This Week on Jazz Spectrum 6/14-6/16

Song of the Week - “Don’t Take Your Love From Me”— Words & Music by Harry Nemo

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

By Fritz Byers

Dear Aly,
 
I’m not sure if commercials from the glamor days of 1960s television have become a subject of ironic fascination in the way so many other cultural elements of that era have been cycled and recycled and patronized.  My view is, All you vultures, do what you will with the sit-coms, variety shows, and earnest police procedurals that define the kitschy aspects of the 60s, but keep your mitts off the commercials.  They were high art, and they represent the spirit of whimsy, freedom, and jollity that was the bright side of the Mad Men decade. 
 
At least so is my Bonanzaland fantasy.  But in this I am confident: the series of commercials Starkist made, featuring Charlie the Tuna, to tout its canned tuna, are an apex of American advertising.  The entire series is worthy, not just of a Lifetime-Achievement Clio, but of enshrinement in some Hall of Fame somewhere. 
 
Charlie the Tuna is ceaseless in his pursuit of activities that display his good taste – in one commercial, he’s a doppelgänger of abstract-impressionist painter Jackson Pollock; in another, he’s turning mundane dance into ballet.  All this in the hope of satisfying Starkist’s standard of good taste. 
 
The punchline at the center of each commercial is, “Sorry, Charlie. They don’t want tunas with good taste.  Starkist wants tunas that taste good.”   Aly, I’m not dissembling when I tell you that, even in my preteen years, this joke cracked me up.
 
I didn’t appreciate at the time that one of the installments of the advertising campaign showed Charlie the Tuna paired on screen with – yep – a walrus wearing a Thelonious Monk-inspired bamboo hat, digging jazz piano in the hope that, at last, THIS exercise in taste would help Charlie make the cut at Starkist. (Spoiler alert: it didn’t.)
 
Nor did I know at the time that the character of Charlie the Tuna was based on the Ur-hipster, Harry Nemo, who, among other things, has been credited with inventing jive-talk (as though such a thing is the result of a single person’s thought rather than of collective improv).
 
Before he became an avatar of hipness, Harry Nemo wrote songs.  He contributed the lyrics to Duke Ellington’s “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” and he wrote the words and music to the Nat King Cole hit, “’Tis Autumn.”
 
Lesser known in the jazz repertoire is his 1941 tune, “Don’t Take Your Love From Me.”  So this week’s SotW will do double-duty – revive the reverence due the person who inspired Charlie the Tuna; AND revive a tune that for its first twenty years or so was part of the go-to repertoire of jazz singers but has scarcely been recorded since the sixties.
 
We begin with Artie Shaw’s version, recorded the year the tune was written, featuring a young Lena Horne with a strikingly crystalline vocal.
 
Then the swing trumpeter Bobby Hackett, who is often and unfairly cubbyholed as an Easy Listening trumpeter.  I like his tone on this track, and his verve.

Of course, you’ll expect to hear Bing’s version, so it’s third in the first set, taken from his classic mid-50s CBS radio recordings.  I’ll let you handle the description of this track.
 
The first set concludes with another swing musician, the tenor saxophonist Flip Phillips.  Flip has an appealing lambent tone and a wonderful way with vibrato.  He’s often linked with his contemporary, the tenorman Charlie Ventura.  Mosaic Records did us all a favor when the company released its compilation of their recordings for Verve and Clef, from which this Phillips track is taken.  Spend some time with this Mosaic set when you’re wondering what happened to swing after Charlie Parker & Company changed everything in the 40s.
 
The second set opens, of course, with Frank Sinatra’s brief version from Come Swing with Me, part of his series of revered recordings for Capitol.  How much better can I set your table to compare and contrast Bing and Frank?  We’ve spent car rides and meals doing this; please proceed.
 
Coleman Hawkins’s version, from his 1960 release Night Hawk, has the pianist Tommy Flanagan setting the harmonies.  Coleman defined tenor saxophone as a jazz instrument twenty years before this recording, and, hearing this track, it’s no surprise that even this far along in his career all the other tenorists stepped aside to make room for the Hawk.
 
Then Weslia Whitfield, among my guiltiest of pleasures – truly, she’s one of my favorite singers, even though more than once I’ve had to defend her against the pointless but strident claim that she’s NOT a jazz singer.  No one in my family has ever said “Whatevs.”  Otherwise, I’d say that now.
 
And we conclude with the trombonist Frank Rosolino, from the 1958 studio date that was released as Free for All.  The tenor saxophonist who lights things up on the track is Harold Land.  Max Roach and Clifford Brown chose Harold to play tenor in their genre-defining hard bop group, so that should give some idea of his stature. 
 
Aly, Harry Nemo died at the age of 90 in November 1999, just a month short of the turn of the millennium.  https://historicfilms.com/v25f  You can find a series of the Starkist commercials here, beginning at 1:09:00.  I can’t be sure, but I bet he’s happy he lives on in this archive.  And now in our SotW.
 
Evr yrs,
 
Fritz
  
 

Aly's Response

Heya Fritz,

A thousand apologies for the slightly late response this week – let's chalk it up to something vaguely time-consuming, interesting, and nefarious, and swiftly move into more important matters: Tuna.

Did you know that StarKist Tuna was founded over 100 years ago in San Pedro, California (colloquially referred to as "Fish Harbor")? Martin J. Bogdanovich, a Croatian fisherman and entrepreneur, emigrated to the United States before the age of 30. His proficiency in all things aquatic led to him partnering with a few other fishermen to form the French Sardine Company. Sidebar: what makes a sardine ethnically french? Is it purely location, or do you think they need to pass a nationalist test of sorts? Do you think french fish breathe differently through their gills, mainly due to the need to have a cigarette lit and stuck into their mouths at all times? How small do you think a sardine's beret has to be? 

Bogdanovich was also an inventor during this time. He's known for his innovations related to refrigeration of the seafood product with crushed ice, which was unheard of in the age of Giant Ice Blocks. This intellectual prowess seeped into the French Sardine Company's bottom line, too; during his lifetime, Bogdanovich built the company into one of the world's largest tuna canneries. Tuna, I've just learned, is a relatively new delicacy for humans. The first canned tuna debuted in 1904 and production, using albacore tuna, increased over the next two decades. By the 1930s, however, albacore tuna disappeared from the California coast, forcing fishermen to move into Mexico and other coastal areas to look for tuna. I like to imagine the albacore tuna just got wise and travelled to the east coast – after all, it is the superior side of the continental USA.

In need of an image boost, the French Sardine Company underwent a rebrand in early 1942, christening itself "StarKist". After Bogdanovich kicked it and went to the great big pontoon in the sky, his son Joseph took over and ensured that StarKist's image maintained a massively hip personality in the cultural zeitgeist. Check out this 1949 Bob Hope ad: do you think I can still send in for that bracelet? You can find print and radio ads featuring John Wayne, Gene Tierney, and Maureen O'Hara declaring their respective tuna-based infatuations during this era. Tuna went big worldwide at this time too; when the United States entered World War II, the U.S. Navy used tuna boats to carry and deliver supplies, and canned tuna was shipped overseas to U.S. troops as a high protein food source. Although there was still a national demand for canned tuna, the supply was limited since many tuna fishermen were drafted. The fact that we survived this tuna drought should be celebrated as fervently as the fourth of July, I posit. 

After the war, canned tuna production thankfully continued. By 1954, the United States was the world’s largest producer and consumer of canned tuna. Over the next three decades, Brazil, Venezuela, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other new countries established large-scale industrial fisheries. Tuna was hitting the big leagues, and StarKist needed to enter the swinging sixties with a bang if it wanted to continue its fish-based monopoly. Enter: Charlie the Tuna. You know him, you love him. I did not know of Charlie's connection to Henry Nemo until you enlightened me, but I'm a better person for knowing it now. I wonder if Henry was incensed or flattered by the homage... I'll venture to say somewhere in the middle, to be safe. I also was unaware that this commercial campaign was the genesis of the popular phrase "Sorry, Charlie". I'd like to see a chart that plots the timeline of Charlie the Tuna commercial successes against the propensity of families to name their kids Charlie over the last 50 years. (I doubt the correlation would be noticeable, but I'd still like to see it.)

Another sidebar: Why is it that Charlie the Tuna wants to be caught by StarKist so badly, huh? Does he know that the entity whose affection he so desperately desires would ultimately want to hack him into delicious bite-sized pieces and shove him in a tiny can? Perhaps Charlie has more of a deathwish than we first thought. I hope his yellow fish friend can help him to see how beautiful the bottom of the sea is, far away from Del Monte's corporate clutches. I did note that it looks like StarKist brought Charlie back for some ads over the last seven years, with a shiny new 3D facade. A hollow attempt to improve on commercial perfection, I fear. Charlie, let me know if you need a new agent – we'll get you into daytime talk shows or something. 

I have to add that through this rabbit (fish?) hole, I discovered an event so stunningly titled that it took my breath away: are you aware of Tunagate? I'll wait for your laughter to subside. It's less interesting than its name suggests, but I had to note it here while we're on the subject. I will now and forever be hoping to find my white whale of an event in my lifetime that I can add "-gate" to. 

Man. History is so fascinating. What were we talking about? 

Oh. Well... I really enjoyed this SotW, for what it's worth. (We'll have to save a Frank VS Bing smackdown for another week.) Henry Nemo didn't know it at the time, but his family name was pretty apt for the mascot that would reference his style so heavily. I do love a good caricature; and it's great that the real person was equally as interesting & talented. Thanks for introducing me to a new-to-me Nemo tune. The next time I hear "'Tis Autumn", I'll make a point of telling the nearest person about Henry and his fishy accoutrements. 

Save me a tuna sandwich,

Aly