Teasing the Korean

What is the album? A Frishberg CTI album? I never saw this. EDIT: Here it is:

I added Mingus to the Faubus entry.

Agreed. And this brings us back to Sondheim and Hart. Sondheim was assessing Hart's abilities based on Sondheim's contemporaneous standards of what a successful Broadway show was supposed to accomplish, and not on Hart's reality. If you could bring back Hart today and tell him that the most celebrated Broadway composer hadn't had a hit song in nearly 50 years, I'm sure Hart would be criticizing Sondheim.

Yes, the first two were mentioned in that NY Times article that I posted, the one that lots of our members dismissed without picking up on the interesting cultural dynamics at play at the time.

As soon as you said Annie, I could almost taste the pumpkin pie.

Agreed. Do people still watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade? That used to provide an annual slice of Broadway to people who lived in Dubuque. Now, all of these huge shows go on the road.

Oh, I'm sure artists in various genres recorded all kinds of Broadway tunes from the 1960s and later, but I think very, very few of these tunes became generally recognizable outside of the shows. I'm sure we could come up with a list if we wanted to, but I think it would become finite very quickly, especially by the time you get to the 1970s. Hair was a real outlier in this regard, having four or five big hits by four different artists. That must have been the last time that this sort of thing occurred.

What's so bad about them? I know "Misty" is (or was) over-played, but that's not the song's fault. What if someone requested either of them?

The Price You Got To Pay, for the cover art alone.

You may be right. I'm no scholar of Broadway either, and what I do know of it is how it relates to the so-called Great American Songbook. I think by the 1960s we began to see big hit shows that contained no hit songs, e.g., A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, by you-know-who.

Sondheim was criticizing Hart as early as the 1980s, if not before. I specifically remember having conversations about this in the 1980s. As you wrote earlier, the shows themselves are very popular, but the songs don't really resonate beyond the context of the shows. Even Webber didn't have all that many "hits" in the traditional sense of the word. Of course, popular culture itself has increasingly fragmented over the decades, and Broadway would be yet one more example. The fact that many of us can't name a single song that Sondheim wrote since 1973, despite his resume, would attest to this.

My point is that Stephen Sondheim's yardstick for "good" Broadway lyrics would not have really applied in the 1920s, 30s, or early 40s, because Broadway was more or less a laboratory for creating pop songs at that time, and little more. The idea of Broadway lyrics deeply driven by plot or character came more into vogue in the Rodgers and Hammerstein era. Sondheim's criticism of Hart would be akin to a contemporary jazz pianist criticizing Erroll Garner for playing a three-minute arrangement of "Misty" on TV variety shows and talk shows in the 1950s or 1960s. Jazz was more closely entwined with pop music then.

More or less, though on a slightly different timeline. But yeah, both jazz and Broadway had less and less of an impact on pop music. Not sure if they abandoned pop, or if pop abandoned them. Or a combination.

Nice choice ending the show with "Listen Here." May I ask about the CTI album you mentioned?

In fairness, Hart was writing for a much broader audience than Broadway. During Hart's era, many more pop songs came from Broadway than during Sondheim's. I don't think that people listening to Rodgers and Hart songs over the decades knew or cared about the characters or the shows, with the possible exception of Pal Joey. Broadway became much more show-oriented and much more insular during Sondheim's era.

I don't have examples in front of me, but he said disparaging things and, IIRC, considered Hart's rhyme schemes to be a "parlor game." Maybe someone has access to the direct quote or quotes. (There were more than one.) It was enough make me avoid Sondheim for a long time.

That plus all the stupid things he said about Lorenz Hart.

So Ms. TTK and I finished Expressions during dinner. The long track "To Be" was uncharacteristically restrained, but very pleasant. The rest of it was very good, and what I generally expect from late-era Coltrane. All in all, the album provided very nice dinner music.

Thanks. So will the new material they produced be released separately?

I admittedly don't keep up with today's "rock" music to the degree that some of you do. That said, never in my wildest dreams would I ever have guessed that the Beatles would one day "get back" together. This must certainly be an event on a cosmic scale for today's youth. I have not had the opportunity to watch the Beatles' new TV special, so I can't comment on the music. It will be interesting to see if Lennon and McCartney still have the ability to write classics like "Yesterday" and "And I Love Her."

Heating up Thanksgiving leftovers and listening to side 1 now.

Ah, that Columbia reverb on vocals...

I think that one of the ways C was perpetuated was the Real Book chart was written in C for an Eb instrument. I think there were several instances of that sort of thing.

Eb.

She still does this now and then. Not to steal the thunder from your show, which again, I really appreciated!