This Week on Jazz Spectrum - 11/8-11/10

Song of the Week – “I Concentrate on You” – Music and Lyrics by Cole Porter

By Fritz Byers

Fritz exchanges thoughts with Aly Krajewski about the Song of the Week featured on Jazz Spectrum Saturday.

Dear Aly,

The noted Sixteenth-Century jazz critic Martin Luther is said to have professed, “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant an apple tree today.”

For reasons that are indistinct, this wise moral resolution is paired in my mind today with another psychological truth, which, like alarmingly many in conventional Anglo-American culture, can be sourced to Samuel Johnson: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”  

I’m pretty sure I first encountered this quote in what was the most memorable University course I ever attended: Walter Jackson Bate’s course on the Life of Johnson.  I experienced this class only a few years after Professor Bate published his biography of the great man, for which he won the National Book Award for Biography, which in truth seems inadequate recognition for that masterly book.  I don’t recall Professor Bate’s having intoned that particular Johnson pearl during the semester, but he most likely did, along with hundreds of others of Johnson’s timeless aphorisms.  

When I think of that class, I recall mostly this: from the start, Professor Bate taught the class in the persona of Johnson himself.  As the semester went on, day by day, class by class, Professor Bate subtly changed his posture, his complexion, the timbre of his voice, to suggest age and its twined wisdoms and burdens.  And at the end of the final class, Professor Bate, rasping out a valedictory that only somewhat modestly summed up a life of incomparable achievement as an essayist, poet, philosopher, and lexicographer, among a much longer list, shambled up on the desk at the front of the class, lied down, and died.  Professor Bate did not stir during the prolonged standing ovation that ensued, maintaining rigor mortis until the vast classroom was empty.

Johnson is, of course, exactly right in his saying about the galvanizing effect of an imminent hanging.  It is a profound psychological truth to observe that an impending crisis tends to spark both an intense focus and, one can hope, the ingenuity to avert it.  Although I’ve met only one lawyer who quoted Samuel Johnson in this context, the essential truth of the point tends to produce a lot of settlements on the eve of trial.

But such things pale in relation to the matters at hand.  To the extent I can understand why these two quotations have been ricocheting in my mind this morning, I think it is because, when paired, they suggest the moral commonplace that at times of peril, we ask first, Are my loved ones safe?  Then, are my neighbors okay?  My community, and so on, in expanding circles of moral concern.  One can hope that the circles reach at least to the oceans, and ideally they span the globe, if not the galaxy.  At its extreme, this pattern of concentric empathy can sour into a sort of purely parochial altruism.  But let’s leave that choleric tendency aside for now.

Aly, what do we do now?  Martin and Samuel have told us: Concentrate our minds and work to cultivate the corners of the world we live in, planting our flags, along with our apple trees, on our common ground.

Thus, this week’s song is “I Concentrate on You.”  Cole Porter wrote it in 1940 for an MGM film musical titled Broadway Melody of 1940. As Porter works go, this is sort of a middling creation, although the movie is notable as the first time Fred Astaire danced on-screen with a male partner (George Murphy).  More often in the movie, Fred is paired in dance with Eleanor Powell.  I checked, and I was surprised to learn this is the only time the two of them ever appeared on screen together.  What a shame.  

Aly, I’ve learned by now that it’s likely you have this entire movie memorized scene by scene, so you probably know that Fred Astaire does not sing the song in the movie – that performance was reserved for Douglas McPhail.  But Fred did make a flawless and strikingly personal recording of the song about a decade later.  Don’t fret, Aly – we’ll get to that.

But we begin with an early vocal treatment of the tune by Anita Boyer, backed by Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra.  The recording was made on January 26, 1940, two weeks before the theatrical release of the movie.  I know virtually nothing about Anita, but I learned this: in 1945, Billboard called her “one of the music business’s most proficient canaries.”  

 Next, the trumpeter Art Farmer from 1957, early in his career.  Although Art’s work here is typically precise and engaging, I chose this track because the arrangement is by Quincy Jones, whom we lost over the weekend.  The 10pm hour on this Friday’s Jazz Spectrum features Quincy’s early work as an arranger and conductor of what he justifiably called “the best jazz band on the planet.”  On this version of “I Concentrate on You,” you’ll hear Quincy’s subtle arrangement, which beautifully showcases Art’s playing.

Then – FINALLY – Fred Astaire from1953.  I think one could plausibly use the adjectives “elegant” and “understated” for almost everything Fred ever did, but they certainly apply to this recording.  I’ve been listening to it on repeat since I woke up.

The first set concludes with the guitarist Grant Green, from a 1962 quartet recording with the pianist Sonny Clark, the bassist Sam Jones, and the drummer Art Blakey.  Grant’s Blue Note quartet dates from this era are to be treasured, all the more so because Blue Note held this recording in its vaults for decades before belatedly releasing it on an album called Nigeria.

The second set begins with the singer Abbey Lincoln, backed by the drummer Max Roach and his great +4 assembly.   The track is one of two songs Abbey contributed to the album Moon Faced and Starry Eyed, an oft-overlooked gem among Max’s work of the time.  It was recorded in the middle of Abbey’s rapid transition from appealing girl singer to forceful civil-rights advocate, an interlude that is well-documented on Max’s fabled 1960 record, We Insist!

Next is the drummer Paul Motian and his quartet, from Volume 1of his On Broadway series, recorded in 1988.  The tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, the guitarist Bill Frisell, and the bassist Charlie Haden round out the quartet.  This band made some of the best recordings of the time, notable for their striking reinventions of familiar tunes and for Bill Frisell’s boundless sonic and harmonic imagination.

The singer Susannah McCorkle is next.  I first heard Susannah at the Algonquin Hotel, not long after she returned to the US from her stint in London.  She was always captivating in person, and her records capture most of that spark.  This track is from I’ll Take Romance, recorded in 1992, which is a favorite.

We’ll conclude with the pianist Brad Mehldau, recorded in 2014 with Larry Grenadier on bass and the drummer Jeff Ballard.  If it matters, Brad’s solo on this tune was nominated for a Grammy for Best Improvised Jazz Solo.  What does matter is that this is a telling example of Brad’s propensity to record familiar standards at a slow or medium tempo, and in doing so to expose the roots of the melody with an almost mathematical precision.  Although he sounds nothing like Thelonious Monk, I think of them together in the way they would focus on two or three notes of a melody and turn them over and over, as though turning a prism to shine light on each facet of the musical relationships.  I love this recording.

Aly, we’ve not shared written thoughts for a while. I hope this tune engages you in a way that inspires you to reply.

Fritz