Quote of the Day (Stephen Sondheim, on Music, ‘A Foreign Language’)

“Music is a foreign language which everyone knows but only musicians can speak.” — Pulitzer Prize-winning American songwriter Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021), Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics, 1981-2011 (2011)

This Day in Pop Music History (Sinatra Concept LP, ‘Only the Lonely,’ Offers Torch-Song Toppers)

Sept. 8, 1958—Once again collaborating with master arranger Nelson Riddle, Frank Sinatra reached something like a career commercial and critical peak with his latest in a series of song cycles he had helped popularize, the “concept album.”

Though baby boomers associate the concept album (a song collection united by theme and musical motifs) with such collections as The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Who’s Tommy, and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Sinatra got there first, sensing, with the extra minutes afforded by the arrival of the LP in 1948, that he could make such records far more ambitious—and requiring closer attention by the listener—than a mere collection of hits and filler material.

In a little more than a decade, he would create several such compilations: Songs For Young Lovers, Swing Easy, Moonlight Sinatra, and, as he turned fifty, September of My Years.

While several of these would be uptempo, it was his more melancholy LPs that called out his soulful, sensitive side. There are those who prefer In the Wee Small Hours as an example of this tendency.

But the one that came out 65 years ago today, Frank Sinatra Sings For Only The Lonely (often shortened to Only the Lonely, as I will do here), struck a special chord with the public, reaching #1 on the charts and being nominated for five Grammys in the first time those recording industry awards were presented. It also measured up to the singer’s demanding standard, as it would be one of the ones he would cite toward the end of his five-decade career as his favorite.

The Best Album Cover Grammy—the only one that, ironically, the album did win—should have been a dead giveaway that the finger-snappin’, swaggerin’ swinger who had been riding the pop charts had taken a back seat to the self-described “saloon singer” who craved the intimacy of a nightclub to communicate with audiences.

Artist Nick Volpe painted Sinatra, amid a gloomy dark background, as a Pagliacci-like sad clown, and the singer had much to be sorrowful about during the recording sessions: his last attempt at a regular TV series, The Frank Sinatra Show, was about to be canceled, and though his divorce from Ava Gardner was finalized the year before, she still represented for him The One Who Got Away.

Sinatra joked that the bleak tunes on Only the Lonely were “suicide songs,” but those familiar with the singer-actor knew and fretted over his mood swings (and he had, in fact, attempted suicide several times at low points in his relationship with Gardner, and once in the early 1950s when he thought he was washed up).

In Nelson Riddle, Sinatra found a musical partner whose temperament and musical orientation meshed perfectly with his own. Another New Jersey native who was an only child growing up, Riddle was also dealing with heartache during the Only the Lonely sessions, having recently endured the deaths of his mother and daughter.

Paired with Sinatra by Capitol Records to help forge a more mature sound from the one that one that made him a teen idol in the early 1950s, Riddle had triumphed beyond expectations with a series of bestselling LPs that took advantage of Sinatra’s changing voice textures, which were evolving, in the words of Pete Hamill’s Why Sinatra Matters, “from a violin to a viola to a cello, with a rich middle register and dark bottom tones."

In an interview cited in Terry Teachout’s July/August 2021 Commentary article, “The Man Who (Re)Made Sinatra,” Riddle described what he had tried to do in the studio with his most famous musical project:

“First, find the peak of the song and build the whole arrangement to that peak, pacing itself as [Sinatra] paces himself vocally. Second, when he’s moving, get the hell out of the way. When he’s doing nothing, move in fast and establish something…build about two-thirds of the way through, and then fade to a surprise ending.”

On movie sets, he was infamous for an unwillingness to rehearse or maintain interest beyond a few takes. But with lyrics, it was different. He positively burrowed into each note, each line, and when he was done he had created a kind of musical short story in each tune.

Part of Sinatra’s magic stemmed from his exquisite sense of which songs worked for him. As with his other LPs in this period, he turned to some of the greatest lyricists and composers who comprised the Great American Songbook, including Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer (“Blues in the Night”), Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen (the title track). Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (“Spring Is Here” and “Where or When”), and Jule Styne (co-writer, with Cahn, of “Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry").

Three songs in particular fascinated me about this album. Carl Sigman and Robert Maxwell’s “Ebb Tide” would later be covered by the Righteous Brothers, but Sinatra and Riddle chose a different way to close out the tune than the rock duo and their producer Phil Spector, climaxing on the lyrics “I can tell, I, I can feel/You are love, you are real/Really mine in the rain/In the dark, in the sun” before receding with “Like the tide at its ebb/I'm at peace in the web/of your arms."

Arlen and Mercer’s “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" had been written for the 1943 Fred Astaire movie musical The Sky’s the Limit, but Sinatra made it into an unsurpassed demonstration of his own powers of interpretation.

On movie sets, he was infamous for an unwillingness to rehearse or maintain interest beyond a few takes. But with lyrics for his albums, it was different. He positively burrowed into each note, each line, and when he was done he had created a kind of musical short story in each tune. You can see how he wove his magic in this YouTube clip.

Matt Dennis and Earl Brent’s “Angel Eyes” provided the ending to what Sinatra had billed as his “retirement concert” in 1971. It was surely a mistake, for someone who thrived so much on audience attention, to leave the stage while still only 55.  

But, had he followed through on his resolution, nobody would have ever been able to forget how he chose to go out. As seen in this YouTube video in the closing minutes of the June 13, 1971 show in Los Angeles, with smoke from his cigarette billowing and the spotlight on him dimming, he sang,

Pardon me, but I gotta run
Gotta find who's now number one
And why my angel eyes ain't here
Excuse me while I disappear.

If only he could have disappeared at this point! But he un-retired in short order. The success of his two late-career CDs, Duets and Duets II, was due more to the younger performers who blended their voices with his (unlike old days, not in the same studio) than to his own powers, which were on the wane at this point.

On February 23, 1995, in Japan, the 79-year-old Sinatra—confused and glassy-eyed, as remembered by drummer Gregg Field in this 2015 Vanity Fair article—performed in public for the final time, at a concert in Japan where he kept missing lyrics from nearby teleprompters.

The epitaph on “The Voice’s” tombstone came from one of his most ebullient songs: “The Best Is Yet to Come.” But the vulnerable spirit of his reported final words at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A. in 1998 could have come as no surprise to close listeners of Only the Lonely: “I’m losing.”

Quote of the Day (Tony Bennett, on How ‘Good Songs Last Forever’)

“Good songs last forever, and I've come to learn that there's a whole group out there in the audience who's studying that with me. There's a greatness in an audience when it gets perfectly still. It becomes a beautiful tribal contact, a delicate, poetic thing. A great song does that.”— Tony Bennett (1926-2023), Grammy-winning, indomitable interpreter of the Great American Songbook, quoted by Whitney Balliett, “A Quality That Lets You In,” originally published in The New Yorker, Jan. 7, 1974, reprinted in Balliett’s American Singers: Twenty-Seven Portraits in Song (1988)

The image accompanying this post, of Tony Bennett in performance at the 2012 Monterey (Calif.) Jazz Festival, was taken Sept. 22, 2012, by David Becker.

Quote of the Day (Melissa Errico, on Music, Memory and History)

“Music is all about how we turn big questions about memory and history into the personal ones of living in and out of the past. A lot of my job as a performer is to make the archival past available to people, American Songbook stuff. I try to make it occur now—not just for my emotions, for your emotions. I think it’s very healing. Nostalgia is sort of a pejorative word, but it’s an essential feeling. Nostalgia suits me because I can speak on its behalf. I have history now, but I didn’t have it before. While other people are saying, ‘Oh, poor you; you’re an older actress,’ I’m thinking, Are you kidding me? I’ve never had more information to share. I’m not just an information bearer. I try to take in information, but my next step is to make it raw and expansive and natural and available.”—Singer-actress Melissa Errico quoted in “Soapbox—The Columnists: WSJ. Asks Six Luminaries to Weigh in on a Single Topic. This Month: Nostalgia,” WSJ.com, October 2019

This Day in Jazz History (Ella Fitzgerald Sets Standards Canon With First ‘Song Book’)

May 15, 1956—Two decades after starting a highly diverse career in which she moved from big-band jazz singer to popular music headliner in her own right, Ella Fitzgerald began to create a Valhalla for classic American songwriters in her first LP at the Verve record label: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook.

Some years ago, I heard the musical term “standard” defined as “any song that Ella and Frank would sing.” An inexact definition, maybe, but it comes as close as any other I can think of.

To start with, the two singers launched Cole Porter into the songwriter firmament. Just before the composer-lyricist was about to enter a final lonely, agonizing physical decline nearly two decades after a devastating equestrian accident, he experienced a last burst of popularity as Sinatra (with some help from Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly) propelled the soundtrack for his musical High Society up the Billboard chart, and turned “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” into a major hit 20 years after it was introduced to the public.

But Ella got there first, with her 32-track double-album devoted to the Indiana native who came to personify international sophistication and cheeky wit.

It was not entirely coincidental that 1956 was the year when Fitzgerald and Sinatra made their landmark Porter recordings, as the two singers reached artistic maturity virtually simultaneously through the help of new musical mentors and new technology. 

Sinatra’s musical game-changer was arranger Nelson Riddle, who recorded “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” for their second collaboration, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! Fitzgerald’s was jazz record producer and concert promoter Norman Granz, who had persuaded her to leave her two-decade musical home, Decca Records.

Though it had produced early hits such as her novelty song, “A-tisket, A-tasket,” the label, noted musical critic Dan Morgenstern, was “never quite sure how to present a singer of such versatility….From a positive angle, this made it impossible to typecast Ella; but on the other hand, it prevented her from developing a strong identity.”

Once Granz moved Fitzgerald to Verve (a label founded originally to record her), they embarked on an extraordinary eight-year skein of discs that paid tribute to the finest American lyricists and composers: Porter, Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer.

The recordings, which often brought new prominence to little-known gems, made even the honorees take notice. Ira Gershwin once declared, “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.” After hearing the collection devoted to Rodgers and Hart, Berlin requested—and was granted—inclusion in the series.

“Armstrong and Crosby and Astaire and Holiday and Sinatra each had an incalculable impact on the canon of modern song,” jazz critic Gary Giddins observed in Visions of Jazz: The First Century. “But Fitzgerald erected the pantheon.”

The still-new technology that benefited Sinatra and Fitzgerald was the long-playing record. Introduced in 1947, it had become, by the mid-1950s, the go-to musical format for audiophiles who appreciated its fidelity to recorded sound and to musicians who enjoyed the increased freedom provided by works of longer duration.

The qualities exhibited by Fitzgerald in her LPs—and especially those in the “Song Book” series—were perhaps best summarized by British critic Henry Pleasants in The Great American Popular Singers (1974):

“She has a lovely voice, one of the warmest and most radiant in its natural range that I have heard in a lifetime of listening to singers in every category. She has an impeccable and ultimately sophisticated rhythmic sense, and flawless intonation. Her harmonic sensibility is extraordinary. She is endlessly inventive.”

By the end of 1956, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook had reached No. 18 on the list of Billboard Best Sellers for the whole year. When the Songbook series concluded with the Johnny Mercer disk in 1964, Fitzgerald was cajoled into trying artists and genres for which she had little affinity, such as The Beatles and country music.

But Fitzgerald, with a falsetto much-admired but seldom matched in popular song, had already created her legacy: virtually institutionalizing the jazz and popular songs created primarily for Broadway and Hollywood musicals from the Twenties to the Fifties. The scat-singer extraordinaire from earlier in her career had become, quite simply, The First Lady of Song.

Concert Review: Veronica Swift and the Benny Green Trio at Chautauqua, NY

In late August, in the last Wednesday of the summer programming schedule at Chautauqua Institution, temperatures plunged, making the atmosphere feel more like mid-autumn than late summer. I hope that had something to do with why so many seats at the performance by Veronica Swift were open in the Amphitheater in this Victorian-era National Historic Landmark—and why so many more seats opened up as the show proceeded. 

I can’t think of any other reason why so many wouldn’t have sat—even leaped to their feet to applaud—through the set by Ms. Swift, one of the most commanding and compelling jazz vocalists of her generation.

“You’re Gonna Hear From Me,” the title tune of her upcoming CD, could also represent her promise not just to Chautauquans but also the wider jazz community. If there could be any reason why her skill did not leave more listeners that night embracing her enthusiastically, it might have been because she exudes confidence without inspiring rapture in return.

Almost exactly a year ago, Ms. Swift had scored something of a triumph on this same stage with a well-received performance with trumpeter Chris Botti. Accompanied by the Benny Green Trio, Ms. Swift had additional reason to believe that this August night a year later also belonged to her. The band’s leader, a veteran pianist, is a family friend who played with her late father 30 years ago, and has told San Diego Mercury News that she is “the greatest straight-ahead jazz talent I’ve seen emerge this century.”

Green, drummer Rodney Green and bassist David Wong demonstrated their decided beebop affinity with a few songs by themselves, including Hank Jones “Minor Conception.” But when Ms. Swift was onstage, she seemed to take particular comfort in Wong’s work, stretching and wrapping her vocals around his chords like a lazy cat. 

The morning after the show, a middle-aged North Carolina woman, a fellow visitor at the inn where I was staying, tried to express her feelings about the performance: “I thought she was good but not great. I say this as someone who likes jazz. But there was just something missing. Not that she wasn’t good, but she didn’t have much stage presence.”

Below-average weather in an outdoor venue can cause audiences to react without warmth. I’m sure that performers, with their sense of listeners’ moods, can experience a consequent letdown, too.

If Ms. Swift did, she displayed no visible signs of it, I thought, even as it became obvious that many audience members were heading for the exits.  She plugged gamely on through her hour-and-15-minute set. 

This was not the first time I had seen Chautauquans leave the amphitheater early. In fact, I had done so myself five years ago, when the combination of extra heat and humidity, along with leftover anxiety from a stressful afternoon incident, led me to step out on the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Benjamin Britten’s unrelentingly grim opera, Peter Grimes. But I had waited till intermission before I left so as not to disturb the performers. The exits at the Swift concert were surely visible from the stage.

Well, as far as I was concerned, this was the listeners’ loss. They missed a singer who, while clearly influenced by jazz legends, showed her own distinct promise.

When Ms. Swift first walked onto the stage, her phrasing and delivery smacked of Peggy Lee. But midway through her opening number., Cole Porter’s “I Get A Kick Out of You,” her vocalese colorings seemed more reminiscent of another female aficionado of the Great American Songbook, Ella Fitzgerald.

She then segued through a song (Mel Torme’s melancholy “Stranger in Town”) and medley (“I Don’t Want to Cry Anymore,” the Bobby Timmons-Oscar Brown Jr. chestnut “Dat Dere,” and Jimmy Van Heusen and Eddie DeLange’s “Darn That Dream”) on the concept of tomorrow.

She then offered a popular tour d’horizon ranging from the Twenties and Thirties (“Pennies From Heaven”), through beebop, and touching down on the modern Broadway musical with Thoroughly Modern Milly.

In trying to establish a connection with the cool audience, Ms. Swift offered, in short between-songs patter, biographical tidbits about her father, a 1980s jazz pianist; her childhood on a farm in Charlottesville, Va.; her college days at the University of Miami; and her current residence in New York.

In the Big Apple, Ms. Swift has become something of a regular at the legendary club Birdland. She will appear there again Nov. 20-24. I intend to seek her out there, where the audience and intimate ambiance are likely to be more favorable than they were at Chautauqua.

Photo of the Day: Johnny Mercer Statue, Savannah, GA

The last time I visited Savannah was three years ago this month, for an afternoon, on a vacation spent mostly in Hilton Head, SC. 

But, in this coastal city of distinctive Southern charm, I was delighted to come across, on my way to somewhere else, something I never expected to see, in Ellis Square. I’ve been waiting three years to use this photo of an outdoor sculpture I snapped then, and what better occasion than on what would have been the 108^th birthday of Johnny Mercer?

I never grasped the full extent of this lyricist’s contribution to the Great American Songbook until I saw Clint Eastwood’s film adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which uses—more effectively than anything else in that often disappointing movie—a soundtrack filled with classic Mercer songs. But really, his songs had been flowing slowly into my consciousness, much like the lazy Georgia rivers this Savannah native loved as a boy.

In the early 1960s, Mercer won consecutive Best Song Oscars for “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses” to go along with two others he had won previously. But that comes nowhere near to conveying the breadth, beauty and verve of his work. Think also of “Skylark,” “Blues in the Night,” “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive,” "Jeepers Creepers," “That Old Black Magic,” “One For My Baby," "Autumn Leaves," “Satin Doll" and “Summer Wind.”

Outside of his lyrics, Mercer—unique among lyricists and composers in the golden age of the Great American Songbook—also made his mark as quite a good singer in his own right and an astute business executive and talent scout, as co-founder of Capitol Records, which he helped establish 75 years ago.

Back in October 1999, on a longer vacation in Savannah, I had made sure to see Bonaventure Cemetery, where Mercer was buried in 1976. While it’s a lovely spot, his gravesite is, of course, a somber affair.

That was part of the reason why the Ellis Square bronze statue—unveiled in 2009, in commemoration of the centennial of Mercer’s birth—pleased me so much when I viewed it. 

Sculptor Susie Chisholm placed it not far from Savannah’s City Market, a setting with an active nightlife and music. Here looking up from his newspaper, as if you’ve just caught him by surprise, wearing a hat and a Huck Finn grin (even down to the gap in his teeth), is a guy with all the warmth and charm in the world—with not merely one song in his heart, but 1,400.

This Day in Jazz History (Birth of Ella Fitzgerald, Supreme Artist of the American Songbook)

April 25, 1917-- Ella Fitzgerald, who, as the “Queen of Jazz” sent listeners into transports of joy for half a century, was born in Newport News, Va., in a home already broken, with parents who had separated even before her birth. By the end of her teens, she had experienced even greater trouble, as her mother died and she was sent to a reform school.

Competing in an “Amateur Night” at Harlem’s Apollo Theater broke the dreariness of her life, opened an avenue to a livelihood, and allowed her to surmount her shyness and self-consciousness about her appearance for at least a few hours onstage.

As a youngster raised on rock ‘n’ roll, it took me a while to warm to Fitzgerald. I knew her best from 1970s Memorex commercials, featuring the famous tagline, "Is it live, or is it Memorex?". In the late 1960s, perhaps advised by her management to seek out newer material, she chose to sing on The Ed Sullivan Show a tune not suited to her gifts, The Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love” (though it was a hit in the UK). Even her mastery of scat singing seemed at the time to me more like vocal pyrotechnics for their own sake rather than in the service of the song.

What made me appreciate her for the first time was my discovery two decades ago of her covers of great American songwriters: Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, and Rodgers and Hart. The series, starting with Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book in 1956 and continuing for nearly a decade, was an extraordinary artistic success that, in the process, earned the deep gratitude of those to whom she paid musical tribute. (A typical response was from Ira Gershwin: “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.")

Like her admirer Frank Sinatra, Fitzgerald had already been a success for more than a decade, but may have achieved her greatest artistic heights in the 1950s with work that helped establish the canon of the Great American Songbook. Jazz critic-historian Gary Giddins may have summed up why she retained the loyalty of jazz fans for five decades: 

“When Ella Fitzgerald was singing at her peak – in good voice, with good song, arrangement and accompaniment – nothing in life was more resplendent.”