The Best American Poetry

"The Birth of the Blues" on FS's Birthday

Note what he does with the word "weird" -- DL

 

"But Not For Me" (Happy birthday to you, Ira Gershwin)

 

One of Ira Gershwin's greatest lyrics:

"They're writing songs of love, / But not for me.  . ."

"With love to lead the way, / I've found more clouds of gray / than any Russian play / could guarantee.  . ."

"I was a fool to fall and get that way / hi ho alas and also lackaday."

"It all began so well, but what an end. / This is the time a fellow need a friend, / When every happy plot / Ends in a marriage know, / and there's no knot for me."

A Brief Digression on Critics and Cops [by David Lehman]

Why do award committees pin the tail on the horse’s ass? Because award committees combine a universal truth (“everyone’s a critic”) with an old punch line (“the committee in charge of designing a horse came up with a camel”). What is a critic? According to the critic Kenneth Tynan, “the critic is one who knows the way but cannot drive the car.” According to Kierkegaard, the critic resembles a poet as one pea another except that he lacks the anguish in his heart and the music on his lips – that is, everything.

When Annie Get Your Gun opened on May 16, 1946, with Ethel Merman as Annie and one of the most glorious scores ever written for the stage, the critic Ward Morehouse of the New York Herald-Tribune wrote that la Merman was “in her best form since Anything Goes” but that “Irving Berlin’s score is not a notable one.” Brooks Atkinson of the Times seemed to concur, characterizing the songs – There’s No Business Like Show Business, They Say It’s Wonderful, Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better, and the rest – as “routine composing.”  Recall, too, the reviewer who left the theater after a performance of Roberta complaining that Jerome Kern’s score lacked tunes you can whistle. Maybe his mind was elsewhere when the orchestra played Yesterdays, Let’s Begin, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. But for dumbness after the fact, it is hard to top the assessment of Guys and Dolls that appeared in the London Sunday Times in May 1953 (three years after the show’s debut on Broadway). Quoth the critic: the show, “despite its striking, incidental merits,” is “an interminable, an overwhelming, and in the end intolerable bore.”

On the screen, the critic is depicted often enough as a venomous, haughty lout (Clifton Webb in Laura), a conniver (George Sanders in All About Eve) or sometimes a guy who needs a drink because he has to choose between telling the truth and keeping his job (Joseph Cotton in Citizen Kane). But in song-and-dance movies with Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly in them, the critic is transmuted into the figure of the cop who looks on the festive proceedings and glares skeptically (as at the end of Kelly’s performance of the title number in Singing in the Rain) or with amused toleration (as when Fred Astaire, sporting a boater, does his shoeshine number in The Band Wagon). The cop is the reviewer saying, You’re not supposed to be having such a good time. Don’t you know there’s a war going on? Don’t you realize that life is serious and art must be the same? Art has a moral imperative. Literature is a criticism of life. To which line of objection, the best answer is the movement of a dancer, the smile on Gene Kelly’s face as he wraps himself around a streetlamp and lets the rain pour on his face, and the recollection of the late John Simon's typically brutal and wrong-headed attack on that landmark movie, The Godfather

The Greatest Songs to Lose the Academy Award [by David Lehman]

In 1937 the award for best song went to "Waikiki Wedding." Nominated was "They Can't Take That Away From Me" by the Gershwin brothers, neither of whom ever won the award.

In 1941 the award went to a worthy song, "The Last Time I Saw Paris," music by Jerome Kern, lyrics Oscar Hammerstein. But "Blues in the Night" (music Harold Arlen, lyrics Johnny Mercer). "It was the only timer an Oscar [award] was stolen by an Oscar [Hammerstein]." Pictured at left is Harold Arlen, who could take solace in know that, with lyricist Yip Harburg (with an assist from Ira Gershwin) he wrote the music of the most popular of all Oscar-winning song, "Over the Rainbow."

In 1953 Harry Warren's "That's Amore" as delivered by Dean Martin should have gotten the nod over Sammy Fain's "Secret Love."

In 1954 "Three Coins in the Fountain" by Jules Styne and Sammy Cahn won the prize, and it's a good song, especially as sung by Mr S, but an even better song was "The Man That Got Away" by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin sung by Judy Garland in "A Star is Born."

In 1960 do you really believe "Never on Sunday" is better than "The Second Time Around"?

In 1964 "Chim Chim Cher-ee" collected the most votes. Among the also-rans was the vastly superior "My Kind of Town" by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, perhaps because the two of them had already won four times each.

After 1965, when "The Shadow of Your Smile" was named the winner, it no longer mattered, but for the record here's the full list starting in 1934 when "The Continental" was winner number one.. -- DL

Mozart's 40th: "The Great G Minor Symphony" (for which we give thanks)

 

Lauren Bacall sings at Eddie Mars's Casino [in "The Big Sleep"]

"Yes, her tears flowed like wine. She's a real sad tomato, she's a busted Valentine."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmK-gF8nEh4

That Old Black Magic [music Harold Arlen, lyrics Johnny Mercer]

This version of the song -- as sung by Louis Prima and Keely Smith -- was my introduction to the Arlen/Mercer standard. I liked the collaboration of Arlen and Mercer so much that in my mind their names merged into one: Merlin. Happy birthday, Johnny Mercer. -- DL

Helen Forrest and I wish you a happy birthday, Johnny Mercer

 

 

Beautiful Dreamer: Lawrence Tibbett and Frank Sinatra on the radio (1945)

Lawrence Tibbett, the great baritone, a mainstay of the Metropolitan Opera, was born on November 16, 1896. Happy birthday, Larry. "Beautiful Dreamer" is one of Stephen Foster's greatest serenades (1864). Jonathan Guyot Smith sings it here:

 

"And the Angels Sing"

Music by Ziggy Elman (trumpet solo)
Lyrics by Johnny Mercer
The Benny Goodman Orchestra
Martha Tilton (vocal solo), whose birthday this is

 

The Power of Tchaikovsky [by Lewis Saul]

Tchaikovsky died today! And if I were Frank O'Hara
I'd note that it was on November 6, 1893, in St. Petersburg,
which is St. Petersburg again after a stint as Leningrad,
but I am not. I am listening to Tchaikovsky's fifth
to which Lew got me to listen, and the music goes on.
We asked the composer for a comment, 
and the Kurosawa connoisseur replied as follows. -- DL  

The Power of Tchaikovsky [by Lewis Saul]

Henry Miller
Monsieur Soyez
Croque Madame
The egg on top

Subway: Viva Vavin!
to Châtelet and all that
Future History
Played back daily

I miss the baguettes and
Free Art
Dipsy doodle
Oysters from street vendors

And then my friend Chantal Schtenkrek played her violin
From the fifth floor of the Bastille
Making bright yellow cracks in the glowing
Cobblestones below

How could any of us have known?

Leonard Bernstein'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

"Perfidia" [as sung by Helen Forrest with the Benny Goodman band] plus a poem

Perfidia

You don’t know who these people are, or what
They’ll do to you if you’re caught, but you can’t
Back out now: it seems you agreed to carry
A briefcase into Germany, and here you are,
Glass in hand, as instructed. You rise to dance
With the woman with the garnet earrings, who is,
Of course, the agent you’re supposed to seduce
And betray within the hour. Who would have known
You’d fall in love with her? Elsewhere the day
Is as gray as a newsreel, full of stripes and dots
Of rain, a blurred windshield picture of Pittsburgh,
But on the screen where your real life is happening
It is always 1938, you are always dancing
With the same blonde woman with the bloodshot eyes
Who slips the forged passport into your pocket
And says she knows you’ve been sent to betray her,
Or else it is seventy degrees and holding
In California, where you see yourself emerge unscathed
From the car crash that wiped out your memory,
Your past, as you walk into a gambler’s hangout
On Sunset Boulevard, in a suit one size too large.
And the piano player plays “Perfidia” in your honor,
And the redhead at the bar lets you buy her a drink.

-- David Lehman (from Operation Memory, 1990)

Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers Moanin' and Wailin' on Art's Birthday

 

"We'll catch up some other time. . ." [by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green]

Just listen. 

Haven't done half the things we wanted -- 

There's so much more embracing
still to be done, but time is racing

O well --

Never have seen you do the dishes --

Seeing you there without your make up --

O well, we'll catch up / some other time

Just when the fun is starting / Comes the time for parting --
But let's be glad / for what we've had / and what's to come -- 

O well --
we'll catch up
some
other
time

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gDYVwtEp_Y

On George Gershwin's Birthday (9/26): Dean & Ella Sing a 'Swonderful Medley

The first four minutes are all Gershwin.

Ithaca Alert: Lehman to give "Lecture with Musical Illustrations" at IC Monday 9/16

Ithaca alert:

On Monday evening,
September 16, 2019,
at 7:30 PM
I will give a talk
-- punctuated by wonderful music --
about the great American songbook.
at Ithaca College, Textor 101.

The talk is based on my book
A Fine Romance:
Jewish songwriters, American Songs
and will include songs by
the brothers Gershwin,
Jerome Kern & Dorothy Fields,
Irving Berlin,
Rodgers & Hart,
Ziggy Elman,
Leonard Bernstein
Betty Comden and Adolph Green,
Kern & Oscar Hammerstein.

It Had To Be You & All the Things You Are w/ Helen Forrest, Dick Haymes, Artie Shaw

Possibly the best swing version of "It Had To Be You": Helen Forrest and Dick Haymes, vocals; the Artie Shaw band.

and then comes Helen's peerless rendition of "All the Things You Are":

 

Why should there be two happy as we? [from "Show Boat": music Kern, lyrics Hammerstein]

Charlie Parker and the Mrs. loved this song. . .

I'm in the seventh heaven / there's more than seven / my heart discovers. . .

Happy Anniversary, Stacey