The Best American Poetry

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

"Come Rain or Come Shine" with Eileen Farrell & Leonard Bernstein

For Valentine’s Day tomorrow
I recommend Come Rain or Come Shine
with born-today Eileen Farrell
proving an opera singer
can sing great jazz and
Leonard Bernstein proving
he could have been a contender
in the jazz piano arena

Eileen Farrell (1920-2002), one of the great sopranos of the twentieth century, had a radio show in the 1940s, launched a sensational recital career in the 1950s (culminating in Carnegie Hall), sang with the Metropolitan Opera in the 1960s, and on one occasion pinch-hit for Louis Armstrong at a jazz concert. Her first theatrical role was as Little Buttercup in "H. M. S. Pianofore," though little she was not. She was married to a distinguished officer of the New York Police Department. This post is dedicated to another daughter of February 13, Stephanie Paterik. And let's not forget the heroine of Vertigo, Kim Novak, born on the thirteenth day of the second month.-- DL

See also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2019/02/come-rain-or-come-shine-a-perfect-division-of-labor.html

Happy birthday to you, Franz Schubert (January 31, 1797)

 

Columbia College 1967 #29 [by Mitch Sisskind]

Carlson Fenwick, Professor

In our years-long correspondence concerning
All things Shakespearian Alan Grosbeck and I
Sometimes amused ourselves by concocting
Hare-brained interpretations and pursuing
Them to their risibly illogical conclusions.
Aware for instance that in Elizabethan times
‘Nothing’ was a crude slang word for the
Female genitalia, we searched past the oft-cited
Double entendre of Much Ado About Nothing
And discovered that "nothing" was possibly
Shakespeare’s favorite word. In King Lear
Nothing appears eighteen times in just
Fourteen speeches including Cordelia’s
First words to Lear – ‘Nothing, my lord’ --
And in Lear as a whole we found "nothing"
Thirty-four times in twenty-nine speeches
While in The Winter’s Tale "nothing" appears
Thirty-four times in twenty-six speeches.
There’s plenty of nothing in Hamlet too.
So what was Shakespeare up to there?
Possibly nothing. But plenty of nothing.
We had some good laughs over it.

I miss Alan, interred now at Mount Auburn,
And he came to mind yesterday as I read
Sonnet 73 and recalled how we used to
Imagine all the possibilities of who is
Speaking to whom in these fourteen lines.
Oh, spare me the dull and obvious banality
That it’s an old man addressing a younger.
It could be an old woman and her cat or
A young girl and her doll. Why the hell not?
But then a rather novel interpretation came
To me which I wholeheartedly welcomed.
Was there really something new to say
About one of the most commented-upon
Poems in the English language? I hurried
To my bookshelves and consulted Dryden,
Johnson, Coleridge, the Marxists, Freudians,
The New Critics, and even old Yeats whose
Remark that Shakespeare is only a mass of
Magnificent fragments expresses not at all a
Denigration but instead suggests an analogy
Between Shakespeare and the post-Newtonian
Description of the whole far-flung Universe.

But it seems that no scholar in any age has
Proposed that the ‘speaker’ in Sonnet 73
Is actually the poem itself, nor that the subject
Of the poem is the experience of reading it.
‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’ --
A coy invitation: If you’ve got a moment to
Engage your imagination, the poem says,
These ink spots on a page can conjure up
A windy fall day, some trees, and a ruined
Church or monastery, perhaps one of those
Closed by Henry VIII. And that’s only the
Beginning of what I, the poem, can disclose
If – and it’s a big if -- you have what it takes
To see it. My coy invitation was also a challenge.
You may ‘behold’ the images, or maybe not,
But the final couplet will offer a congratulation
On what ‘thou perceiv’st’ – with a reminder that
Perception won’t last forever. “This’ in line 13
Refers to the inevitability of conclusion, which
Has been universalized in the poem and is now
Demonstrated by the end of the poem itself.
Is there more? Yes, or maybe not. Oh dear God.

Ed. note: "There’s plenty of nothing in Hamlet, too." True, and the studious reader will note the allusion to this great song from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.

No use complainin'. . .

Readers, vote for the best version. -- DL

Happy Birthday, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

"William Holden, Model Prisoner" [by David Lehman]

from The American Scholar 

<<<
William Holden, arguably the model for American men of his era, plays a prisoner of war in two major motion pictures. The Germans hold him and other American airmen captive in the close confines of Stalag 17 (1953), and in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), he sweats it out in a Japanese POW camp. In both movies, Holden’s character makes a daring, even miraculous, escape. His getaway happens at the very end of Stalag 17, but in The Bridge on the River Kwai, it marks the beginning of our hero’s adventures.

Both films were celebrated. Playing Sefton in Stalag 17, the cynical POW with the smarts to profit by bartering with the camp guards and running gambling schemes to fleece his fellow prisoners, Holden won the Academy Award for best leading actor. The Bridge on the River Kwai won eight Oscars, including those for best picture and best director.

To some extent, the repetition illustrates the success principle: if at first you succeed, try, try again. Nevertheless, if you identify Holden with the masculine ideal of the postwar years, the coincidence is too keen to overlook.

Aside from Holden and the POW camps, the contrast between the two movies is striking. Stalag 17 is a black-and-white studio production directed by Billy Wilder, whose other masterpieces include Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and Some Like It Hot. It’s set in late December 1944, and man, is it cold. References to Bastogne make it clear that the Battle of the Bulge is raging, and the Nazis are the enemy. The POW camp commandant (Otto Preminger) tells the prisoners they can forget about having a “White Christmas,” a song written, he says, “by one of your composers who stole his name from our capital” (Berlin). Later we hear “Jingle Bells” and “Adeste Fidelis” in the background.

To balance the surfeit of sentiment, we get the comic antics of two of the prisoners, Harry Shapiro (Harvey Lembeck) and his friend the “Animal” (Robert Strauss). There is essentially one set: the barracks housing the American POWs. It’s easy to tell that a Broadway play preceded the movie.

At one point in Stalag 17, the men improvise a Christmas party by marching around the barracks singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.” When a couple of guys in a makeshift band play the old Harlan Thompson and Harry Archer tune, “I Love You,” some of the boys pretend to be girls. As they dance, Harry Shapiro is the stand-in for the Animal’s adored Betty Grable. Once, when I dropped in on my Miami-based mother, then in her 80s, she was watching Stalag 17 on television and we watched that particular scene together. A sweet number, I thought, and wondered if Sinatra had recorded it. When I returned from Miami to New York, I listened to “I Love You” sung by Sinatra on a Capitol Records compilation. That was an amazing moment. I recommend you do the same if you want an object lesson in the difference between a pleasing rendition of a song and a masterly performance.

Clocking in at 161 minutes, 41 minutes longer than Stalag 17, The Bridge on the River Kwai was shot in vivid color on location in Sri Lanka. Directed by David Lean, whose other movies, similarly epic in scope and length, include Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, the film follows U.S. Navy Commander Shears (Holden), one of the very few men who have not succumbed to disease or the sadism of the camp commandant, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa). It’s beastly hot, which gives the producers multiple chances to show William Holden without his shirt on: sweating as he digs a grave in the POW camp or sipping martinis as a free man on the beach. Here, the Japanese are the enemy and Allied victory does not yet seem inevitable.

In both movies, Holden displays great survival instincts, resourcefulness, guile, and the weary self-interest that Bogart expressed in Casablanca: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” He is very lucky, too, until his luck runs out. As Shears in The Bridge on the River Kwai, he manages to escape from the isolated prison camp that needed no gates or surveillance because there was no place to escape to—the camp is bordered by a steep promontory from which few would survive a jump or a fall.
>>>

Click here for the rest of this essay.

 

Bobby Darin, "Beyond the Sea"

Born Roberto Cassotto in East Harlem, Bobby Darin went to Bronx Science. Rheumatic fever as a boy shortened his life -- he died at age 37 following heart surgery. Here's his best live perfomance of one of his greatest hits, "Beyond the Sea," a swinging version of Charles Trenet's "La Mer." If memory serves "Beyond the Sea" was on the flip side of "Mack the Knife," which reached the top of the charts for Mr. Darin. Little known fact: he also wrote songs, such as "Splish Splash" (which took one hour to compose) and "Dream Lover." He was a fantastic performer on stage and did great impressions. When he tries he can sound exactly like Andy Williams doing "Moon River." And you can look it up.

 

Dave Brubeck, "Besame Mucho" -- and Andrea Bocelli!

 

 

"But Beautiful" with Billie Holiday and Barbra Streisand

 

Louis Armstrong, Saint Louis Blues

I hate to see the evening sun go down.. .