DECEMBER 2010 Mietek Szczesniak's new track (English version) written with Gary Baker, Matt Johnson, Mietek and Wendy. The city of Kalisz celebrates its 1850th birthday with this tune!
Besides co-writing the song, Wendy also produced it, plays guitar and sings backing vocals on the track.
Photos from September 10, 2009
Recording Session with Wendy Waldman
John Cowan, Kenny Edwards & Scott Babcock View Photos Here
My father, Fred Steiner the humble, gentle and extraordinary genius, great composer, scholar, thinker, and true man of grace, died today in Mexico. His family was with him. He was quiet, refined, courageous, and the breadth of his mind was immense. He and my mother, Shirley Steiner, were married 64 years. I wish so many of my friends could have known my dad, who was a great man.
My father, Fred Steiner, one of the last of the great Hollywood composers, died today in Mexico.
He came west in the late 40s to work in television and he was one of the most successful television composers of all time, having written the astonishing "Perry Mason" theme, the infectious second Rocky and Bullwinkle theme, years and years of Gunsmoke, Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Have Gun Will Travel, countless other shows, and many many animated shows as he was a marvelous animation composer as well. He became a well known scholar, was a great conductor, and was the last man standing from what is really the golden age of film and television music. His crowd all came of age together and remained close for their entire lives: Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, my dad, Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini, Hugo Friedhofer, Alfred Newman, and a host of others, who defined the world's idea of what movie and television music is supposed to be.
Their like will never be seen again. It was truly a unique period in American culture, and Fred was part of it, and witnessed it. His generation, which was really the next generation after guys like Gershwin and Eric Korngold, Max Steiner, moved west and became, a handful of them, the designers of music that will resonate for generations around the world. People may not even know their names. But my father was one of them.
Kenny Edwards passed away yesterday. He was my closest musical brother of some 40 + years, as he was to Karla Bonoff, whose best friend he was as well as producer, collaborator, sideman, and member with Andrew Gold, myself and Karla of Bryndle-- and he worked during the most significant years with Linda Ronstadt and many many others, the list being too long for this note. His incredibly long and influential career as a musician first impacted so many people, there is an enormous hole in a lot of our lives today. Kenny was a magnificent musician, my mentor, my brother, my chief songwriting partner of the last 20 of those 40 years...and I don't think he realized until the very end of his life how many people loved him, and how much his music had and will have a growing impact on the world of music around us.
We spent years talking about the things we all now discuss every day--we basically made music against the darkness, always, and it was a lively debate between our friends and us--this thing of continuing on when there's no roadmap as to how to do it other than to make it up as you go along and do it--and this, after many had ridden in the limousines.
I feel today like half of my musical soul is gone, but I understand as I always have that we make music, basically cause that's what we were put here to do. In some cultures and periods of human history, artists get to be kings-in other times, we are just working people: janitors and sign painters. Having witnessed a period when some of our colleagues became kings and some of us became sign painters, it was always a difficult and challenging proposition to remain flexible, low to the ground, passionate, excited, knowing that the ability to really kick ass with a song is a gift from God--Kenny had that in spades, as much as it pained him so at times to live through the transition. Nothing mattered more to us than the music, and we were intent on growing, and Kenny did to the very last day of his life. He was getting better and better.
There was a place he was getting to just now as an artist--and this is what I mourn the most. I saw where he was going, and how we could have used that music on this planet at this time!
But my son Abe,who enjoyed many intense and joyous moments of musical discussion with Ken, reminded me that Beethoven died ten years younger than Kenny, as did Joe Strummer, Chris Whitley, Chopin-- and there would have been more music there too--imagine it. We are so lucky to have what we have from all of these great musicians, it is the greatest treasure, and really the only treasure we can keep.
I am the luckiest woman on earth because I made a ton of music with Kenny Edwards from the time I was 18 years old until even now, when I have tracks of his I have to mix, somehow. I am grateful for the time I had with him and I hope all of our friends will enjoy the great music he left for us in all kinds of incarnations, starting with the Stone Poneys until his newest, magnificent cd, Resurrection Road.
