The Great American Songbook

[jazzolog]

On the set of Shall We Dance, 1936, are dance director Hermes Pan, Fred Astaire, director Mark Sandrich, Ginger Rogers, George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin and musical director Nathaniel Shilkret.

Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time---that is the basic message.

---Pema Chodron

Awakened, I hear the one true thing---

black rain on the roof of Fukakusa temple.

---Dogen

I should be content to look at a mountain for what it is, and not as a comment on my life.

---David Ignatow

Saturday morning, and I was delighted to read the cover story of today's New York Times Book Review. Garrison Keillor writing about George Gershwin. I've neglected to report how wonderful I thought Garrison was in the Robert Altman movie about his radio show. I had put off seeing it because Prairie Home Companion can get too cute at times, and I thought a cast of Kline and Streep and Tomlin and Harrelson might be too great a temptation in that direction. And I've heard Keillor personally is pretty aloof and out there, in his own world...so I thought probably this movie is going to be painful.

Besides, for those of us who grew up in front of a huge radio that was bigger than we were---with glowing, radiating tubes in the back that looked like a Flash Gordon outer space city---how many times had we gone to the movies to see an adaptation of a favorite radio show? Yuck! How many were any good? The Shadow? The Lone Ranger? The Fat Man? Arthur Godfrey? A wonderful voice comes out of that dumb guy? Most were about as flat as a Lux radio version of a movie.

But, except when Meryl Streep tries to loosen him up a little, Garrison Keillor is wonderful in the movie. In fact, he makes great fun of himself as someone totally out in his own world. And he nails radio when he tells Lindsay Lohan---who also is wonderful---that nothing ever ends in radio, nobody gets old, nobody ever dies.

But of course the kind of music on the show---oh god, Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly singing Bad Jokes is worth the price of admission...and by the way, The Behind-The-Scenes feature on the DVD may be better than the movie---I say, the music ain't exactly Tin Pan Alley. Tin pans galore, but we don't hear In The Still Of The Night. So why does anyone think Garrison Keillor should be reviewing a new book by Wilfred Sheed about Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, Arlen, and Kern?

It's probably because, like me, Garrison grew up in the '40s and listening to radio, so what has come to be known as The Great American Songbook is imprinted in our neurons. If we're walking through Central Park with a girl, and Dancing In The Dark begins to play, we may have to turn our walk into a dance that will be legend in the minds of anyone who sees us. Those songs do that to people. They still do it...maybe more than ever. Many rock singers just have to try an album...like jazz players want that one with strings. Opera singers too...and while it used to be horrible to sit through, some of them are starting to get it. I heard Renee Fleming sing You've Changed the other day...and I had to nudge Billie Holiday over in my mind to make room for her.

So Garrison, like Guy Noir, has blues in the night in his sinews. He can set 'em up, Joe, with the rest of us. The rest of us who have heard a tune on the juke box...a tune so devastating there was nothing more to do but get up off the stool, reel toward the door, and out into the lonely night. Maybe she'll be there.

THE HOUSE THAT GEORGE BUILT

With a Little Help From Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty.

By Wilfrid Sheed.

Illustrated. 335 pp. Random House. $29.95.

July 22, 2007

Here to Stay

By GARRISON KEILLOR

Way back in the '20s, with the advent of radio came an intimate style of singing that addressed a single listener in the dark, and with it a style of song, syncopated, swinging, capable of verbal play and subtle tones and colors. American vernacular poetry. It shoved out the stale cream-puff operettas of Herbert and Friml and the madcap yowza-yowza-yowza vaudeville revue and took over the Broadway theater and the movies and reigned supreme until Fred and Frank and Bing got too old to be romantic and then rock 'n' roll came in. That period, embalmed as the Golden Age of American Song, has been saluted and high-faluted in books and wept over repeatedly, but "The House That George Built" is a big rich stew of an homage that makes you want to listen to Gershwin and Berlin and Porter and Arlen all over again.

Wilfrid Sheed's jazzy prose is a joy to read. It goes catapulting along, digressing like mad, never pedantic, a little frantic, which is just right: the jazz song, like all true art, is a flight from depression, indifference, the cold blank stare, the earnest clammy touch. Sheed lopes along through decades of pop, bowing to Berlin (whose lyrics seem "not so much brilliant as inevitable") and upholding some neglected masters (Richard Whiting and Harry Warren), throwing some cold water (Richard Rodgers had a "fatal taste for comfort music"), naming classics — Kern's "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and of course "Stardust" and "Here's That Rainy Day" and Ellington's "Prelude to a Kiss" ("I would instantly vote this the most beautiful song ever written, except for this one problem of the words ... grandiose piffle"). About Porter's "Begin the Beguine," he writes: "The chief musical gift the non-Caucasian world had to offer back then was a variety of exotic beats, and Cole would use these as a semisecret weapon to provide the kicker in his songs, in the form of vivid bass lines that worked like pistons under the melody." He loves the music elaborately while tossing off dollops of gossip about the canoodling of the masters, Porter's flamboyant gayness, the drinking, the meanness of Johnny Mercer when drunk and how a few lines of a song could soften him, Jimmy Van Heusen's roistering with Frank Sinatra, "whose singing seemed to get wiser as his life got sillier and more childish," so you get an idea where their blues came from.

George Gershwin is the main man, though Sheed traces the jazz song back to 1914 and Kern's "They Didn't Believe Me" ("And when I told them how beautiful you are, they didn't believe me"), not some jiggly novelty tune but elegant, swingy, "a perfect loosey-goosey, syncopate-me-if-you-care, a relaxed and smiling American asterisk-jazz song." Gershwin is the president of the fraternity, the all-American golden boy, hyperactive, booming with self-confidence, who went up to Harlem to learn from James P. Johnson and Willie (the Lion) Smith and whose ascent was swift ("no songwriter ever wasted less time reaching his prime") and who, when he reached the top, was openhearted and went out of his way to praise and encourage his brethren.

Sheed gives a nod to the beautiful myth of a music made by Jews who'd been to Harlem, Jews with the blues, one oppressed people listening to another, the blacks using the Hebrew Bible as their text, but in the end he acknowledges that "music is not produced by whole groups, but by one genius at a time." And those geniuses included Midwesterners who learned how to outslick the slickers, like Fred Astaire of Omaha: "Fred had uniquely mastered the art of swinging tastefully, without entirely tipping over into the down and dirty. He could be hot and cool at the same time." And there was Cole Porter of Peru (pronounced PEA-ru), Ind., who wrote jazz songs, and smart patter songs, and was also "a sentimental country boy who can tug on your heartstrings without any tricks at all." And Hoagland Carmichael of Bloomington, Ind. "Carmichael was, like many Americans, a divided soul, part nomad and part homebody, who seemed a little bit at home everywhere, but was probably more so someplace else, if he could just find it. ... What had dislocated him the most was the arrival of jazz, which had sneaked into rock-ribbed Indiana by way of the great music river, the Mississippi, and which would hit young Hoagland with the force of a religious conversion."

The music was nothing if not memorable, so it was spread by "the average absent-minded whistlers and hummers" — "If you knew the music, you whistled it, as if all the backed-up melody in your head was forcing its way out through your mouth like steam from a kettle ... respectable bankers and businessmen in stark colors and homburg hats whistling their way to work like newsboys or Walt Disney's dwarves." And it was composed by men who tended toward glumness. "Over the Rainbow" was written by the bipolar Harold Arlen — "Arlen's manic side may have been almost as necessary to his compositions as his gloomy one, simply because it gave him the heart to write in the first place. In other words, he had to feel that good to tell you how bad he felt; if he felt any worse, he couldn't have written at all, even sadly. And when, for reasons beyond his control, he couldn't write any more anyway, the depression that had been waiting to happen became quite suicidal."

Sheed is in peak form, and the book just gets better and better. You start to hear ghosts talking and they're funny ghosts, not stuffed shirts. "Like most of his colleagues, only a little more so, Irving always needed someone else to tell him when he was good. Witness the famous instance when he almost discarded that most palpable of hits 'There's No Business Like Show Business' because his secretary didn't like it, and perhaps more seriously, because Richard Rodgers didn't light up when he first heard it. A more confident man might have realized that Richard Rodgers never lit up over anything and that he was hearing this new song under the worst possible conditions: Irving was playing it himself. And Irving's pianism was so primitive that Hoagy Carmichael once said that it had given him the heart to go on, on the grounds that 'if the best in the business is that bad, there's hope for all of us.' " (Berlin also discarded "How Deep Is the Ocean" for a while.)

Sheed is so engaging, he can be forgiven a sour note: "By 1945, the kids had seized control. ... And just like that, the magical coincidence of quality and popularity was over, the music in the public square was nowhere near the best music anymore." Not true, so not true. "Never apologize for a song that sells a million copies," Berlin said, which covers the Beatles very nicely, and Paul Simon and Springsteen, and a hundred others, and so does Jerome Kern's advice: "Stay uncommercial. There's a lot of money in it." Meaning: throw away the formula, break the mold, be surprising. By the early '50s, pop music was run by hacks, and bright young talents walked in and drove them away. George would have approved.

Garrison Keillor is the author of "Pontoon: A Lake Wobegon Novel," to be published in September.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/books/re...amp;oref=slogin