Barry Manilow

From Wind Repertory Project
Barry Manilow

Biography

Barry Manilow (born Barry Alan Pincus, 17 June 1943, Brooklyn, N.Y.) is an American singer-songwriter, arranger, musician, and producer.

Manilow grew up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and attended Eastern District High School, graduating in 1961. That same year, he enrolled in the City College of New York where he briefly studied before entering the New York College of Music. He also worked at CBS while he was a student, and later studied at the Juilliard performing arts school.

In 1964, Manilow met Bro Herrod, a CBS director, who asked him to arrange some songs for a musical adaptation of the melodrama The Drunkard. Instead, Manilow wrote an entire original score. Herrod used Manilow's composition in the Off Broadway musical, which enjoyed an eight-year run at New York's 13th Street Theatre. Manilow then earned money by working as a pianist, producer and arranger. During this time, he began to work as a commercial jingle writer, continuing well into the 1970s.

When Bell Records was taken over by Clive Davis, he was reassured by the Manilow acquisition after seeing him perform as the opening act at a Dionne Warwick concert, the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park, New York, on June 26, 1974. The partnership began to gain traction in 1974, with the release of his second album, Barry Manilow II, on Bell Records and reissued on Arista, which contained the breakthrough number-one hit, Mandy. Mand was the start of a string of hit singles and albums that lasted through the rest of the 1970s to the early 1980s, coming from the multi-platinum and multi-hit albums Tryin' to Get the Feeling, This One's for You, Even Now, and One Voice.

As well as producing and arranging albums for other artists, including Bette Midler and Dionne Warwick, Manilow has written songs for musicals, films, and commercials. Since March 2010, he has headlined at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas. He has sold more than 80 million records worldwide, making him one of the world's best-selling artists of all time. He is best known for a long string of hit recordings such as Mandy, Can't Smile Without You, and Copacabana (At the Copa).


Works for Winds


Resources