Fascinating Rhythm

...Ellington disliked Gershwin making light of the Bible in “It Ain’t Necessarily So...

...The sophisticate was putting away his smoking jacket and tuning in to the radio, though the WASP element in Porter always gave the wannabe Jewish element an undertone of ironic wit...

...He may have admired Gershwin’s music, but he hardly looked up to him...

...We must not make the mistake of thinking lightly of the very characteristic art of Gershwin or, to go further back, the beautiful melodies of Stephen Foster...

...But mostly it came from the fascination that the Jews of New York’s Lower East Side had for the jazz of Harlem...

...You can subtract any other great name from the story,” he declares, “and it would be basically the same story...

...After leaving Indiana, he moved to Palm Beach, then to New York, then Los Angeles, and fi nally Palm Springs...

...Clarke’s in New York, we always played Bunny Berigan’s classic version on the jukebox...

...Star Dust,” “Skylark,” “Georgia on My Mind,” and “Lazy River” all exude a hunger for the unattainable...

...it was a triumph of vocation...

...Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris show how right he was to recognize that his unique understanding of popular music opened up a special place for him in classical music...

...Music is not produced by whole groups, but by one genius at a time,” he writes, “and it may be signifi cant that the two families that gave us Irving Edward Short is the author of a forthcoming book about John Henry Newman and his contemporaries...

...In the cramped world of psychohistory, nobody has ever gotten drunk just for fun, but only to escape from some problem he or she can’t face...

...Longing was Hoagy Carmichael’s great theme...

...His piano playing would always remain rudimentary: “If the best in the business is that bad,” Hoagy Carmichael observed, “there’s hope for us all...

...At least a part of Irving Berlin was an intuitive jazzman,” Sheed points out, “who had once heard the sounds of Harlem as clearly as those of Hester Street and had, so to speak, fi nally hatched out the embryonic sounds of his early rags into the swinging majesty of ‘Cheek to Cheek.’ ‘Heaven,’ as he puts it perfectly, ‘I’m in heaven.’” Sheed is good at showing what a defi ning infl uence Berlin had on Cole Porter...

...Sheed has a soft spot for the fi rst of Richard Rodgers’s collaborators...

...Duke, born Vladimir Dukelsky, was a White Russian Cossack, a child prodigy with an aristocrat’s belief in his own superiority...

...It came from Stephen Foster and Scott Joplin, from Tin Pan Alley and Dixieland, from Basin Street and the Great White Way, from the European waltz and the 12-bar blues, from the Jazz Age and the Crack-Up, from two World Wars and a Depression, from the American dream and an American patriotism that saw America, not any Old Country, as “home sweet home...

...The well-heeled Porter envied Berlin his apprenticeship on the Lower East Side—“the Vienna of American song,” as Sheed calls it—and when he returned to New York in the mid-1930s after living it up in Paris and Venice, he was determined to give his cosmopolitanism a rest and write, as he put it, “little Jewish songs...

...A lifetime’s research into the work of Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers, as well as Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Jimmy Van Heusen, Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, and many others, has provided him with unusually rich materials...

...Still, we can be grateful for the riches that he and other songwriters—famous and not-so-famous—left behind...

...Ralph Vaughan Williams paid him a compliment that Gershwin himself would have relished...

...His collaborator Rodgers could not handle the stuff, nor could Johnny Mercer, whom Sheed calls the “meanest, cruelest of drunks this side of James Thurber...

...He found Hollywood almost too good to be true: “They brought us money on bicycles,” he recalled, prompting Sheed to remark that “the image of a kid tossing a check onto your porch as casually as an evening newspaper must have packed a positively Norman Rockwell enchantment to eyes used to Depression New York...

...Without Gershwin, or his godfather, Irving Berlin, it would be unrecognizably different...

...Nature,” Sheed writes, “had never intended him to be a rebel...

...When I met Harold Arlen in person years later, I could only wonder, as many people must have, how such a mild, unimposing little man could have produced such powerful and turbulent music...

...it was only their wives who prevented him and Humphrey Bogart from coming to blows...

...His take on Lorenz Hart’s fondness for the jug is worth quoting, though it would probably cause certain expulsion from any AA meeting: The one thing that dwarfs really can’t do is drink as much as the Jolly Green Giant, and Hart’s attempts to do so would lead to most of the grief that followed...

...He was never slow to acknowledge the brilliance of others, citing Kern and Berlin, in particular, as principal infl uences...

...Whenever I had dinner with my father at P.J...

...Yet the jazz song found its classic expression in Berlin: The score he wrote for Top Hat (1935) would become the standard for all standards...

...Gershwin, for his part, always let it be known that he envied the bridge of Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady...

...Moreover, many of the songwriters “looked up to [Gershwin], as the closest thing to a role model that this happy-go-lucky profession would allow itself...

...Of Gershwin’s generosity to beginners and rivals alike, Sheed says: “It was as if George wanted all those great songs to be written by somebody, preferably by himself, of course, but not exclusively...

...Kern was another starchy composer who gained from “going lowbrow...

...Gershwin did not live to build that great art himself, but what an art it would have been if he had...

...For “Just One of Those Things” he lifted the line—“A trip to the moon on gossamer wings”—from an ad for mattresses...

...Gershwin put up with his airs for the sake of his talent, and inspired him to write some of the loveliest standards in the canon, including “Autumn in New York,” “April in Paris,” “Taking a Chance on Love,” and my father’s all-time favorite, “I Can’t Get Started...

...Sheed sums up this versatile composer nicely: “Hoagy 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 fi nd it...

...Sheed also notes that what Ellington took exception to about Porgy and Bess (1935) was not that it appropriated black experience— the man who wrote Such Sweet Thunder (1957) had no problem with anyone appropriating things—but that it didn’t make suffi cient allowance for the Christianity of its characters...

...As a result, Porter’s songs took on a new depth—or perhaps one should say a liberating vulgarity...

...Carmichael, like Porter, might have been born in Indiana, but his music abounds with evocations of other places, from Harlem and Baltimore to Memphis and Hong Kong...

...Understanding that fascination is crucial to understanding the great popular music that fl ourished in America from the 1920s to the ’50s, and Sheed misses nothing of its momentous import...

...Of Harold Arlen, for example, the man who wrote “Stormy Weather,” “Over the Rainbow,” “Last Night When We Were Young,” and “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” Sheed stresses that “the rough-and-ready give-and-take of the bandstand had been his fi nishing school, and the Cotton Club was the name on his diploma, not the Juilliard or the Sorbonne...

...The American composers who wrote symphonic poems for which they were not emotionally ready are forgotten, while the work of those who attempted less and achieved more has become the foundation on which a great art can rise...

...If Berlin, Kern, and Gershwin worked hard to emulate the jazz of blacks, Porter worked even harder to emulate the vernacular verve of his Jewish colleagues...

...He might have done Vernon Duke a favor when he told him to “try to write some real popular tunes—and don’t be scared about going low-brow...

...But what set Gershwin apart was that he was never afraid of going highbrow...

...The number of truly great songs that Gershwin wrote is impressive, considering his early death at 39...

...He also gave such younger talents as Arlen and Vernon Duke a leg up...

...It was certainly the case that Ellington “didn’t ‘beat down doors,’ he walked through them...

...Fascinating Rhythm Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Songbook BY EDWARD SHORT The novelist and critic Wilfrid Sheed calls his new book “a labor of love, not a work of scholarship, which means that I have been researching it for most of my life...

...Irving Berlin got his start on the Bowery in a Chinese saloon called Nigger Mike’s, where he worked as a singing waiter...

...So the possibility that Hart might have had an inspired and highly productive capacity for enjoying himself is simply squeezed into a box marked “manicdepressive,” from which nothing good or beautiful has ever emerged...

...Berlin repaid Porter’s admiration with a touching note after seeing CanCan (1953): “It’s a swell show and I still say, to paraphrase an old bar-room ballad, ‘Anything I can do, you can do better.’” For Porter, the Berlin ballad would always be the top...

...Berlin and George Gershwin both fl ed Russia on the same great wave of czarist pogroms, only to fi nd in America black people not only singing about a similar experience, but using the Hebrew Bible as their text...

...My Funny Valentine,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “Love Never Went to College,” and “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” to name a few of Hart’s gems, prove that Sheed has a point...

...Duke Ellington was an exception...

...A Foggy Day,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” “Embraceable You,” and “Things Are Looking Up” are just a few of many...

...The House That George Built should inspire younger readers to give those riches a listen, and remind the rest of us who prize the great American songbook that our love is here to stay...

...Great things grow out of small beginnings...

...They will open you up...

...Porter never became a drunk, but that was only because he knew how to abstain now and again...

...Arlen’s father was an Orthodox cantor who tried hard to separate his son from the secular music that he brought back from Harlem, but Arlen would not renounce his newfound love...

...His songs also teem with an itinerant restlessness...

...The model for the Duke’s ways was closer to home: As Sheed points out, Ellington’s father James “had been at various times a butler and a chauffeur to the Washington, D.C., elite, both positions that could teach one an awful lot about irony and the way the world works, and perhaps James imparted some of this outlook to his son...

...That this dapper vagabond was a lifelong Republican did not endear him to Hollywood’s liberals...

...Full of astute judgments about the music itself, and the tunesmiths who knocked it into shape, The House That George Built is a delightful companion to an inexhaustibly fascinating subject...

...Hart’s demons could never stop him from writing like an angel, and he was not alone in his drink problem...

...Less a formal history than a series of witty profi les, this volume is particularly good at showing the crucial role that the Cotton Club played in helping America fi nd her native wood-notes wild...

...Sheed points out that Duke could not fi nd a lyric for the song and went to Gershwin for help, whereupon George put his brother Ira on the case, who delivered the immortal goods (“I’ve been consulted by Franklin D / Greta Garbo has had me to tea...

...That he has gathered them together into a book that reads like inspired conversation will surprise none of his admirers and win him many new readers...

...For when you lay off the liquor / You feel so much slicker...

...Rockin’ Chair,” which became a staple of Louis Armstrong’s, describes a kind of vagabond’s nightmare, where there will be no more wandering, only fl ies, the front porch, and Judgment Day...

...Where did this wonderful music come from...

...Carmichael’s nostalgia for places that were not his home was characteristic...

...Once MGM beckoned, Arlen obliged with the score for The Wizard of Oz (1939...

...Sheed gives pride of place here to George Gershwin, whom he regards as the capomaestro of the golden age of American popular music...