The Best American Poetry

Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra Collaborate on "How About You" [on TD's Birthday]

I like potato chips, moonlight, and motor trips. . .on TD's birthday ( November 27).

 

Roy Hargrove Dead at Forty-Nine [by David Lehman]

The most talented trumpeter
of his generation,
who played
for us in Albany,
used to hang out
at Smalls, that
low-ceilinged cellar
near us where
he proved he could sing,
a bonus,
because we came for his trumpet
“Whisper Not,”
and when Cyrille Aimée sings “Love for Sale”
and he plays, it’s as if
he’s Coltrane to her Johnny Hartman

"Let's Get Lost" with Cyrille Aimee

 You've heard Chet Baker's take on these lovely Frank Loesser lyrics. Now listen to Ms. AImee. -- DL

 

 

Dee Dee Bridgwater, "Ne Me Quitte Pas": magnifique! [by David Lehman]

Ce chanson est meilleur en francais. La version americaine, "If you Go Away," traduit par Rod McKuen, est beaucoup moins satisfaisant. Dee Dee Bridgewater, qui est nee a Flint, Michigan mais a passe un an a France (ou elle a joue Sally Bowles dans une version francaise de "Cabaret"), hits it out of the park. The video below is excellent, or try this one. Thank you, Rhonda Hamilton of "Real Jazz," for bringing this amazing recording to my attention. My keyboard has no accent marks so please, dear reader, supply the accents aigues where needed. --  DL

 

Cyrille Aimee Carries the Day [by David Lehman]

Cyrille Aimee  of the curls 

proves vocally that “Three Little Words”

as done with pianistic elegance by Dick Katz in 1992

remains a great jazz standard

in the “I love you” category

illustrated by Sinatra in “I Love You” (Harlan Thompson music,

Harry Archer words) in 1953, which I recommend you listen to

after watching Stalag 17 in which the song orchestrates

the POW party in the barracks where the Animal, drunk

and deluded, thinks he is dancing with Betty Grable.

The great Lee Wiley (Oct 9, 1908-Dec, 11, 1975) sings "Manhattan"

Was there ever a better recording of Rodgers & Hart's "Manhattan" than that of Lee Wiley?

 

Gershwin Medley (on George's birthday, with Vic Damone)

 

 

On Sonny Rollins's Birthday [by David Lehman]

                                        for Jamie Katz

Speaking of the devil
you know and the tenor
saxophonist your father
played with, today is
Sonny Rollins's birthday 
(September 7, 1930) how's
that for good luck his
rendering of “I've Got You
Under My Skin” is on Blue  
Note Plays Sinatra (1995)
I knew they called him Newk
because he looked like Don
Newcombe of the Brooklyn
Dodgers and for a while he
practiced daily on the
Williamsburg Bridge 
but not until I talked to you
today, dear friend, did I learn
he said it was a good place
to practice because no
one complains about the noise

9 / 7 / 17            5 PM

Ives Lives (a poem for Peter Frank) [by David Lehman]

Charles Ives’s second symphony
as conducted by Bernstein in 1951
climaxes in “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean”
which Peter Frank sang with the words
“Charles Ives steals his tunes from all over”
applying Sigmund Spaeth’s method
for memorizing melodies you may never forget
such as
“This is the symphony that Schubert wrote but never finished”
or (and maybe this, too, was a Peter Frank invention)
“Mozart’s in the closet, let him out, let him out, let him out”

 

For extra credit: the chap on the left is
(1) Peter Frank
(2) Sigmund Spaeth
(3) Charles Ives
(4) Bernstein
(5) Schubert

The author of the correct answer will have the satisfaction of being absolutely right. -- DL

 

Happy birthday, Leonard Bernstein, 100 years old today

 

The Chance to Choose a Subject - Daniel Brown

This post is different from my preceding four. It's an excerpt from a book in progress. (If any publishers or agents would like to know more about the book, they can reach me via the contact page on my website.) The post is also longer than the others, so before you plunge in (if you do), I want to thank a couple of folks up front for the privilege and pleasure of guest-bogging on BAP this week: this blog's Managing Editor, Stacey Harwood-Lehman, for her kind encouragement and her help with the mechanics of posting; and--not to forget him--the person who invited me to post. This latter individual's prolificness, talent, and versatility moves me to an assertion that only sounds hyperbolic: Schubert is almost as unaccountable a phenomenon as David Lehman.

...

Before I wanted to write poems, I wanted to write music: a calling for which I had, talent excepted, all the necessary equipment.  In the years since, I’ve asked myself more than once if I wouldn’t rather have composed, had I been able to, than written poetry (or at least what tries to be).  An answer that sometimes comes to mind takes the form of another question: wouldn’t anyone rather compose than write poetry? (Wagner looked forward every morning to sitting down at what he called “the incredible loom.”) But sometimes I’m fine with being a poet rather than a composer. On a good day, I can even feel fortunate that this is how things turned out. If there's a central reason why, it’s because writing poetry gives me the chance to choose a poem’s subject. 

In what follows, I’m going to assume that a poet who works with subjects carries around, in his head or on paper, a list of possible ones. I say “assume” advisedly. I’m personally acquainted with a subject-oriented poet—a good one—who not only doesn’t have such a list, but says he’s incapable of having one. He tells me that when he sits down to write, he has—in fact he needs to have—nothing whatsoever in mind (unless you count the knowledge that he’s sitting down to write).  If he’s lucky, some words will emerge from this void. If he’s doubly lucky, a subject will emerge from these words. If he’s lucky cubed, he’ll find the subject worth pursuing—at which point he’ll have an incipient poem on, and in, his hands.

But since I’ve also spoken with poets who do maintain a list of subjects…You’re looking at your list, trying to choose which subject to take up in your next poem. On what basis are you going to make this choice? Quite possibly on a basis one hesitates to even call a basis. I suspect I’m far from alone in tending to select, from my own list of prospective subjects, simply the most recently added one.  This is the one, after all, that will be most freshly charged with the excitement of discovery. Or, in a move that’s almost as mindless, I might choose a subject from my list simply because it differs markedly from the last one I chose. Here again, the driver is excitement, in this case not of discovery but of variety. On rare occasions, we may choose a subject not because it’s different from the last one we chose, but because it’s different from all the subjects we’ve ever chosen. Here we’re motivated not merely by variety but by growth. (Yeats offers a look inside such a development in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” where he speaks of his need to find a theme not among the “masterful images” of his prior work—“Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, / Lion and woman and the Lord knows what”—but in the source of those images, “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”) Note that in all of the above scenarios, the choice of subject is made with the poet’s own pleasures and concerns primarily in mind. It’s of course assumed that benefit will accrue to the reader as well, but as a by-product of benefit to the poet. 

A subject may also be chosen, however, with the reader’s benefit principally in mind: chosen mainly in order to intrigue the reader and/or inform the reader and/or amuse the reader and/or move the reader and/or heal—not to forget provoke or hurt (since who couldn't use a poke or some pain at times?)—the reader. Readers being people (for now, anyway), a reader-centric choice of subject is best made in cognizance of human experience. To take a for-instance, would a given subject be expected to intrigue? Any answer worth paying attention to will be informed by an inside knowledge of life. (A lack of such knowledge is what makes passing—not to say acing—the Turing test, or writing a deeply meaningful poem, so hard, if not impossible, for a computer.)

The need—and the opportunity—to consult life in choosing a poem’s subject is the main reason I feel fine—sometimes even better than fine—about writing poetry instead of music. Assessing a subject in light of life, after all, calls upon every faculty we have: intellectual, moral, spiritual—and, yes, aesthetic, to the extent (not always very great these days) that we want our subjects to underwrite poems whose virtues include beauty. This call for all we have, that we might offer all we can—to what other summons would one feel more eager or privileged to respond?

Which leaves my old feeling of being called to composition…where?  I remember being shocked to hear myself say, in speaking with a music-loving literary critic, that I thought music was “thin soup” compared to poetry. What I meant (which she understood all too instantly and perfectly) was that the “matter” of poetry—life, language, and the physical world these inhabit—was richer—“thicker”—than the tones and interrelations thereof that constitute music. She was graciously willing to leave it to her face to express her discomfort (to put it mildly) with this view, but I can imagine only too clearly the terms in which she might have objected to it: that the “grain” of music is finer than that of poetry (she might have adduced Mendelssohn’s marvelous assertion that the meanings of music are not too vague but too precise for words); and that, considerations of “thickness” or “thinness" to the side, music affords access to emotional and spiritual depths that would otherwise be not merely un-plumbable but, for the likes of mere us, effectively non-existent.

I wouldn't want to dispute these views outright (not least because part of me participates in them so wholly), but perhaps I might offer a couple of counter-considerations. I was taught music theory in college by a professor with the most extraordinary ear for, and knowledge of, music. He’d studied performance (on the viola) and composition at one of the great conservatories. In a pensive mood one day, he told me that, as thoroughgoing as those studies were, and as indebted as he was to them as a person and an artist, he regretted their having left him without the broader knowledge that a liberal arts education would have provided. (He’d been trying over the years, in a wide-ranging, self-directed course of reading, to make up this deficit.) To go by his feeling of inadequacy in this regard, this good man's lifelong immersion in music might have especially equipped him to understand, and even sympathize with, a view of music as being “thinner” than poetry. Or (Take--or Tack--Two) maybe music and poetry can be seen, to borrow a concept from mathematics, as “different orders of infinity,” with poetry being the larger one (as the infinity of “real numbers” is larger, in being more densely populated, than the infinity of integers).

Someone once told the wonderful choreographer Mark Morris that he seemed more passionate about music than dance. Morris’s response was that “Music is more interesting than dance.” (After all, he went on, “there are only so many things a dancer can do.”) I don’t see how my own love of music could be greater than it is, and yet—and if I were a practicing composer instead of a failed one, this might not be the case—I can at least imagine myself saying (when Bach isn’t listening) that poetry is more interesting than music.

". . but the look that leaves you real shook is the look of love" . . .so. . . marry me

Dear Stacey: Will you marry me? David

 

"Inch Worm" (or The Other Kind of Counterpoint) - Daniel Brown

When we think of counterpoint, we’re usually thinking of the "imitative" kind, where melodies (or bits of them) echo one another.  This is certainly the kind most of us encounter first, when we learn as kids to sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” or “Frere Jacques” as a round. It’s also the kind we encounter most often: sometimes on a cell phone these days, whose ringtone may well be the opening of Bach’s Two-Part Invention in F. (Click on the "Play" symbol in the upper left of the score to hear it.)

But there’s also a non-imitative kind of counterpoint, a kind where different (often very different) melodies are made to fit together. Maybe the most familiar example of this sort of counterpoint is also found in Bach: his setting of the “Wachet Auf” chorale (again, click on the the "Play" symbol to hear it), in which he overlays a stirring Lutheran hymn with an almost ostentatiously dissimilar melody–one of the all-time ear worms, as it happens–of his own invention.  (Think this trick is simple? You try writing a tune-for-the-ages that has to work contrapuntally with an existing one.)

My first encounter with non-imitative counterpoint was a revelation (not that I was old enough to have called it that). One day the director of our grade school chorus introduced us to a pretty little song called “Inch Worm”  (music and lyrics by the great Frank [Guys and Dolls] Loesser: it's in his score for the movie musical Hans Christian Andersen). Our director divided the chorus in half, and taught one half the song's main melody ("Inch worm, inch worm...", sung by Danny Kaye in the clip) and the other half the song's haunting countermelody (which you hear first in the clip, sung by the class of children: “Two and two are four…” etc.).  The sinuous combination of melody and countermelody still gives me the beauty-chills.

It was only many years later that I realized Loesser’s full brilliance in contriving this counterpoint of differing melodies.  The overall meter of the song is 3/4 (i.e., waltz tempo), into which the lyric of the main melody fits perfectly: “Inch worm __, inch worm __, measuring the marigolds...”.  But the lyric of the countermelody doesn’t fit into 3/4, at least not comfortably; the meter leads to unnatural stresses: “Two and two ARE four __ , four and four ARE eight __ , eight and eight ARE sixteen, sixteen and sixTEEN are thirty two…”). But the lyric of the countermelody (along with the countermelody itself) works perfectly in 2/4 (alternating stressed with unstressed syllables): "Two and two are four __ , four and four are eight __ , eight and eight are sixteen, sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two…". Which is to say that this seemingly innocent ditty is not only polyphonic but polymetric! But here’s the real kicker: what is the lyric of the (2/4) countermelody talking about but measuring marigolds by multiples of two!  The mind-boggling musico-verbal wit of this connection--a duplicity (not to say duple-icity) of the benignest kind--reduces one to saying of Loesser, as a certain Schumann said in announcing his first acquaintance with the music of a certain Chopin, “Hats off, gentlemen: a genius.” (As if one didn’t think this of Loesser already.)

Beethoven Bites Off the End of a Bottle - Daniel Brown

Beethoven was facing an especially tough compositional problem. He’d just brought off one of the most singular coups in music.  The problem was how to repeat it.

A little context: The third movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is that mischievous descendant of the minuet known as a scherzo (Italian for "joke"); the symphony's fourth movement is a rousing finale. This sequence of symphonic movements is entirely conventional (Haydn had patented it decades earlier). But in the course of the 5th's scherzo, some strangeness starts seeping in. The movement begins with a quiet theme, followed by a loud one whose da-da-da-DAH rhythm echoes the famous “fate” motive that opens the symphony. (This stentorian theme comes in at 0:21 in this clip.) In a typical scherzo, these themes would, after an intervening episode, be literally repeated. Sure enough, the quiet theme does return (at 3:14), but–the first hint that something unusual is up–after a few measures, Beethoven reorchestrates it (bowed notes become plucked ones). And when the loud theme returns as expected (at 3:35), it isn’t loud: it’s as quiet as the quiet theme–and also reorchestrated (stated not by the horns of its first appearance, but by more plucked notes in the strings ).

As if these departures from the norm weren't peculiar enough, at the point where the movement should end, it doesn’t. It’s suspensively prolonged (starting at 4:46) by a sustained low note which is soon joined by wisps of the scherzo's "quiet" theme.  Things are clearly hanging some sort of fire…until without warning a rapid build begins, a breathless crescendo that climaxes in the fortissimo opening theme–all golden trumpets and sun-resplendent C major–of the fourth movement (at–not that you could miss it–5:07). This glorious outburst, we realize in retrospect, is what Beethoven has been setting up with all the unwonted quiet that's been preceeding it.

So far, so stupendous. We're now into the symphony’s final movement. This movement is in a classical finale's usual “sonata form.” An all-but-mandatory feature of a sonata-form movement is a return, part-way through, of its opening theme. And with this requirement comes Beethoven’s above-mentioned problem. After all, the original statement of the finale's opening theme was so stunning that its return will almost have to be a letdown. But what made this theme’s original statement so stunning? The suspensive buildup to it. Of course that buildup, being a feature of the preceding movement, is now history... Whereupon Beethoven issues one of the great “So what?”‘s in the history of the arts. If the buildup to the finale's opening theme was essential to that theme’s impact, then let's bring the buildup back! Let's just forklift the whole bleeping buildup out of third movement into the fourth! Which Beethoven goes ahead and does (at 8:39)--resulting in a return of the finale's opening theme (at 9:21) that has all the splendor of its original appearance. The boldness, even ruthlessness, of this solution reminds me of a method suggested, when all else fails, for dealing with a bottle of beer that's proving hard to open: bite the end off it.

The Dipsy Doodle [by David Lehman]

Of all the pinball machines in all the zinc-bar cafes in Paris, and there were many, the one that I recall playing most often with my chums was Dipsy Doodle. The name didn't mean much to me then, but it was a good machine -- the kind of machine that you could play competitively. Years later I heard the 1940s song called "The Dipsy Doodle." The Tommy Dorsey band was the first to play it; the Andrews Sisters made it a hit;  Ella Fitzgerald recorded it with the Chick Webb orchestra. It's a dance song of the period with a rhythm suggestive of "In the Mood."

Some ink has been spilled over the puzzlement that the lyrics for "The Dipsy Doodle" may arouse. What does "the dipsy doodle" mean? Many feel it is a meaningless phrase on the order of sha-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, an expedient occasion for an uptempo dance. In 1982 Ronald Reagan characterized a political argument he opposed as "the real dipsy doodle," prompting William Safire to speculate that "dipsy" was shorthand for "dipsomania" (now more commonly known as alcoholism) and that "doodle" added both a nice alliterative touch and an allusion to the contortions of a body in motion, as when one is dancing or trying to elude a tackler in football. In discussing Reagan's use of the term, Safire reminded readers that "dipsy doodle" was slang for a curve ball in baseball and was used by Raymond Chandler in The High Window as a down-home way of saying trickery or chicanery.

My own feeling is that, in the song, "dipsy doodle" is code for the state of mind of one who is at risk of falling in love -- and that in its young and playful way the lyric illustrates the idea that the first time you fall in love is the first time anyone has ever fallen in love. In defense of my admittedly speculative theory, I will point out that "digga-do" served in the 1920s as slang for lovemaking.

Here are the lyrics (followed by Ella's recording). The song was written in 1937 by Larry Clinton. He wrote it for Tommy Dorsey who backed Larry when he embarked on his own career as a top bandleader. -- DL

The Dipsy Doodle's the thing to beware
The Dipsy Doodle will get in your hair
And if it gets you, it couldn't be worse
The things you say will come out in reverse
Like "You love I and me love you"
That's the way the Dipsy Doodle works

 

The Dipsy Doodle's easy to find
You know it's always in the back of your mind
You never know it until it's too late
And then you're in such a terrible state
Like "The moon jumped over the cow, hey diddle"
That's the way the Dipsy Doodle works

 

Whenever you think you're crazy
You're just a victim of the Dipsy Doodle
Ah, but it's not your mind that's hazy
It's your tongue that's at fault, not your noodle

 

You better listen and try to be good
And try to do all the things that you should
The Dipsy Doodle will get you some day. .

as sung by Ella Fitzgerald

Les Lieber Loved Living the Life [by David Lehman]

On Monday the 16th of July, the New York Times ran an obituary for Les Lieber, who died last week at the age of 106. Here are four facts about Les Lieber:

(1) In 1965 he started Jazz at Noon, which lasted forty-five years as a great New York notion achieved with artistry and renewed with vigor and vibe on a weekly basis. Every Friday you could go to whichever club or tavern was hosting and you'd hear Les on his saxophone joining other gents who, like Les, held demanding jobs in medicine, finance, or other professions, but relished this one hour when they could honor their love of jazz. News of Jazz at Noon spread from mouth to mouth and a dedicated following followed. Dizzy Gillespie dropped in with his trumpet, and Buddy Rich visited to play drums. 

(2) Les's main job was as a journalist, a sports journalist, whose profile of the great Yankee catcher Yogi Berra ran under the title "There's No Place Like Home Plate."

(3) Les, fluent in French, spent many a summer in St. Paul de Vence with his charming wife, Edie, a beauty in the Ava Gardner manner, where they befriended the painters and poets who made this hillside town in the Alpes Maritimes a destination worth a journey.

(4) A veteran of the air force in World War II,  Les had a sharp wit and was adept at delivering a humorous comment or aside with a straight face in the Bogart manner.

Jazz aficionado Jamie Katz, Les's stepson, has spoken movingly about his "talented, lovable stepdad, who spoke six languages, pitched a no-hitter in college, landed in Normandy, recorded with Django Reinhardt in Paris in 1945, and wrote hundreds of imaginative, beautifully turned, whimsical magazine articles."

When I met Les, he was twenty five years younger than I am now, which sounds like a math problem but is just a way of saying that he was a longtime friend who was exemplary in demonstrating that possibly the best way to appreciate great music -- better even than the joy of listening -- is to play it. This is a lesson that applies as much to poetry as to jazz. -- DL 

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Les Lieber, who for more than 45 years ran Jazz at Noon, a fabled New York institution where talented amateur players got together every week to stretch their skills and to perform alongside top-flight professionals, died on July 10 on Fire Island, N.Y. He was 106.

His stepson Jamie Katz confirmed the death.

Mr. Lieber had already had a substantial career as a publicist and journalist when, in September 1965, he organized the first Jazz at Noon, partly to give himself a chance to play his alto saxophone and penny whistle for an audience. It was on a Monday at lunch hour at Chuck’s Composite, a restaurant on East 53rd Street.

“I was dying on the vine as a musician,” he told The New York Times in 1975, recalling the origin of the sessions. “I hadn’t had my sax out of its case in eight years. I felt there must be others like me who would love to play but couldn’t get a rhythm section together without disrupting their families.”

The experiment soon had a following, as players who might have once had thoughts of a professional career but had become doctors, lawyers or accountants pulled instruments out of closets. Soon Mr. Lieber added to the allure by recruiting professionals, for a modest fee, to drop in as guest stars. 
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for more of Neal Genzlinger's obituary for Les Lieber, click here.

Sinatra wishes Louis Armstrong a very happy day as they account for the birth of the blues. . .

 

 

"Get out of that bed, wash your face and hands!" Song to start the work week

Marilyn Monroe as Chanteuse [by David Lehman]

We don't think of her as a singer, but Marilyn Monroe (whose birthday it is) sang. Unlike Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak in Pal Joey, Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, she needed no dubbing. See Marilyn making the most of a secondary role in Niagara, or teaming with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or joining Ethel Merman and Donald O'Connor on the Irving Berlin bandwagon in There's No Business Like Show Business, or cavorting with cross-dressers Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot. She sings in each of these movies and the songs are noteworthy, each and all. 

Some songs with male chorus and big brass solos, such as "Heat Wave," are extravaganzas of sexual desire and energy. You can't keep your eyes off her, which is as it should be, but one consequence is that you don't hear enough of the voice.

Listen to her sing "I'm Through with Love," or "I Wanna Be Loved By You," "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" or "Bye Bye, Baby" -- but listen to the songs without looking at the visuals. You'll hear a melodious voice of limited range, thin but accurate, with a husky low register, a breathy manner, and a rare gift of vibratro. When her voice trembles over a note -- over "you" or "baby" -- the effect is seductive and yet is almost a caricature of the seductress's vamp. The paradox of her singing is that she reveals her sexual power and flaunts her vulnerability -- to flip the usual order of those verbs. She can be intimate and ironic at the same time.

Compare her version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" with Carol Channing's definitive Broadway treatment, and you get the essential difference between theater and cinema, New York and Hollywood. Channing's is the superior theatrical experience: funny, charming, a show-stopper of the first order. But Channing serves the song where Monroe makes her songs sound like illustrations of her life. Monroe's treatment of "Diamonds" may not be as effective as Channing's in its service to Leo Robin's marvelous lyric for Jules Styne's delightful tune. But Monroe's version is younger, friskier, sexier. When she sings it, the song is about her. Music is the food of love, and sexual ecstasy is on the menu, for dessert.

Nowhere is she better than "I'm Through with Love," which she sings in Some Like It Hot. Gus Kahn's lyric, which rhymes "I'm through" with "adieu," is as apt for Marilyn as "Falling in Love Again" was for Marlene Dietrich. In "I'm Through with Love," the singer feigns nonchalance, affects an uncaring attitude. But melodically during the bridge, and lyrically in the line "for I must have you or no one," the song lets us know just how much she does care. Monroe implies this pathos in "I'm Through with Love" at the same time as she struts her stuff. She vows that she'll "never fall again" and forbids Love -- as if the abstraction stood for a Greek god or for the entire male sex -- to "ever call again." But we don't quite believe her, because we know temptation is just around the corner. In a sense, her voice thrusts out its hips when she sings. It's a feast for all the senses.

-- DL

Advice from Sinatra and Riddle, Van Heusen and Cahn: "Come Blow Your Horn" [by David Lehman]

Like Marilyn Monroe
Nelson Riddle [left] was born
today (the first of June)
so let's blow
his horn
(a trombone):
with this catchy tune  -- DL

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The taller the tree is, the sweeter the peach
I'll give you the whole megillah in a one-word speech:
Reach
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