This Week on Jazz Spectrum - 8/9-8/11

Song of the Week – “Here’s That Rainy Day” – Music by Jimmy Van Heusen; lyrics by Johnny Burke

By Fritz Byers

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

Dear Aly,

Last week, we concentrated on “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”  The song evokes a piercing sentiment, a moment that stops time, and then the frozen moment sticks with you forever.  

This week, I’m remembering the first time I saw a Breughel painting – we’re talking here about Pieter the Elder.  Aly, you spend your working life in one of the nation’s great museums, so it’s even more daunting than usual to be engineering this train of thought with you.  But, as they say, here goes.

The painting was “The Triumph of Death,” shared with me by a professor who was trying to overcome my Kansas-hick boyhood and get me some learning.  I was flattered and, as ever, eager to please, so I went along with the plan.  I learned from him that painting, like the other arts, is serious business, and sublime. My debt to him is unceasing.

Not long after, I ran into W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts,” a poem that uses Breughel’s great painting, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” to make one of the most profound statements ever conceived about art and its role in portraying the way life and its ups and downs play on our heartstrings.  I have an even deeper debt to Auden.

 I was thinking about this poem earlier this week, and about Breughel, and, in the spirit of the times, about how charlatans use appeals to the Higher Powers to try to elevate, or at least excuse, their own tawdry expressions.  And that, in turn, reminded me of the Broadway costume designer who chose Breughel’s paintings to shape her conception of the clothing for the Broadway musical, Carnival in Flanders, a notorious flop that closed after only six performances.  It wasn’t the costume-designer’s fault – by all accounts, her work was wonderful.  But I do wonder about the premise of the show: a bunch of Spanish imperialists invade a Flemish community, they look to woo the town’s womenfolk, and hilarity ensues.  No, but seriously, folks . . . 

The show’s book was by Preston Sturges, with lyrics by Johnny Burke and music by Jimmy Van Heusen.  Talk about your powerhouse trios!   And you’ll want to know this: your fella Bing Crosby provided financing and, as best I can tell, chose, or at least endorsed, Burke and Van Heusen to write the music.  Understandable  – their portfolio includes some of the era’s best songs: “But Beautiful” “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” “Like Someone in Love” “It Could Happen to You” “Imagination” etc.

But for this project they seem to have lost their mojo – of the fourteen songs they wrote for Carnival in Flanders, only one survived the show’s collapse.  But we here in management at Jazz Spectrum Song of the Week world headquarters like to find gems in unlikely places, so we scavenged through the detritus from the show and found “Here’s That Rainy Day.”  It’s an excellent song, although unconventional in its chord structure and harmonics.   There are several fine vocal versions and a much broader selection of instrumental excursions.  

    Perhaps as a reflection of this weeks’ prevailing mood in these-here parts, I chose mostly straight-ahead interpretations, leaving some of the more adventurous versions for the next time we land on this song.  Or maybe I’ll just air them in the weeks to come.  I’m thinking particularly now of two versions that didn’t make this week’s cut, each of them a trumpet-piano duet: Dave Douglas’s great pairing with the pianist Martial Solal (two JS favorites together!) and Christine Jensen’s version with the pianist Steve Amirault, from her release Day Moon.  Stay tuned.

Our survey this Saturday night begins with Julie London’s slow version, with light chords from the strings helping her along.  You know how much I like listening to her.  I especially like the surprising huskiness she puts into a couple of the lines, and the way she swells her voice in unexpected places and then retreats to her familiar intimacies.  

The pianist Bobby Timmons is next, from 1967.  There’s less soul and more concert grandeur in this performance than you’d expect from Bobby, and some nice guitar lines by Joe Beck, who was near the start of his long career in the music.  

Joe Williams is inevitably associated with the Count Basie Orchestra, with which he sang for many years after the end of WW II.  Of course, he went on to make some fine records with other luminaries, Sweets Edison and Cannonball Adderley among them.  In 1970, giving in to the regrettable pressures of the era, he made a detour into a smoother, lightly swinging setting with the album Worth Waiting For, with arrangements by Horace Ott.  Among the better tracks on the outlier date is his version of our Song of the Week.

The first set concludes with Paul Desmond, paired with the guitarist Ed Bickert, from a live date in Toronto in 1975, late in Paul’s career.  Paul’s playing here is even airier than usual, but he displays his characteristic fidelity to the melody and the kinds of perfectly conceived inversions that make him such a joy to listen to closely, although I often struggle to say why he moves me so.

To begin the second set, we return to a favorite vocal recording: Helen Merrill’s The Feeling is Mutual.  The date is anchored by flawless accompaniment by the pianist Dick Katz.  We’ve talked before about Helen’s vocals and how personal they are.  You’ll hear that here, but also I think you’ll be struck by some of her more bravado voicings.  Other tunes on this great record add horns to the mix, but the very best tracks are, like this one, reduced to just Helen and Dick.

I mentioned earlier a pair of piano-trumpet duets that I omitted – I have included one, a version by Chet Baker with the pianist Enrico Pieranunzi.  I’m not nearly enough of musician to understand why this tune produces so many great recordings by duets consisting of these two instruments.  But this is a particularly nice one, and Chet’s understated trumpet has its usual spare and emotive qualities.

The final vocal version is by the pianist and singer Daniela Schachter.  The track really swings, with outstanding piano soloing from Daniela and interweaving saxophone by Mike Tucker.  After hearing this piece, you won’t be surprised to know that Daniela has broad training in classical piano and that she has been widely recognized by critics for both her singing and her forceful playing.  I’m not sure why she’s not more widely known.  Let’s see if we can do something about that.

And finally, the pianist Mal Waldron with – who would have guessed? – the soprano saxophone of Grover Washington, Jr.  Forget, at least for the moment, the snooty putdowns you’ve heard about Grover and his detours into fusion and other lesser art forms – his playing here is very nearly perfect in mood and execution.

So that’s it, Aly.  My sunniest best wishes to you as you step into this week’s song.

Fritz