The song of the day for Friday, April 12, 2013, is All The Things You Are.
About This Song
Written for the 1939 Broadway music Very Warm for May, All The Things You Are was written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. In American Popular Song, Alec Wilder notes that Very Warm For May must have had a terrible book “since otherwise the show’s failure is incomprehensible. For it had one of Kern’s best scores. Indeed there are five songs worth considering, the greatest of them being All The Things You Are“.
The song has lent itself to numerous jazz interpretations by some of America’s finest jazz musicians, including Artie Shaw, Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie and Dave Brubeck. In his book The Jazz Standards, Al Gioia relates that “I recall talking to saxophonist Bud Shank a few months before his death at age 82, when he noted that he never felt he had exhausted the possibilities of this specific son, which he had first recorded almost 60 years earlier.”
About This Version
I was listening to Bennett’s Carnegie Hall concert today at the office; when All The Things You Are started I had to stop working and just listen because I was overcome not only with the beauty of the song itself, but Tony Bennett’s exquisite rendering of the song. When he sings “you are the angel glow that lights the stars” so gently, touching the notes so lightly as if they are sacred, the beauty of the song is fully revealed. While most of the praise for this song goes to the wonderful composition by Jerome Kern, Tony Bennett’s treatment of the song lyrics are a tribute to the greatness of Oscar Hammerstein.
http://open.spotify.com/track/4XohhDSDnbIMP8kIbESsuv
All The Things You Are, as well the complete Tony Bennett At Carnegie Hall album, is available from iTunes.
And yes, if you check the new Reader Poll, I was the first “reader” to choose the Carnegie Hall Concert as my desert island album.
I was present at a rehearsal in Atlantic City when Tony sang this song. People were all working in the theater doing their thing but when the Maestro started singing this song, everyone stopped working and listened to the great man singing his heart out! We all stood to applaud him.
PS: I voted OTHER in the desert island question you asked. I’d go the extra mile and somehow find a way to bring all the records you had listed. They are all my favorite.