One Last Encore for the Golden Ear

Reunited After Fifty Years, Randy Edelman and Tony Orlando Take the Stage in the Shadow — and the Light — of Clive Davis

Every great song has someone standing just offstage — the one who heard it first, believed in it hardest, and pushed it into the world. For an entire golden age of American music, that someone was Clive Davis. And when Randy Edelman and Tony Orlando reunite on Friday, July 24, 2026, at 8:00 PM at the Bellmore Movies & The Showplace — sharing a stage for the first time in more than fifty years — the man with the golden ear will be standing just offstage one final time, the way he always was. This time, in memory.

Davis, who passed away in June, was the towering figure of the modern record business: president of Columbia Records, founder of Arista, and, to the very end, chief creative officer of Sony Music Entertainment. He guided Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, Santana, Barry Manilow, and Alicia Keys — a roster that reads like the history of the radio itself. But the truest measure of Clive Davis was never only the superstars. It was the moments — a phone call, a green light, a single yes — that quietly changed the course of an artist’s whole life. The two men reuniting in Bellmore are living proof.

The Yes That Made Tony Orlando

In 1970, Tony Orlando was a music executive at CBS’s April-Blackwood publishing house, his teenage hitmaking days behind him, when friends asked him to lend his voice to a little song called “Candida.” It was a favor — sung anonymously, with a possible conflict of interest hanging over the whole thing, since Orlando worked in the Columbia Records family. The decision could have been killed at the top. Columbia’s president was Clive Davis. He let it happen. “Candida” went around the world, “Knock Three Times” followed it to number one, and “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” became the biggest-selling record of 1973. One quiet yes from Clive Davis, and Tony Orlando and Dawn — Carnegie Hall, primetime television, five number-one hits, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — came into being.

The Believer in Randy Edelman

Randy Edelman’s road ran through the same rarefied world. A young staff songwriter at that very same April-Blackwood office — where Orlando was the executive and Edelman the kid with the melodies — he wrote “Weekend in New England,” which Barry Manilow, Davis’s signature Arista superstar, carried into the Top Ten and into history. Edelman himself recorded as an Arista artist under Davis’s banner, and his songs found their way to The Carpenters, Patti LaBelle, Olivia Newton-John, and Dionne Warwick before Hollywood claimed him as one of its most beloved composers — The Last of the Mohicans, Gettysburg, Dragonheart, The Mask, My Cousin Vinny, Kindergarten Cop, the MacGyver theme, and the Emmy-winning music of NBC’s Olympics. The golden ear heard Randy Edelman coming, too.

The Encore

So understand what July 24 truly is. On the surface: a magnificent evening of music — Randy Edelman at the piano, presented by Tony Orlando, in the intimate, roughly 325-seat jewel that is the oldest theater on Long Island, just steps from the Long Island Rail Road. Songs, film themes, and a half-century of stories between two men whose paths began in the same office and never crossed a stage again until now.

But beneath the surface, it is something more tender: the first time these two artists stand together in a world without Clive Davis — and the most fitting memorial imaginable. Not a eulogy. A concert. Because men like Davis never asked for monuments; they asked for music. Every note played in Bellmore that night is a note he, in some way, made possible — two careers his instinct touched, harmonizing at last.

The lights go down, the piano begins, and somewhere just offstage, the golden ear is listening. This one’s for Clive.

Randy Edelman & Tony Orlando — Reunited After 50 Years

Friday, July 24, 2026 • 8:00 PM

Bellmore Movies & The Showplace • Bellmore, New York — steps from the Long Island Rail Road

Tickets available via Eventbrite

Produced by JD Sarantakos, JD’s Productions •Supported by Paul’s Pianos  1115 Theodora St., Franklin Square, NY 11010