RECENT MANCINI – HANK’S TOP 3 SONGS in MODERN WORKS
Months ago, I kicked around a final Henry Mancini centennial year blogpost that, perhaps, should have been my first this year. The idea was to point to three recent pop culture uses of Henry Mancini’s music – that could guide generations born after Mancini’s heyday (or his life) to his genius. The tricky word in that last sentence is “recent”. I asked my friend Paul – a teacher at American University – what his audio and composition students consider “recent”. His reply: anything that happened in the last 30 years. That was a good start for me – especially since Mancini passed away 30 years ago on June 14, 1994. While I wanted to blitzkrieg readers with the appearances or homages to Mancini in all things from Hallmark movies to Spotify covers, I decided to stick to his top 3 most popular songs most often associated with the name Henry Mancini. Those songs, in order of release, would be: Peter Gunn, Moon River, and the Pink Panther theme. And so, here is a recent appearance of each of
