The Best American Poetry

Happy birthday to you, Georges Bizet

 

On George Gershwin's Birthday [by David Lehman]

On George Gershwin’s birthday
I keep expecting them to play
Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris,
the Cuban Overture,  the Concerto in F,
Porgy and Bess as played by Miles Davis,
but no, all day it’s been Dvorak, Grieg,
Rimsky-Korsakov, and other worthies
not born today, Elgar for heaven’s sake;
at least they could give us some Debussy,
as didn’t they (such a useful pronoun)
criticize him for imitating Debussy,
or Ravel, who declined to give George lessons
saying “Why become a second-rate Ravel
when you’re already a first-rate Gershwin?”

-- DL

Lenny's "Divertimento" [by David Lehman]

So you've never heart it before, / or even heard it,  / you're driving on Highland Road when it starts, / and instead of driving up East Remington and home, / you drive down Highland / until it intersects with Hanshaw, / then double back, and drive up the Parkway / and back down and then over to Berkshire / and then to Cayuga Heights Road / and finally Sunset Park, / but you don't stop, you continue driving, / so you can hear the whole thing /all eighteen minutes forty eight seconds of it, / the end enthralling, the music outlasting the applause / with thanks to Lauren Rico for playing it / on "Symphony Hall" (Sirius 76) / Bernstein's Divertimento for Orchestra / composed in 1980, and said to be / based on two notes, B (for Boston) and C (for Centennial).  -- DL

Happy birthday, Lenny (August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) 

Leonard Bernstein (August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) conducts the overture to "Candide"

Vic Damone's Breakout Hit (Al Martino sings it at Connie's wedding)

Here's to you, Vito Farinola, on your birthday (June 12). "I Have But One Heart" was Vic Damone's breakout hit. Al Martino playing Johnny Fontaine sings it at Connie Corleone's wedding in The Godfather. Vic Damone had auditioned for the part. -- DL

Judy Gemini Could Go On Singing [by David Lehman]

Judy Garland: The Road Gets Rougher

          Born to sing America’s all-time favorite movie song, Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland was as natural a Gemini as you will find – totally binary, loyal to a fault yet fickle, cheerful and proud yet sometimes suicidally desperate.  She habitually came late to the set fortified by drinking bottles of “Blue Nun,” “Liebfraumilch,” and similar white stuff, which tasted terrible but did the job.

    On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death. The 2019 movie Judy did Judy no favors.

          Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.

         The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands and a torrid affair with lyricist Johnny Mercer when she was eighteen and he, thirty. He wrote the words of “That Old Black Magic” and “I Remember You” with her in mind.

         An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars.  From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001.

          As kids Judy and Mickey Rooney teamed up in movies, and their duet versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. The two best versions of "Have Yourself a Merryl Little Christmas," the best American Christmas song not writen by Jews, are hers and Sinatra's. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.

         In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.

            In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Tormé's account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Tormé was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Tormé says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pulling for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.

           Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. She had a natural talent for the Al Jolson songbook ("After You've Gone"). At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.

            If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.

-- from the archives; first appeared, in somewhat different form, in 2014. 

          Born to sing America’s all-time favorite movie song, Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland was as natural a Gemini as you will find – totally binary, loyal to a fault yet fickle, cheerful and proud yet sometimes suicidally desperate.  She habitually came late to the set fortified by drinking bottles of “Blue Nun,” “Liebfraumilch,” and similar white stuff, which tasted terrible but did the job.

    On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death. The 2019 movie Judy did Judy no favors.

          Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.

         The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands and a torrid affair with lyricist Johnny Mercer when she was eighteen and he, thirty. He wrote the words of “That Old Black Magic” and “I Remember You” with her in mind.

         An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars.  From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001.

          As kids Judy and Mickey Rooney teamed up in movies, and their duet versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. The two best versions of "Have Yourself a Merryl Little Christmas," the best American Christmas song not writen by Jews, are hers and Sinatra's. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.

         In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.

            In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Tormé's account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Tormé was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Tormé says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pulling for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.

           Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. She had a natural talent for the Al Jolson songbook ("After You've Gone"). At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.

            If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.

-- from the archives; first appeared, in somewhat different form, in 2014. 

          Born to sing America’s all-time favorite movie song, Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland was as natural a Gemini as you will find – totally binary, loyal to a fault yet fickle, cheerful and proud yet sometimes suicidally desperate.  She habitually came late to the set fortified by drinking bottles of “Blue Nun,” “Liebfraumilch,” and similar white stuff, which tasted terrible but did the job.

    On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death. The 2019 movie Judy did Judy no favors.

          Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.

         The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands and a torrid affair with lyricist Johnny Mercer when she was eighteen and he, thirty. He wrote the words of “That Old Black Magic” and “I Remember You” with her in mind.

         An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars.  From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001.

          As kids Judy and Mickey Rooney teamed up in movies, and their duet versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. The two best versions of "Have Yourself a Merryl Little Christmas," the best American Christmas song not writen by Jews, are hers and Sinatra's. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.

         In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.

            In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Tormé's account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Tormé was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Tormé says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pulling for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.

           Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. She had a natural talent for the Al Jolson songbook ("After You've Gone"). At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.

            If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.

-- from the archives; first appeared, in somewhat different form, in 2014. 

The apotheosis of birthday boy Dean Martin (June 7,1917 – December 25, 1995)

 

"They're gonna take a hike / through Hitler's Reich": D-Day plus 76

There'll be a hot time in the town of Berlin. . .

 

"After You Get What You Want, You Don't Want It" [with Marilyn Monroe]

On Marilyn Monroe’s Birthday

On Marilyn Monroe’s birthday I have
to catch my breath running
as a receiver catches a football,
shakes off tacklers, glides down
the sidelines to the end zone as
the game clock runs out or
like a fisherman angling for
trout, turning over phrases
until I feel a tug, catch a bite, that’s
what this jolt of morning joe, like “joltin’
Joe” DiMaggio, has done to me but if
I could calm down long enough to stop
hurrying and concentrate on the lawn
in front of me the wind at my back the laughter
from Alexander Pope’s dagger-like couplets
still echoing from last night’s reading
of The Dunciad – or maybe just to clear
the mind of words, all of them, including
the words that keep coming even now
-- if I could look at the trees darkening
as a cloud covers the sun, look at the grass,
the myrtle, the pine needles, the maple leaves
and the one rhododendron the deer have not devoured,
what then? After ten minutes of bliss,
I shall return to my mind, and she will be singing,
“After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It.”

Music and lyrics by Irving Berlin
Video from the movie "There's No Business Like Show Business"

Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage" [a Jamie Katz Recommendation]

Jamie Katz has been asked to select the ten musical albums that have made the greatest impact on him. He posts one album cover per day for ten consecutive days. This is his choice for day #3:

 

On Fats Waller's Birthday: A Poem [by David Lehman]

Fats Waller Live in 1935

You and I both know why
“all my blondes and brunettes”
become
“all my Harlem coquettes”
when Fats Waller sings
“Lulu’s Back in Town”
after playing it on the piano
in 1935.

Think of that: in 1935
when everyone was supposed
to be miserable, here was Fats Waller
with his derby hat mustache cigarette and huge grin
playing and singing for the sheer joy of it.

Soundtrack for "The Daily Mirror" [by Joshua Michael Stewart]

Joshua Michael Stewart has created a Spotify soundtrack for The Daily Mirror by David Lehman (Scribner, 2000). It includes Ella and Louis singing "Can't We Be Friends," Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters accentuating the positive, Dexter Gordon's "Tangerine," Sinatra's "All of Me," Bessie Smith (pictured far left in a 1936 photo taken by Carl Van Vechten) singing "Do Your Duty," Horace Silver's "Song for My Father," plus Freddie Hubbard, Coleman Hawkins, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Miles Davis ("Bags' Groove), Thelonious Monk, Peggy Lee, and Nat Cole.

Click here to order or to obtain more information.

 

"Beyond the Sea" (1959 & 1973): Bobby Darin's great nostalgia trip

No more sailin'. . . Happy birthday, Bobby (May 14, 1969 -- December 20, 1973). He gave an amazing nine-minute performance of "Beyond the Sea"  in 1973, the year he died. (There's a full-length tape but we're denied access.) What a talent. He could play the trombone with his voice -- he does it here. In the fourth clip, you'll see what a tremendous gift he had for mimicry: he does Andy Williams's "Moon River" exactly as Andy did it. Finally, I couldn't resist putting up the episode of The Jack Benny Show with Bobby Darin as his guest (January 28, 1964). -- DL

"Black, Brown, and Beige": Happy birthday, Duke Ellington

1.
The horns say yes proceed
And the sea delivers
Nine waves of applause
Black, brown, and beige
Or red, white, and blue
At Carnegie Hall in World War II

2.
A couple of winds
Sing back and forth like birds
As the sky darkens and clouds
Release their energy
The horns have their say
And even the violins agree
So the answer is yes,
A cymbal crash,
Before the trumpet takes up
The wail and the season changes
From black to brown to orange
In the wah-wah woods

3. You could have one instrument
And the music would continue
Mute the horns
And the music will continue
The notes like masks on the subway
And the streets are empty
Except for the music
Take a walk with me on Broadway
And let the games resume 

4/ 29/ 20

Great Movie Music: Fifteen examples that avoid the usual suspects [by David Lehman]

from The American Scholar

By David Lehman | April 28, 2020

Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot (1959). (TCM Mediaroom/Wikimedia Commons)

In an effort to be mildly unconventional, this list of songs, soundtracks, and musical moments from cinematic history omits all “best song” Oscar winners (“Over the Rainbow,” “Thanks for the Memory,” “Moon River”), old favorites (“Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “As Time Goes By”), justly celebrated soundtracks (Gone with the Wind, The Godfather, Vertigo, 2001), and numbers performed by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland.

1. “Isn’t it Romantic” (music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart) in Love Me Tonight(1932). This great standard is sung in a musical relay race begun by Paris tailor Maurice Chevalier in his shop and continued by a customer in a top hat, a taxi driver, a composer, a troop of soldiers, and a gypsy band, before reaching princess Jeanette MacDonald in the casement of her palace boudoir. The glamorous melody is whistled, performed as a violin solo, and sung as a show tune, a march, and an aria. You hear the tune in a lot of movies but usually without the words that you get here.
   
   For the other fourteen, click here.

Harold Bloom on Jazz

Harold Bloom [photo by Sue Mingus]

. . . the whole jazz tradition from at least Amstrong on features what was called "cutting." And cutting is the pure instance – from the Greeks on, and it was revived by Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzche – of the agonistic spirit; the agon or the contest. The last cutting contest I heard was the rather unequal match between the extremely brave Branford Marsalis and Sonny Rollins – very brave of Branford. Of all living masters in jazz now, Rollins is surely the greatest extant…… Among poets it’’s always a competition. Mr. Stevens and Mr. Eliot existed at the same time. Mr. Eliot thought well of Wallace Stevens and published him in England by Faber & Faber. Stevens refused to say a word about Eliot in prose, though it entered into the letters occasionally and it was family tradition; that’’s how they told me he didn’t like Eliot or his poetry. Didn’t like the fact that Harmonium had been crowded out by The Waste Land in 1922……

Harold Bloom in conversation with Chris Lydon, at Bloom’s home in New Haven. http://www.radioopensource.org/at_home_with_harold_bloom_3_the_jazz_bridge/

first posted June 30, 2008

Sometimes You Get Lucky [by David Lehman]

Sometimes you get lucky
and get to adopt
Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern
as Uncle Harry and Uncle Jerry
in the choir of the synagogue
you went to as a boy.

I heard the tekiya of the shofar
in the opening whistle of
West Side Story and joined
the crowd asking Lenny why
don't you be a good boy,
run upstairs and write
a nice Gershwin song?

And thus I wrote a book after
Billie Holiday sang Dorothy Fields's
brilliant and funny lyrics for
"A Fine Romance," and Ella sang
Rodgers and Hart's "My Romance,"
and I got to be a romantic poet
and could sum up (click here)
how a lyric differs from a poem.

To top it off, Ian Crouch
reviewed the book
brilliantly
in The New Yorker (click here)
Mirabile dictu, don't you agree?

Sinatra at the Waldorf (1945)

Tips on Tables - By Robert W. Dana - November 30, 1945

Sinatra Takes Over Wedgewood Room and Wins Crowd Despite His Illness

The quality of laryngitis is strained these nights at the Waldorf-Astoria's Wedgwood Room where Frank Sinatra is making a belated start on a short engagement. It is painfully obvious that he shouldn't be singing until he has had proper rest yet he sang 14 numbers Wednesday night, the concluding one "Old Man River."

Ordinarily the slim technician of modern song-phrasing is in his element with a large band behind him-wasn't he once a swing band vocalist? And Dick Stable's 22-piece band, featuring numerous violins and a harp, lends splendid support, but the voice that has hypnotized millions was like a butterfly in a whirlpool.

It was a masterful performance, nevertheless. There was the familiar stance, the bending of the microphone, the intent, searching glance that swept back and forth across the room in piercing penetration of the customers' thoughts and feelings and moods. He'd even turn now and then and seem to signal facilely to his piano accompanist.

Rises to His Best.

Frank's opening number was "Paper Moon"- light, airy and huskily fragile. Next came "It Might as Well Be Spring," "Laura" and "Its Been a Long, Long Time."The fifth tune was Irving Berlin's memorable "How Deep Is the Ocean," which is having a notable rebirth among top favorites. It revealed Sinatra at his best, too. From then on the singer seemed to have his laryngitis licked and the program became vibrant. He told of the time Jimmy Van Heusen and Phil Silvers were houseguests at his home and wrote a number called "Nancy With the Laughing Face," dedicated to the joy and sparkle that is his daughter. No great shucks of a composition but a tender, touching song.

After rendering "My Romance," from the still-remembered "Jumbo," and "When I Marry Sweet Lorraine," he pulled the first surprise of the evening with "Bess, Where Is My Bess." A haunting, lovely tune, he sang it very well.

 

"Street Scene": The Movies That Use Alfred Newman's Theme of the City

 

Listen to it (with Alfred Newman and orchestra, 1946):  here

https://youtu.be/DqjWf7qgoHg 

Or here

for Nic Raine & the City of Prague Philharmonic (rehearsal)

Maybe best of all, the horns and strings on the soundtrack of How to Marry a Millionaire

Directors: Henry Hathaway (2), Otto Preminger, Elia Kazan. Robert Siodmak, Jean Negulesco, Bruce Humberstone, George Marshall, and King Vidor 

From "Showboat": "Make Believe" (Jerry Hadley, Frederica von Stade)

From Showboat (1927) -- seven and a half minutes of genius.  -- DL