internet

This is from a 1960s TV special The Music of Lennon and McCartney.  It can't be overstated the massive impact that those two young armature musicians and songwriters had on the music industry both now and back then.  Not only in the world of pop music, but beyond. The great Leonard Bernstein once lauded their songwriting skills as being right up with the best of classical composers.  And in the above clip, the brilliant Henry Mancini, of all people, gives us a rendition of one of L&M's earliest compositions that wowed the critics in the day - If I Fell.  One of the songs written for their first film A Hard Day's Night. 

The fun bit is that Mancini was a major influence on the Beatles' own record producer George Martin.  The one most often called the Fifth Beatle, Martin was a WW2 vet who was classically trained in music and, by his own accounts, dreamed of having a career scoring music for movies.  And one of his heroes in that regard was Henry Mancini.  In an interview I saw some years ago, he spoke of Mancini's almost unnatural ability to produce the most memorable music with so little effort. The example he gave was the theme to The Pink Panther. I mean, not until John Williams took the music world by storm with two notes meant to herald the arrival of a shark has a composer accomplished so much with so few notes.  

Fun stuff. For a bonus, that wizardly brilliant Pink Panther theme that can't be unheard for a least a day once you hear it: