Sydney Leff, 104, Artist With an Eye for Music, Dies

[Brownian Motion]

The New York Times

December 18, 2005

Sydney Leff, 104, Artist With an Eye for Music, Dies

By MARGALIT FOX

Sydney Leff, a commercial artist who was almost certainly the last surviving illustrator of sheet music from the golden age of Tin Pan Alley, died on Dec. 10 at his home in Ossining, N.Y. He was 104 and had lived for many years in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Mr. Leff's son-in-law Alfred Miller confirmed the death.

In the 1920's and 30's, Mr. Leff designed and drew the covers for nearly 2,000 songs, from enduring standards like "Stormy Weather" and "Sweet Georgia Brown" to more ephemeral numbers like "Rock Me in a Cradle of Kalua" and "Baby Feet Go Pitter Patter Across My Floor."

Associated in particular with Irving Berlin, Mr. Leff also illustrated the work of Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington and many others. In 2000, several of his covers, including his elegant illustration for "Underneath the Harlem Moon," by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel, were featured in "New York: Songs of the City," an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.

In the MP3 era, with consumers awash in sound, it is hard to remember that through the first half of the 20th century, new songs typically met the world as sheet music. Nearly every middle-class home had a parlor, and nearly every parlor had a piano. Before radios and record players became ubiquitous, families gathered round the piano to sing the latest numbers, available in any dime store. The music's illustrated cover was meant to sell the song.

Mr. Leff's covers spanned the transition from the dripping tendrils of Art Nouveau to the clean lines and bold tonal contrasts of Deco. Not all of them are memorable; Mr. Leff, who earned about $25 a cover, sometimes drew three or four a day. A few, which depict black Americans in the stereotypical manner of the period, are badly dated. But much of Mr. Leff's work is striking even now.

With their promise of romance, glamour and sophistication, Mr. Leff's best covers were small graphic dramas, neatly encapsulating the story inside. One of his most enticing images is for "Yes Sir! That's My Baby," by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson. On the cover, a fur-swathed young woman, wearing a plumed cloche and an alluringly short hemline, strides toward the viewer.

Behind the woman lies a sleepy village, with white houses and a church spire. Was she fleeing her staid home for the lights of the city? Was she a scarlet woman, run out of town? Or had she arrived there to shake things up? Spend a quarter and find out, the cover seemed to say.

Sydney Leff was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 18, 1901, and attended a vocational high school for the arts in Manhattan. A classmate and lifelong friend was Al Hirschfeld, the noted theater caricaturist. Though the two men had very different visual styles, both were concerned throughout their work with a controlled economy of line.

Mr. Leff got into the song business in the early 1920's, after answering an ad for an illustrator placed by the songwriter Sam Coslow, who would later write "My Old Flame." Over the next two decades, Mr. Leff illustrated a range of standards, among them "Sophisticated Lady," with music by Ellington; "Ain't Misbehavin' " (Fats Waller and Harry Brooks); "Me and My Shadow" (Al Jolson and Dave Dreyer); "Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue" (Ray Henderson); and Berlin's "Blue Skies."

By the early 1940's, photographs had become the norm on sheet music covers, putting a generation of illustrators out of work. Mr. Leff went into advertising, working as an art director at several agencies.

Mr. Leff's wife, Rita Zion Leff, an artist and illustrator, died in 1979. He is survived by two daughters, Joan Miller and Gail Raab, both artists living in Manhattan; four grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

The American sheet-music business, which began in Colonial times and was by the 19th century a thriving concern, is today mostly a thing of the past. But through the work of Mr. Leff and his colleagues, the era of spats and Champagne endures in miniature.

"I knew when to hang out the moon and the stars," Mr. Leff told The New York Times in 2000. He also knew where to hang a hemline, studying the fashion plates to ensure that his ladies' attire was fetchingly up to date.

[ghost of miles]

Thanks for posting this--I had just looked Leff up on the Internet a couple of days before Christmas, because he's mentioned in William Zinsser's EASY TO REMEMBER, and was surprised to find that he had just passed away (surprised because I didn't even think he'd still be alive--and Zinsser didn't either, when he actually got to meet Leff in the late 1990s). My grandmother actually has some of the original sheet music with Leff's images on the front.