Stories of Standards: “Invitation”

Tune in to Jazz with Victor Cooper – weekdays from 6-9 a.m. MT – for Stories of Standards to hear our favorite versions of this song all week long starting Monday, November 20!

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Bronislau Kaper wrote the “Invitation” melody for the 1950 movie “A Life of Her Own”, starring Lana Turner and Ray Milland. While the film’s score was nominated for a Golden Globe award, the movie didn’t fare as well. The music was then used as the theme of the 1952 movie “Invitation”, which starred Dorothy Maguire and Van Johnson, with lyrics to the title tune by Paul Francis Webster. Consequently, “Invitation” is generally given the date of the second movie. While never on the charts, John Coltrane’s 1958 recording provided the impetus for its status as a jazz standard and it has been recorded numerous times in recent years.

Bronislau Kaper (1902-1983) was a prodigy in his native Poland, where he studied music and law befre moving to Berlin to concentrate on music. Anti-Semitism led him from Berlin to Paris in 1933, while an offer from Louis B. Meyer led him along with lyricist and collaborator Walter Jurmann to Hollywood. Soon afterwards they composed the score for “A Night at the Opera” (1935). In the following thirty years he wrote for film and television and in the score for “Mutiny on the Bounty” introduced American audiences to gamelan, the traditional percussive music of Java and Bali.

Paul Francis Webster (1907-1984) won three Academy Awards for Best Song (“Secret Love” (1953), “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing” (1955) and “The Shadow of Your Smile” (1965). He was nominated 16 times for the award. His careers included working on ships in Asia and serving as a dance instructor in the Arthur Murray Dance Studio system before concentrating on writing lyrics. His first major song was “Masquerade”, with John Jacob Loeb, which became a hit for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in 1932. Webster’s songs include “The Green Leaves of Summer” (1960), “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good) (1941), “Somewhere My Love” (1966), theme song for “Spider-Man” (1967) and “The Twelfth of Never” (1956).