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The Year of Tony Bennett

An Appreciation of the Art and Music of Tony Bennett

June 30, 2016 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

Songwriter of the Month: Richard Rodgers

For July, The Year of Tony Bennett honors one of America’s greatest Broadway songwriters, Richard Rodgers. Rodgers career as a Broadway composer spanned six decades, starting in 1919 and ending in 1979, with scores for 43 musicals. He is also one of the rare artists to achieve the EGOT: an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony award. In addition, he also won the Pulitzer Prize.

Rodgers-young

Richard Rodgers was born to wealthy Jewish family in Queens, New York, on June 28, 1902. He started piano at the age of six and attended public schools in New York. He entered Columbia University, which his future collaborators Oscar Hammerstein II and Lorenz Hart also attended. However, he soon switch to the Institute of Musical Art, which became The Julliard School.

He met and started working with Lorenz Hart in 1919; that year they wrote the song “Any Old Place With You” for the 1919 Broadway musical comedy A Lonely Romeo. The following year, they contributed to their first professional production: Poor Little Ritz Girl with music by Sigmund Romberg. Their next professional show, The Melody Man, did not premiere until 1924. During that time, Rodgers was musical director for Lew Fields, father of lyricist Dorothy Fields.

roger-hart1930s

The Rodgers and Hart partnership took off the late 1920s. While the productions they did aren’t very well-known, they were writing some of their best songs, including “Mountain Greenery,” “Manhattan,” and “You Took Advantage of Me.” By the 1930s, they were untouchable and the major hits rolled out: Jumbo, On Your Toes, Babes in Arms and The Boys from Syracuse. Hollywood also came calling. Songs during this period included “Blue Moon,” “Isn’t It Romantic,” “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “Where of When.”

By the 1940s, Hart’s alcoholism was starting to take its toll. They wrote only two shows: Pal Joey in 1940 and By Jupiter in 1942. Larry Hart died in 1943.

rodgers-hammerstein

They had been working on a musical based on Lynn Riggs’ 1931 play, Green Grow the Lilacs, though not much had been accomplished. It was then that Rodgers started the second major part of his career when he teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein and wrote what is now considered one of the first modern musicals: Oklahoma! Working with Hammerstein, they created a series of beloved American musicals including: Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, Cinderella and The Sound of Music.

 

The Sound of Music was their last show. Oscar Hammerstein died in 1960, the year after the opening on Broadway.

After Hammerstein’s death, Rodgers continued to work, including a production of Do I Hear a Waltz with Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim was a protegé of Hammerstein, who very much wanted Sondheim to work with Rodgers. Unfortunately, the two did not get along well, and by that time Rodgers was suffering from his own battles with alcoholism. He died on December 30, 1979.

RichardRodgersPhoto

 

Rodgers left an enormous legacy, having written on 900 songs for 43 different productions. His career covers the period of the light, fluffy Broadway musical comedies to the significant musicals, starting with Pal Joey and continuing with his work with Hammerstein; their work together tackled social themes ahead of their time. His daughter Mary Rodgers was an important influence on the American musical and wrote the score for Once Upon a Mattress. Her son, Adam Guettel is also a composer and won the Tony Award in 2005 for The Light in the Piazza.

I close with this quote from Alec Wilder, who wrote in his book American Popular Song:

Of all the writers whose songs are considered and examined in this book, those of Rodgers show the highest degree of consistent excellence, inventiveness, and sophistication…[A]fter spending weeks playing his songs, I am more than impressed and respectful: I am astonished.

Filed Under: Songwriter of the Month Tagged With: Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers

May 30, 2016 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

Songwriter of the Month: Cole Porter

The Year of Tony Bennett is proud to honor Cole Porter as the songwriter of the month for June 2016.

Cole Porter was born on June 9, 1891 to a wealthy family from Peru, Indiana. His mother encouraged him musically, and as a child he studied both piano and violin. While he was quite good with both instruments, he disliked the sound of the violin and concentrated on music. He studied hard and was a proficient pianist in his teens.

Cole Porter - 1913 at Yale
Cole Porter – 1913 at Yale

His grandfather wanted Cole to follow in the family business and wanted the young man to become a lawyer. With the in mind, he sent him to prep school in Massachusetts; Porter brought an upright piano with him. He did well in school, though, and was the class valedictorian. He entered Yale in 1909, majoring in English, minoring in music and also studying French. While at Yale, he wrote several student songs, some of which are still sung today. He wrote scores to several student musicals while at Yale as well. He did enroll in the law school at Harvard, but was encouraged by the dean of the law school to switch to the music school, where he continued his studies in classical music.

Cole Porter and Linda Lee Thomas
Cole Porter and Linda Lee Thomas

By 1916, he had two productions that had made it to Broadway, though they were flops and only ran for a short time. Porter moved to Paris at the beginning of World War I and, some say, volunteered with relief organizations and possibly joined the French Foreign Legion. That said, he lived in Paris, quite lavishly on his share of the family fortune, and was well-known for his scandalous parties. Though Porter’s homosexuality had become more open while a student at Yale, he was completely out as gay during this period. In 1918, he met Linda Lee Thomas, a wealthy divorcee from Louisville, Kentucky and they were married in 1919 and stayed married until Linda’s death in 1954.

In the early 1920s, Cole began to take his music more seriously, mainly due to Linda’s belief in his talent, and began to write.

Cole Porter and Ethel Merman
Cole Porter and Ethel Merman

In 1928, he returned to Broadway with the musical Paris, which was a big hit for him, which contained two of his more famous songs: “Let’s Do It” and “Let’s Misbehave.” In the late 1920s and 1930s, he was continually on Broadway, including Gay Divorce in 1932, Fred Astaire’s last stage show before Hollywood called. One of his early great hits was Anything Goes, starring Ethel Merman.

In 1937, Porter had a terrible riding accident, where his horse rolled over on his and crushed his legs. While the doctors wanted to amputate his right leg, Linda fought adamantly to save it, afraid that he’d never return to writing music again. As soon as possible, he returned to work, but the rest of his life was a series of crippling pain and several dozen surgeries.

In the 1940s, he began writing for Hollywood, which paid well but wasn’t a cultural success. But he returned to Broadway in full force, with a string of hits: Kiss Me Kate, Can-Can and Silk Stockings.

After losing both his mother and Linda over a two-year period, he began to slow down. By 1958, the right leg finally had to amputated; he never wrote another song after that. Porter died in 1964 while in California, due in large part to the doctors not properly understanding the seriousness of his addiction to alcohol.

cole-older-2

The songs he wrote remain popular and are sung today by popular, jazz and cabaret artists. Ella Fitzgerald’s Cole Porter Songbook is a masterpiece, of course. Other major Porter recordings include Frank Sinatra Sings the Select Cole Porter, Anything Goes: Stephane Grappelli and Yo-Yo Ma, and Red Hot + Blue.

For more information about Cole Porter and his body of work, please visit Cole Wide Web.

Filed Under: Songwriter of the Month Tagged With: Ethel Merman, Linda Lee Thomas, songwriter of the month

May 1, 2016 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

Songwriter of the Month: Irving Berlin

The Year of Tony Bennett is happy to honor Irving Berlin as the Songwriter of the Month for May 2016.

Irving Berlin was born in Russia as Israel Isidor Baline on May 11, 1888. Some say his family was from Siberia; other say he was born in what is now Belarus. His father, a cantor, relocated his family to New York City in 1893. The Baline’s story was similar to those of many other Russian Jewish families; their house was burned to the ground by Cossacks and the Baline family had to sneak themselves out of Russia to America.

The family, whose last name had become Berlin by the 1900 census, settled in a cold-water flat in the Yiddish Theater District on the Lower East Side. Irving’s father found work in a kosher meat market and gave Hebrew lessons to support his family. Young Irving helped out by selling the evening paper while his mother became a midwife. His siblings worked in various jobs, including his brother who worked in a clothing sweatshop.

Young Irving found that he could sell more newspapers if he sang while selling and helped him discover his first job ambition: that of a singing waiter. He had little formal education and his only real skill was his singing. He taught himself to play the piano, though for remainder of his career, he could only play in a single key. He was a song plugger during the day and a singing water at night; in the meantime, he began to write songs. His first published song was “Marie From Sunny Italy,” for which he earned 37 cents.

Gradually, his work began to be noticed and his work as a song plugger introduced him to other young songwriters. His big break came in 1911 when he published “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” a song that is well=known to this day. George Gershwin called “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” the ‘first real American work.’ He continued to write songs of great popularity, including “I Love a Piano.”

He was drafted into service during World War I. His songwriting supported the war theme, including the score to Yip Yip Yaphank, an all-soldier musical. From this came one of my favorite of his songs, “Oh How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning.”

After he returned from the war, his career began to boom as he wrote for revues and the two editions of the Ziegfeld Follies. The string of hits during the 20s and 30s was astounding: “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” “Say It Isn’t So,” “I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm” and “God Bless America.”

In the 1940s, Berlin turned to Broadway, with his 1946 score for Annie Get Your Gun. For Hollywood, he wrote for films such Easter Parade and Holiday Inn.

Berlin died on September 22, 1989 at the age of 101. He left behind a body of work that is the foundation of the American Songbook.

About That Piano

Irving Berlin never had any formal training on playing the piano. Completely self-taught, he could only play in one key, F#, and only used the black keys. He used what is known as a “transposing piano,” which used levers to play in the correct key. This video has Mr. Berlin explaining his piano on the Dinah Shore television show.

Filed Under: Songwriter of the Month Tagged With: Irving Berlin, songwriter of the month

April 1, 2016 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

Songwriter of the Month: Duke Ellington

This month we celebrate the songwriting career of one of America’s greatest, and most prolific, songwriters: Edward Kenney “Duke” Ellington.

Duke Ellington was born in Washington, DC on April 29, 1899. He died in New York on May 24, 1974.

I won’t presume to write a biographical summary of Duke Ellington. If biographical information is what you’re after, I recommend his official website at dukeellington.com.

What I do want to address over the month is not one his extraordinary gift as a composer, but as one of the great bandleaders of the 20th century. In spite of being fired from Columbia, the death of his collaborator and close friend Billy Strayhorn, and the changing tastes in music, Ellington not only managed to keep his orchestra going, he kept it going until, literally, his last breath. The end of swing era marked the end of many of great bands, but Ellington not only hung on but created some of his finest compositions and recreated himself at his legendary Newport Jazz Festival in 1956 with the still-amazing “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” feature a 27-chorus solo from Paul Gonsalves that takes my breath away.

As we feature the music of Duke Ellington performed by Tony Bennett, we’ll also be playing some of Ellington’s performances as well. We hope you enjoy listening and, to quote the great Duke: “We love you madly.”

As a special treat, here’s that 1956 recording from the Newport Jazz Festival. I think it’s the greatest piece of jazz music ever recorded. No fooling.

Diminuendo In Blue - Live

Listen to Diminuendo In Blue - Live on Spotify. Duke Ellington · Song · 1956.

Filed Under: Songwriter of the Month Tagged With: Dimenuendo and Crescendo in Blue, Duke Ellington

March 1, 2016 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

Songwriter of the Month: Jimmy Van Heusen

The songwriter of the month for March 2016 is Jimmy Van Heusen.

Jimmy Van Heusen

He was born Edward Chester Babcock on January 29, 1913 in Syracuse, New York. He began playing piano at an early age, which he much preferred to traditional schooling. In fact, he was expelled from high school in 1928 for a prank he played during a school assembly; a year later he was expelled from a seminary for being a degenerate, having been caught hanging around poolrooms.

His musical career began at the age of 15, when he landed a job as a part-time disc jockey for a radio station. The station manager insisted that he change his name. He looked out the window and saw an advertisement for Van Heusen men’s shirts, and the first name of James or Jimmy came soon after. In spite of using that name professionally for the rest of his life, he never had it changed and was officially known as Edward Chester Babcock. His stint as a disc jockey gave him a real understanding of the construction of popular songs, and he began composing at that early age.

He did attend Syracuse University for two years in the early 1930s, where he studied piano and composition. During that time, he formed a friendship with Harold Arlen’s brother, Jerry Arlen. Arlen was happy to recommend Jerry and Van Heusen for jobs both on the east coast and in Hollywood, a wonderful assist for his burgeoning career. He moved to New York, got a job as a waiter and worked on getting recognized as a composer. Like many young composers of his time period, he worked as a staff pianist for various music publishers, which served to draw attention to his skills. By 1938, he met Jimmy Dorsey and together they composed a song, “It’s The Dreamer In Me,” that was recorded by Dorsey’s orchestra. That same year, he began to parter with lyricist Eddie De Lange, with whom he worked for several years. Van Heusen and De Lange got their big break in 1940 to compose the score for Swingin’ The Dream, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which featured Louis Armstrong as Bottom. The song “Darn That Dream” was a hit for Benny Goodman and was widely recorded, including a very fine version by Billie Holiday.

In 1940, Van Heusen teamed up with Johnny Burke, a relationship that lasted many years. They were asked to composed for the first of the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope “road” movies: The Road to Singapore, released in 1941. Bing Crosby’s recordings of their songs in this 1940s brought great attention to the pair; the songs from that period include “Birds of a Feather, “It’s Always You” and one of my personal favorites “Swinging on a Star.”

jvh-pilot

During this period of writing a long string of hit songs, Van Heusen also helped out in the war effort. He toured with Crosby to help sell war bonds and, using his given name, also worked at Lockheed as a test pilot for bombers being sent to the front. Apparently, Lockheed had no idea of Babcock’s other job, while Paramount Studios, had no idea that Van Heusen had another job! His shift at Lockheed started around 4:00 am and he was done by noon, when he would report to Paramount.

After the war, Van Heusen and Burke continued to write for both Hollywood and Broadway, in spite of Burke’s failing health, which did not allow Burke to work in 1954 and 1955. Due to contractual issues, Van Heusen was only able to publish his songs under a pseudonym. After the contract was finally terminated, Van Heusen teamed up with Sammy Cahn and began the second stage of his career where he partnered frequently with Frank Sinatra, both professionally and as a friend. Van Heusen and Cahn began to collect awards, including Oscars for The Tender Trap and The Joker’s Wild, which starred Sinatra, as well as an Emmy for their score of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The partnership with Cahn included Broadway musicals, songs for singers including Sinatra, Paul Anka, Lena Horne, Nat “King” Cole, and Sammy Davis, Jr.

Van Heusen, who was quoted as saying “I dig chicks, booze, music and Sinatra — in that order,” remained a bachelor until 1966. He retired in 1970 and visited his homes in California and New York. He died in 1990, from complications of a stroke. He left us with an amazing collections of songs that are still popular today.

For more information about Jimmy Van Heusen, please visit his official website at jimmyvanheusen.com.

Filed Under: Songwriter of the Month Tagged With: Chester Babcock, Jimmy Van Heusen, songwriter of the month

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