Manhattan Serenade - Louis Alter

**engelbach** · 11-12-2016, 07:59 PM

Manhattan Serenade is the background music that opens the Hollywood sequence in The Godfather. It's an old song, going back to 1929.

There's a version of it from the film on YouTube, but it's incomplete. Here's a link to Jo Stafford and Tommy Dorsey doing it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MvqRvxbRoE

It doesn't seem to be in any of the regular fake or real books. It's in the old Fake Book of 1000 Songs, Volume Two. There it's in the key of F, but all the recorded versions I've heard are in G, so mine is, too.

As always, I've added some of my own harmonies.

Manhattan Serenade-Rev JE - Louis Alter

**Keith88** · 11-12-2016, 11:41 PM

A bit of additional background info on "Manhattan Serenade:" The Dorsey version uses a secondary theme of the original composition. The first recording (1928) of "Manhattan Serenade" can be heard at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJjhVJ3x1Pw. In fact, "Manhattan Serenade" is a movement of a larger work entitled "Manhattan Suite." The other movements are "Manhattan Moonlight" and "Manhattan Masquerade." There are versions of all three movements by Paul Whiteman on Youtube and they are worth listening to.

I remember the many hours spent with both Volumes 1 and 2 when I was a teenager learning hundreds of standard tunes. I suspect you did the same thing many years ago, Jer.

**engelbach** · 11-14-2016, 04:54 PM

Keith, it's great to know that someone is still haunting this site. I was beginning to lose hope.

Thanks for the interesting additional background on the tune. I did not know any of that.

Boy, you pegged it. I joined a band after I turned 17, and we went to a music store and bought those first two volumes under the table for I think $10 or $15 each.

Later that summer, while working at my first real music job in the Catskills, a traveling fake book salesman (I don't know what else to call him) came along and sold us the newly released Volume Three, which contained only 500 tunes, as well as the Modern Jazz Fakebook.

I still have all of them, falling apart after more than 50 years. Volume One I have also in digital form, but not the others. Do you know if digitized versions are available for them?

As I'm sure you know, those fake books originated as Tune-Dex cards in 1942, and contained chord symbols from the original sheet music, usually for ukelele or guitar, which were often inaccurate and so of limited value to jazz musicians. My fake books are riddled with pencilled and inked corrections to the changes.

Cheers,
Jer