These Twilight Memories pages feature an expanded version of an article that first appeared in Cool & Strange Music Magazine #21 in the summer of 2001.

Article contents ©2004 Michael David Toth and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without express permission of the author.

Casher describes the Three Suns In Japan LP, "It was a bizarre album for several reasons. It was Japanese children's folk songs that were jazzed up, and we put all sorts of bells and whistles and all kinds wacky sounds on it. It was sort of like a Three Suns version of Esquivel. But the melodies were very pretty. Artie asked me to write the live arrangements so that when we got to Japan we'd be able to play without a band backing us up. So when we were in Las Vegas, we'd work until 4:00 in the morning opposite Perez Prado and his band, and then I'd go home and sleep for a couple of hours and start writing arrangements."

The Japanese studio LP is immediately recognizable as the work of mastermind arranging madman Charles Albertine (previously mentioned in Part One). It was recorded in 1959, around the same time as his nifty Swingin' on a Star and his awe-inspiring A Ding Dong Dandy Christmas. As with his arrangements for American standards, Albertine took songs and musical instruments familiar to the Japanese culture and turned the songs inside out in the way he reassembled the elements.

Before Albertine, and a few years prior to winning a shared Oscar for their arrangements for theWest Side Story movie, Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal collaboratvely arranged albums released as "Al Nevins and His Orchestra." But as Al increasingly became a recording idea man in collaboration with arrangers, and Morty and Artie didn't have much if any involvement with the orchestral arrangements, the later albums under the Three Suns name were actually all becoming more "Al Nevins and His Orchestra" projects than documents of the original trio.

The third of four Al Nevins "solo" projects for RCA, 1957's Bon Voyage, is a hidden gem that seems to escape most Three Suns collectors. (It's so rare that many collectors think there are only three Nevins solo LPs!) The songs are ordered and arranged to document a fictitious trip around the world, with edited sound effects and jarring tempo and stylistic changes within individual songs, all used to convey a narrative described in the liner notes. The result is perhaps the most experimental Three Suns record of all (which, considering what Albertine would later do, is saying quite a lot).

Ramin recalled, "That was done before people knew much about editing and overdubbing. It was very different and Al was very daring at that time. For example, if you wanted to use cupped brass immediately following open brass, he said, 'Why can't we just record them in segments and just splice them?' From Al's initial ideas, (Kostal) and I did the arranging. Al picked the material, the repertoire, and we came up with the ideas, and we didn't even have to present it to him because he just trusted us to do whatever we thought was right. He'd have an idea, for example, of using a boat whistle, or an idea for a key change, and he might say, 'Wouldn't it be great if we did "Whispering" in so many different keys, say every four bars?' And we'd say, 'That's a great idea' and we would implement it. It was a collaborative effort. It was really fun looking back at it. But I must say that Al was very forward-looking and he did things like adding reverb that weren't yet done much at that time."

While this Web site aims for preservation, Al's unusual creative genius as a producer have mostly become lost and forgotten with time. Al Nevins' most significant legacy to the history of the music industry was indisputably through the music publishing company Aldon Music that he founded with Don Kirshner. From 1958 throughout the same Albertine-era years of the "Nevins-Kirshner Associates" studio production company, Aldon's staff of songwriters including Neil Sedaka, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil created a legacy of some of the biggest smash pop/rock hits of the early 1960s.

If anything connects the broad legacy of the Three Suns from the group's earliest roots to its final days, it was probably Al Nevin's sense of adventure. Al left in his wake a legacy of diverse recordings, most of which defy classification as easy listening, jazz, rock, or any other convenient genre. It was an unpredictable musical universe where accordions collided with beatnik bongos, guitars ping-ponged through hell, and organs sleigh-rode through avalanches of bells and tubas. "Sometimes subtly and variously violent, but always MOVIN' 'N' GROOVIN'."

— Michael David Toth,
Three Suns Webmaster

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