Whole Lifetimes Set to Mancini

When it came to music, composer, conductor, arranger, pianist Henry Mancini could do everything. Well, almost everything.

“He was a terrible singer,” Monica Mancini says with a laugh. “I didn’t get the idea [to become a singer] from him,” adds the daughter of the composer of “Moon River,” “Dear Heart,” “The Days of Wine and Roses” and scores of other hits from the movies. “He couldn’t even carry a tune.”

Instead, says Mancini, who appears tonight through Saturday at Founders Hall in the Orange County Performing Arts Center, the inspiration to become a vocalist came from her mother, Ginny.

“Mom was a studio singer,” Mancini said by phone from her Studio City home. “She worked with the Glenn Miller Orchestra--that’s where my father met her; they were in the orchestra together--and she sang for several television shows, ‘Red Skelton,’ ‘Dinah Shore.’ So when I was growing up, Mom was a working mother. We went off to school, and she went off to work and sang.”

But Dad had an influence as well, suggested by a photo in the liner notes with her recent “Monica Mancini” album. The snapshot shows young Monica with her brother and sister looking at a book; Pops sits nearby at a piano, composing.

“My father used to say that he wished he was at home more while we were growing up,” said Mancini, “but my recollection of back then was that Mom and Dad were very much at home. We led a normal life. Dad had an office-studio in the house, and he would work there all the time, and we would come in a mess around. He never threw us out.”

Mancini grew up to sing background and studio dates for Nelson Riddle, Quincy Jones, Placido Domingo and Kenny Rogers, among others. She sang on soundtracks for movies including “Victor/Victoria,” “Batman” and “City Slickers.” She sang Mancini programs, some with her father at the piano, with various pops and symphonic orchestras around the country before the chance came to do her first recording last year.

The singer was shopping a demonstration album she’d made with various record companies about the same time that Warner Bros. and PBS entered into an agreement to do joint recordings and television specials.

“They were trying to work off that Andrea Bocelli phenomenon,” Mancini said. “His sales shot through the roof after he was heard on television. They wanted to tape a series of one-hour specials to go along with the recordings.”

A friend at Warner Bros. heard Mancini’s demo and figured the singer would be perfect for the kind of audience they were trying to reach. Mancini was tabbed to become the first performer to record for the new PBS series.

“It was a bonus for me,” she said. “I didn’t expect to have a television show. The kind of music that I sing doesn’t get much radio play, so the television exposure was marvelous.”

The PBS special, “Monica Mancini . . . On Record,” was recorded during a concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall and was first aired Dec. 7, less than a month after the album release.

Mancini, working with a full orchestra arranged and conducted by Patrick Williams, included a number of her father’s songs, including a duet with Johnny Mathis on “Dreamsville,” just as she does on the PBS special. On the program, Mancini shares stories with one of her father’s great interpreters, Andy Williams.

“There were always people coming over to the house when I was growing up. Andy and Quincy [Jones] and all kinds of people just came over to play. I thought they were just normal people. I wasn’t star-struck. But I do remember what a thrill it was when Sean Connery showed up. If Paul McCartney had walked through the door, now that would have been something different.”

Despite all the celebrities he knew and worked with, Henry Mancini remained a regular guy, his daughter said. “That’s why musicians loved working with him,” she said. “He was so much fun, just one of the guys. He always thought of himself as a musician first, and he loved going out on the road and hanging with the musicians.”

The same qualities were also what made the composer’s music so popular, Mancini said. “[My father] had a real gift for melody. People respond to great melody, to something they can remember and repeat. It touches them.”

Though she most often performs with full orchestra, for her Orange County dates Mancini will be working with a quartet that includes her husband, drummer Gregg Field (who produced her album), as well as pianist Tom Ranier, guitarist Anthony Wilson and bassist Chuck Berghofer.

“I was asked to play the Algonquin [cabaret club in New York] last summer with a trio and put together a set for small group. It’s a very different show [than the one recorded for the PBS special]. We dug deep into the vaults to come up with [Henry Mancini] music that most people aren’t familiar with.”

She’s looking to move beyond the Mancini songbook when she records her next album, but the Mancini name will figure large in her next project: a pair of concerts in Wisconsin this spring on a double bill with Frank Sinatra Jr. and his orchestra.

“Even I was impressed,” she said, “when I saw the title ‘Sinatra-Mancini Live.’ It sounds historic.”

BE THERE

Monica Mancini appears at Founders Hall, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center ‘Drive, Costa Mesa; 7:30 p.m. tonight, 7:30 and 9:45 p.m. Friday-Saturday. $46 for 7:30 p.m. shows, $42 for 9:45 p.m. (714) 556-2787.