updates on Gaga/Tony Bennett collab album

When Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga collaborate on their upcoming jazz album, Marion Evans will be prominently involved. The Bucks County resident has been composing and arranging music for famous entertainers for more than 60 years.

The phone rang at 2 or 3 in the morning, but when it’s Tony Bennett on the other end, you don’t mind being roused from a sound sleep.

“We finally signed Gaga,” Bennett told his longtime friend that night in 2011. “We’ve got to get into the studio to record her.”

For some, such news would have been mind-blowing. For Marion Evans, it was business as usual.

Evans, 86, and his wife of 22 years, former Miss America runner-up Terri Rinaldi-Evans, are perhaps Bucks County’s most musically gifted couple, with résumés that include Grammy nominations and gold records for him and numerous stage and screen appearances for her. They moved to the area from Connecticut about five years ago, living in the Regency at Northampton retirement community in Holland.

Not that Evans is close to retired.

The veteran music arranger and composer arranged five songs on Bennett’s platinum-selling, Grammy-winning 2011 album “Duets II,” including “The Lady Is a Tramp” with Lady Gaga. The first song on the disc was the last to be recorded, coming after lengthy contractual wrangling and only a few days before the cutoff date for the album’s completion, prompting Bennett’s urgent, middle-of-the-night phone call.

Evans worked on the arrangement through the night and into the next day, a band was booked to record the music and, soon after, Lady Gaga arrived to lay down her vocal track.

“I couldn’t figure out how she would do a song like this,” Evans recalls. “But she’s a fabulous musician. She walks right in, picks up the music, hears the track one time and the next time, that’s it. One take. She was fantastic.”

Overall, Evans wrote 18 arrangements for the album, but only five were actually recorded.

“I’m thinking about having an arrangement garage sale,” he quips.

But that’s to be expected, especially for a project involving so many celebrity egos. More than 40 singers were initially invited to participate.

For a recording project that included getting stood up by multiple artists for personal or contractual reasons, Cher and Bette Midler both wanting to record the same song (neither ended up on the album) and contending with an 11-member PBS film crew that, Evans says, “couldn’t keep quiet,” Gaga’s participation couldn’t have gone any smoother — especially in a business where, Evans points out, “nothing ever runs smooth.”

So smooth, in fact, that Bennett and Lady Gaga are planning to record a big-band jazz album together, a project Evans will be a big part of.

Evans teaches a class in composition to professional musicians every other Saturday at Arcadia University. But he expects much of his time in the near future to be consumed by the Bennett/Gaga album.

“I don’t know at this point exactly how many songs will be on the CD, but I’m sure we’ll have about four or five different-sized orchestras or bands,” he says. “It’ll turn into a giant panic, I can assure you. That’s just how this business is.”

Evans’ list of collaborators reads like a who’s who of 20th-century entertainers: Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Judy Garland, Eydie Gormé and Steve Lawrence, Sammy Davis Jr., Perry Como, Helen O’Connell, Carole King, Bennett and many others.

He wrote arrangements for 65 gold records and 17 TV shows (writing the closing theme for the “Tonight Show with Johnny Carson”) and orchestrated 11 Broadway shows.