Of all the great songs that Hart wrote with Richard Rodgers, that's not one of them. I'm much happier to write about "Have You Met Miss Jones?" a lyric by Hart that conveys in a few lines the meeting between a cocky and maybe pretentious young man and a woman who sees through him: "All at once, I lost my breath / and all at once, was scared to death / and all at once, I owned the earth and sky."
I learned a couple dozen of the Rodgers and Hart songs from a 2-LP survey by Bobby Short. Playing piano and singing, Short brought exuberance to the songs and sometimes brought out the edginess in Hart's lyrics -- Hart, I understand, loathed himself, and wrote about his own "laughable" looks for "My Funny Valentine." In a similar set of Rodgers and Hart tunes recorded in the late 1970s with just guitar and trumpet, Tony Bennett creates an intimate and personal feeling.
[For a curated list of my blogposts about these artists and others, see my page Saloon Singers.]
For Valentine's Day, husband-and-wife saloon singers John Pizzarelli and Jessie Molaskey offered commentary from experience for some wonderful recordings they played on their podcast Radio Deluxe. (I listen to them Sundays online from Toronto's CJRT 90.1).
[PHOTO, clockwise from top: John Pizzarelli, Jessie Molaskey; Barbara Cook; Peggy Lee; Johnny Hartman, John Coltrane, and McCoy Tyner]
From Johnny Hartman's collaboration with John Coltrane in 1961, they selected Irving Berlin's tune "They Say It's Wonderful." The recording is wonderful, with Hartman's rich baritone voice, backed by McCoy Tyner on piano, and Coltrane's elegant sax obligato. Molaskey remembered a Julliard student singing this song during a master class with Broadway diva Barbara Cook. Molaskey imitated the young man's big operatic voice and told how Cook halted his performance to ask what the song was about. "Falling in love," the guy said. "'So they say... so they tell me,'" Cook added. "This character hasn't experienced love, and doesn't know if he ever will. Sing it like that." Johnny Hartman does.
Molaskey asks the radio audience, "What's more romantic on Valentine's Day than playing your own husband's recording of 'Our Love is Here to Stay?'" She remembered Pizzarelli's band playing arranger Don Sebesky's chart the first time and crying because Sebesky had worked the song "Little Darlin'" into the accompaniment. Pizzarelli's vocal performance, as always, is clear and affable, tossed off as if the words and music are just the way he feels.
Then he set up the final track of the episode by pointing out that he and his wife are empty nesters, now. The recording was "The Folks Who Live on the Hill," Peggy Lee singing Jerome Kern's music and Oscar Hammerstein's lyrics. I'd heard the song before, and it seemed homespun and obvious.
Maybe the host's introduction helped me to appreciate "The Folks Who Live on the Hill," or it may be the simplicity of Lee's delivery, but this recording today made me cry. It's your basic AABA lyric, each "A" ending with the title phrase, but in that space Hammerstein tells the life story of a couple, from courtship to parenthood to empty nest and beyond, a time when the couple "who live on the hill" are remembered in past tense. It's a sweet love song that anticipates all of their life together, 'til death parts them. That was my parents' story.
PS: Knowing that Pizzarelli and Molaskey did a Sondheim tribute at the Cafe Carlyle some years ago, I checked out their show for December 4, a week following Sondheim's death. They reminisced about him, and told of director Hal Prince's annual party where the rule was, sing anything but Sondheim. That changed following 9/11/2001, when it was all Sondheim songs, composer Jason Roberts Brown at the piano. Sondheim wept to hear everyone in the room singing every word by heart. When Barbara Cook arrived late (following a gig), Sondheim requested "In Buddy's Eyes" from Follies. He once said that had been a "throwaway" bit of exposition, but Cook was a revelation in her first pass at the song during rehearsal for the 1985 concert recording. She took the words at face value, and sang the character's appreciation for her hapless husband as if she were totally sincere.
[PHOTO: "Joe Alterman: Joyous and Joyful Young Virtuoso" from Theater Pizzazz.]
Young jazz pianist Joe Alterman primed me to feel this way by his selection of songs at his performance last weekend at the Marcus Jewish Cultural Center north of Atlanta, a facility he loved when he was growing up (which was, maybe, 10 years ago). I watched his hands amazed, as he seemed sometimes barely to be touching the keys when cascades of sound were coming at us. He takes us to surprising places, but never too far away from the melody to know where we are.
Three of the numbers that Alterman played with his trio were songs that my parents sang. Before I even started school I remember musical evenings when my siblings gathered around Mom's electric chord organ and Dad's guitar to sing with our young parents. Sometimes, Dad serenaded his wife with this song:
I can only give you love that lasts forever
And a promise to be near each time you call
And the only heart I own
For you and you alone
That's all
--"That's All" by Bob Haymes
...and sometimes, this...
It's not the pale moon
That excites me
That thrills and delights me
Oh no
It's just the nearness of you
--"The Nearness of You" by Hoagy Carmichael
Alterman played many other songs, but these were sentimental favorites. When Alterman announced what his final number would be, and it was my Mom's lullabye to us, "You Are My Sunshine," I made a sound to which Alterman responded, "I get that reaction every time."
Awwwwwwww.
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