from The New Yorker, January 28, 2010
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Last Wednesday night, I was fortunate enough to be at the Allen Room in Frederick P. Rose Hall for "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," Hal Willner’s inspired rejiggering of the “Great American Songbook.” With the lights of New York forming an ideal backdrop through the venue’s glass back wall, Rufus Wainwright crooned Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” (1936). Sting emerged from the audience and lustily sang the Gershwin brothers’ “Love is Here to Stay” (1938), in what was likely the only time the standard had been performed by a man wearing cargo pants and a sleeveless T-shirt. And, following numbers by Shannon McNally, Marc Anthony Thompson, Van Dyke Parks, Jenni Muldaur, and Christine Ohlman, Lou Reed stomped his way through the great 1943 Harold Arlen / Johnny Mercer hit “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).”
The show was held in conjunction with David Lehman’s exceptional new book “A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs,” which inspired a freestyle narration by Ken Nordine, whose pre-recorded voice was piped into the room last night from on high, sounding like the received word from a better, more devious God.
Lehman’s central theme is that while the success of great popular composers and songwriters—Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II—owes much to their Jewish cultural heritage, the songs they wrote often served as a way to escape “their Jewish origins and join the American adventure.” (Philip Roth writes about this exact idea in several novels, perhaps most movingly in “American Pastoral,” and most histrionically in “The Plot Against America.”) 
Lehman’s foremost example of what he calls this paradox (Richard Rodgers actually attended Camp Paradox as a child), is Irving Berlin (born Israel Baline) [pictured left] who in writing such songs as “God Bless America” and “White Christmas,” was preaching a new religion, that of America itself.
Yet Lehman is both proud and protective of his own connection to these great songwriters, going as far as to cast himself as a fictional nephew to Uncle Jerry (Kern) and Uncle Harry (Arlen)[pictured right]. 
And he offers a clever turn on a famous line from “West Side Story” (Bernstein / Sondheim), noting that, “When you’re a Jew, you’re a Jew all the way.” His most intriguing argument is that even the songs by non-Jews of the era, “are in some fundamental way inflected with Judaism.” Lehman’s thrust is a cleaned-up riff on the classic Lenny Bruce Jewish/goyish bit: “If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish … Negroes are all Jews. Italians are all Jews. Irishmen who have rejected their religion are Jews.” The connection between Jews, blacks, and goys is not inconsequential: it forms one of the central components of music from the standards era, perhaps best exemplified by Frank Sinatra singing “Ol’ Man River,” 
[pictured right on the radio in the 1940s] or as Lehman puts it, “the lean Italian dressed in white singing a song by Jews about the plight of blacks.” (It’s worth noting, also, that Lenny Bruce made an appearance last night, in the person of Steve Cuiffo, doing a version of the above bit. A crazy show!)
While navigating these elaborate and often fraught ideas, Lehman consistently applies a light touch, perfect for a book about songs with lyrics such as: “The eyes, the arms, the mouth of you,/ The east, west, north, and south of you.” That one’s from “All of You,” by Cole Porter [pictured left], a Midwestern WASP who went to Yale, yet who wrote lyrics that fit squarely into what Lehman understands as a tradition that “followed a Jewish imperative in their abundant humor, wit, and cleverness and in their ability to mix sadness and elation and to produce thereby the mysterious tingle of romance.” Porter was all about romance, and his songs “Let’s Do It,” “Let’s Misbehave,” and “You’re the Top,” can make even the most hardened stoic grin like a fool. If you’re not convinced, check out Bobby Short’s debonair version of “You’re the Top,” which includes such improbable rhymes as: “You’re a rose,/ You’re Inferno’s Dante,/ You’re the nose / On the great Durante.”
For all the fun of the pop song, however, there is an underlying sadness throughout the book. “An ode to the great songwriters is bound to turn elegiac,” Lehman writes. He includes a chronology at the end of the book that starts at 1,000 b.c., with King David (“a musician”) ruling over the Kingdom of Israel, and ends with Bob Dylan performing an electric set at the Newport Film Festival in 1965. (Interestingly, last night’s bassist was Tony Garnier, a longtime member of Dylan’s current touring band.) Lehman likes Dylan, and even links him to Harold Arlen and the other Jewish songwriters of an earlier era. 
But Dylan heralded, in many ways, the death of the popular standard. He—along with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—made the guitar king, and eliminated the composer/lyricist dynamic by doing it all himself. Additionally, folk and rock music communicated the anger and confusion of the time, rather than scoring points with cheeky internal rhymes and charming pathos. “The new music devalued cleverness and irony, not to mention the clarinet and the trombone,” Lehman writes.
The standards celebrated the American “good life,” something that in the nineteen-sixties suddenly seemed bourgeois, old-fashioned, or narrow. An example: As the boys in the Barry Levinson movie “Diner,” (set in 1959) argued about who was better—Sinatra or Johnny Mathis—Mickey Rourke, the beautiful young Mickey Rourke, ended the discussion, and the era, by naming “Presley,” as in Elvis, as his choice instead. That movie’s great opening scene at the dance hall now looks like a museum piece. The gentle notion of “romance” had turned to camp. Dancing was finished, and for those who have lamented the last fifty years of pop music, so was sophistication and style.
Which brings us back to last Wednesday, to Lou Reed and “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).” That killer interpretation, along with Marc Anthony Thompson’s gorgeous rendition of “Spanish Harlem,” suggested that at least for that moment—with the city lights shining in the distance, and the traffic inching cross-town—the old popular standard could live alongside rock, and that hits are hits no matter when they were written or how they are performed.
from The New Yorker, January 28, 2010. Pictured top left: George and Ira Gershwin. Bottom left: Rufus Wainwright and David Lehman after the concert. See also the write-up that appeared in Tablet.
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