Ed Mascari

Conversations at the Piano

Some songs are just plain fun to play. I Won’t Dance is a great example of this. The easiest way for you to understand what I mean is to think of the feeling you get from watching a romantic comedy. It seems that there are films and TV shows for every generation that capture this character. From Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Annie Hall to Pretty Woman to When Harry Met Sally to The Devil Wears Prada just to name a few.

In light of this mood, jazz vocalist and former WICN-FM disc jockey, Carol Sloane teamed up with trumpeter/vocalist Clark Terry to create a wonderfully enjoyable performance. Their recording is reflective of the light-hearted earlier rendition created by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Keeping to the duet format, three other vocalists managed to capture a similar mood by combining their talents with excellent pianists. Susannah McCorkle’s recording with English pianist Keith Ingham features the latter’s stride piano style during the instrumental interlude. French singer Isabelle Georges offers yet another example in combination with pianist René Urtreger. A more modern version follows this same model: California’s Nina Blade joining forces with the wonderful pianist Bill Mays.

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In addition to Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (featured in my 6-22-10 post), Jerome Kern composed Yesterdays with lyricist/librettist Otto Harbach (1873-1963) for the 1933 operetta Roberta. As we found in the former standard, these collaborators created a song that left performers plenty of room for creative expression. How could Mr. Kern have missed this? He insisted that his pieces should be performed within the context of their shows and in the style in which they were composed. Thankfully, pianists, vocalists and other instrumentalists have ignored this decree!

Yesterdays, like many of Jerome Kern’s other compositions, contains a great deal of harmonic (chords) and melodic repetition. As a matter of fact, Yesterdays is a 32 measure song which is made up of two identical 16 bar sections. Because of this, there is an extra measure (bar 33) needed so that the song will actually end on the tonic (principal chord of the key). So as I mentioned last time in my Dearly Beloved post, when it comes to improvisation and interpretation, simpler is better. The great thing about Yesterdays though, is that it is written in a minor key.

One of my adult students and I have often discussed the difference between songs written in major keys (happy in character) and those written in minor keys (sad in character). She has been drawn to learn pieces in minor keys because she senses a depth to them which communicates to her. These have included such selections as Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Autumn Leaves. Yesterdays certainly would fit into her concept of depth.

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When I was a student at Stepinac High School in White Plains, NY, my exposure to music increased tremendously due to my participation in the Glee Club. What a wonderful way for your sons and daughters to enjoy the thrill of performing some terrific material as part of their educational experience! Some people (you may be one of them) continue choral singing in college and then later in life as a member of a church choir and/or a community chorus. The great thing is that the process of performing pieces of music requires a deeper relationship with the details of the material.

Why is this important?

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Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler wrote Let’s Fall in Love in 1933, the same year as their hits Stormy Weather and It’s Only a Paper Moon (two songs featured in my recent blog posts). Several years ago, I realized that today’s featured standard, Let’s Fall in Love, would actually be a terrific tool for teaching my students how to implement the walking bass technique.

This is one left hand accompaniment style that continues to fascinate many of my piano students. Not only do they find it energizing, but they also can’t wait until they can learn to use it too. As a teacher, I find that the best way to help a student expand her pallet of piano playing accompaniments is to select a song that helps her start using the specific style she is studying. This piece is the perfect pedagogical vehicle for introducing her to the walking bass technique.

What a far cry from constantly focusing on fingering exercises!

Once I make a few minor changes to the chords found in the verses of Let’s Fall in Love, the student is able to get started on his way to swinging piano playing. For our first step, my student and I review the ii-V-I progression concept which is so central to the music of the American Popular Songbook. Then the fun begins! He’s ready to understand how to create his own walking bass lines. Starting with the I-vi-ii-V (you’d recognize this as the Heart and Soul pattern); I explain how to construct what I call the anchor bass line. Using this for the turn-around (set of chords that bring you back to the beginning of the song); this student sees the secret for his success.

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It seems particularly appropriate to include Stormy Weather in this Harold Arlen series of blog posts considering the amount of rain that we had in New England during the past few weeks. If you’re like me, you encountered several detours due to closed roads when you were driving somewhere. Although Ted Koehler’s lyrics were written to create an image of lost love rather than a weather report, we can relate to them in a much more personal way now. Since the blues is certainly a musical style that has been used to express sadness, disappointment, loss and the like, the words of Stormy Weather could have just as easily been written for a 12-Bar Blues rather than one of the standards from the American Popular Songbook.

So who, other than Harold Arlen could have created a composition that combined song form with the blues? As I mentioned in my Blues in the Night blog post, Arlen had managed to find a way to energize and enrich his songs with a blues feeling that has continued to inspire jazz musicians for more than eight decades. Stormy Weather is no exception. Despite the fact that it includes two instances of “keeps rainin’ all the time” (two measures each) and thus increases the song’s length by four measures, for all intents and purposes, this standard follows the customary 32 measure form featuring the A-A-B-A (verse 1-verse 2-bridge-verse 3).

Arlen’s genius in imbibing his songs with blues elements can be seen by looking at the sheet music. There are several spots where an A# appears. You might think that this is just an accidental (a note that is marked sharp or flat because it’s not in the key of the song). However, this is the composer’s clever way of including the commonly used blues scale note, the flatted 3^rd (A# is actually a disguised version of Bb). There is also a Db in the melody and this can be seen/heard as the flatted 5^th. You may remember me telling you that my students often notice me adding some bluesy sounding notes when I demonstrate songs for them. Here’s a case where the melody of Stormy Weather gives you, as the piano student, the opportunity start sounding bluesy.

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If you’ve been following my posts on American Popular Songbook composers and lyricists during the past months, you may have noticed that many of these well-known creative artists adopted stage names. The two lyricists who collaborated with Harold Arlen (as you know, a stage name) to create today’s featured song selection, It’s Only a Paper Moon, were Bill Rose (William Samuel Rosenberg 1899-1966) and Yip Harburg (Isidore Hochberg 1896 -1981).

Although Rose received partial credit for writing the words to this song (as well as a few others in collaboration with other lyricists and composers), it was never clear how much he actually contributed to the creation (usually, just an occasional word or idea). Because he was so successful at promoting songs that he had a hand in writing, lyricists and publishers were willing to include his name in conjunction with that of the actual professional lyricist. Yip Harburg, on the other hand, was a prolific and successful wordsmith.

Harburg’s partnerships with composers Vernon Duke (Autumn in NY), Jerome Kern (I’m Old Fashioned & My Romance), Julie Styne and Burton Lane as well as Harold Arlen produced many well-known successful songs. In fact, beginning with Satan’s Little Lamb (1932), Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg worked together on songs for more than 40 years. Of course, their most famous collaboration was for the Wizard of Oz including Over the Rainbow (1939).

Like several songs that have been featured in my previous posts, It’s Only a Paper Moon (1932) has become recognized as one of the great standards in the American Popular Songbook despite the fact that it was written for an unsuccessful Broadway play called The Great Magoo and even included the 1933 film Take a Chance. Once again, we have a case of a song’s popularity resulting from recordings that were made by jazz musicians including Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole. It’s certainly a wonderful vehicle for improvisation as is evidenced by the number of instrumentalists and vocalists who have made quite a variety of versions of this terrific tune.

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I’ll never forget the time that I found out Michael Landon’s real name. Years ago, many actors and actresses used a stage name rather than their real name as a way of helping their fans remember them. Can you imagine seeing the youngest of Ben Cartwright’s three sons on Bonanza being billed by his birth name, Eugene Horowitz?

Although I never used a stage name, this practice was so common among performers that anyone who wanted to join the musicians’ union had to list his or her stage name on the membership application. Thinking back to a few professional musicians who used stage names, I am reminded of an experience I had on one of my summer hotel gigs in the Catskill Mountains. A few weeks into the season, a saxophonist came with his family to stay at the hotel for his annual vacation. Apparently the owner of the hotel had promised him free room and board if he would perform with our trio in the casino (as the lounge was called) every night during his stay.

And so without any discussion or warning, this gentleman introduced himself by his real name and then proceeded to show us all sorts of promotional materials that used his stage name which I think was Paul Whiteman (not to be confused with the band leader who premiered Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue). To make a long story short, this older man took over the leadership of our group by becoming both the featured soloist and the emcee. Oh yes, he also showed up to perform in a white dinner jacket with his tuxedo so he would stand out from the three of us who wore black tuxedos.

Need I say more?

Well that brings us to the composer of today’s song selection, Darn That Dream: Edward Chester Babcock.

Who?

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Today marks the final chapter of my Cole Porter blog series. As I mentioned a while ago, this composer was far from being an overnight success. Although Love for Sale was featured in the revue called The New Yorkers, its lyrics were considered much too explicit for society in 1930. Nevertheless, this song composed two years after Cole Porter reintroduced himself to Broadway, has become a popular standard. In fact, many jazz instrumentalists and vocalists continue to include Love for Sale in their performance repertoires.

When I reflect on the collection of songs that I played and recorded for this series on Cole Porter, I certainly can appreciate Porter’s contribution to the American Popular Songbook with a different perspective. There’s something very valuable about getting acquainted with a composer’s musical language. By this I mean his or her manner of creating melodies and harmonic progressions as well as choosing certain chords and presenting these with certain overall and specific rhythmic patterns. In the case of Cole Porter, there is the additional element of his lyrics which definitely have an impact on his musical structure.

During the 16 years when I was actively composing concert music (classical music), I gained a tremendous amount of knowledge by getting to know the lives and works of many classical composers. My pattern was to select a specific composer because I had heard a piece that I really liked. I would buy the CD and purchase or borrow the musical score from the library. Usually, I would be curious about the creator of the particular piece that had caught my attention. This motivated me to find and read the biography which in turn introduced me to the even more of the composer’s compositions. Before I knew it, I was listening to many new (at least to me) pieces of music. This process combined in a way that energized and enriched my musical life.

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When I was young, going to see a movie was a big deal. Unlike the availability of films on TV as well as on DVDs, the Internet and even hand held devices as we have today, the local cinema was the only place to experience Hollywood’s latest motion picture. The characters looked larger than life on the giant screen; the color picture provided a marked contrast to the dull black and white images we viewed on our television at home, and the sound was staggering since we were use to hearing heard voices and music coming from small poor quality speakers.

Because these trips to the movies were infrequent during my childhood, they stood out in my mind. It’s interesting that two of the films that our family attended came to mind when I began preparing to write this post. One of them, which was and continues to be an important part of the American cultural experience, was The Wizard of Oz.  In fact, I recorded and wrote about Over the Rainbow in my blog post nearly one year ago. There I pointed out the fact that this song’s universal appeal is the reason that I often use it to demonstrate a variety of arranging styles to prospective piano students (adults and/or children with their parents) when I meet with them for their free initial interview/consultation.

The other less well-known movie that our family attended featured Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in the 1957 film version of Cole Porter’s show, Silk Stockings. I can still remember watching this couple dancing effortlessly and gracefully across the screen. Since my mother knew, liked and could play many of the standards from the American Popular Songbook, it doesn’t surprise me to think that she not only wanted to see the film herself, but also wanted to introduce me to this wonderful musical repertoire. Needless to say, I certainly had no idea at the time that I’d be playing, recording and writing about All of You, the song which emanated from this Cole Porter score so many years later.

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Many people I know have said that they were glad to say goodbye to 2009. With the economy, the political situation and the general morale being less than upbeat, it certainly seems like the title of today’s selection That’s All is spoken with a tone of relief. When he wrote the words to That’s All in 1952, lyricist Alan Brandt (born 1923) probably had a different thought in mind.

There is an element of humility in Brandt’s lyrics when they say, “I can only give you love…. I can only give you country walks….that’s all, that’s all.” Perhaps as we move forward into 2010, we can take solace in the fact that last year could only give us what it gave us. If we let it go, we can look ahead with a more positive outlook.

What better way is there to feel more joyful, more hopeful and more enthusiastic about life than by playing and listening to music? That’s All is the kind of a tune that leaves room for a variety of interpretations. Its composer Bob Haymes (1923-1989) was the younger brother of the singer and actor, Dick Haymes. Also known under the stage names Robert or Bob Stanton, Bob Haymes is best remembered as the composer of That’s All.  However, during his long career, he also worked as a singer, actor, radio host and television emcee.

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