May 4 & 5, 2002
"In The Mood"
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Program Notes by Keith Campbell |
Part I
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In the Mood
(1928) Andy
Razaf/Joe Garland |
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In the Mood has become synonymous with the Big Band era (1920s to the early 1950s) and is one of America's best-loved and most danced-to melodies. The tune is an arrangement by Joe Garland (composer, arranger, and long time reed man in Louis Armstrong's band) based on nothing but syncopated riffs played and recorded for years by members of the first great black bands. A riff is a short, repeated, improvisatory phrase that suggests interesting harmonic ideas to soloists.
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A riff from In the Mood
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In the Mood was presented as an eight-minute instrumental to Artie Shaw, who performed it frequently. But it was too long a piece for one side of a record, and Shaw relinquished it. Garland then brought it to Glenn Miller who adapted it into a four-minute item which, from the time of Miller's first radio broadcast and recording, became a fixture in the repertory. The lyrics of Andy Razaf were heard in the Andrews Sisters' recording of 1944. |
Blue Moon (1932) Lorenz Hart/Richard Rodgers
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Rodgers and Hart
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Richard Rodgers (1902-79) and Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) wrote over 600 songs for stage and film musicals, except one,
Blue Moon. It was not, as far as the general public knew, associated with Broadway or Hollywood, but its first version with mawkish lyrics and the title
Prayer, was written for Jean Harlow to sing in a 1933 film, Hollywood Party, an enterprise whose cast included Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, Jimmy Durante and Mickey Mouse. It was never produced. With new lyrics and a new title it became
The Bad in Every Man, sung in the film Manhattan Melodrama. This was the movie the homicidal John Dillinger watched before he was shot dead leaving the theater. The final lyric setting of the melody came about when Jack Robbins, Head of M.G.M.'s publishing company, said he would promote it if Hart would write more commercial lyrics. Hart complied with a string of lyrics which would make Tin Pan Alley proud.
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My Romance (1935) Lorenz Hart/Richard Rodgers |
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In 1935 Rodgers and Hart returned to Broadway.
My Romance, a song with both a melody and lyric of wry restraint, made its debut in an over-the-top production in which Jimmy Durante made an entry riding an elephant, in which band leader Paul Whiteman made his astride a horse, and in which animals outnumbered humans. In fact, the show had so many animals in it that Actor's Equity classed it as a circus. Presented at New York's Hippodrome Theater, this grand extravaganza was appropriately named
Jumbo. Jumbo never really came to life except in its marvelous tunes, which also included
Little Girl Blue and The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, a waltz, the form in which Rodgers became a master. The production expenses for
Jumbo were so large that it lost half its investment. The 1962 film (Doris Day's last musical) was also a disaster.
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The Continental (1934) Herb Magidson/Con Conrad
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Con Conrad (1891-1938) came to Tin Pan Alley by way of the vaudeville stage where he had been appearing since his sixteenth year. Conrad enjoyed his first resounding success with Margie, sung by Eddie Cantor (Cantor's five-year-old daughter was the Margie of this song). His other hits were
Ma, He's Making Eyes at Me and Barney Google, inspired by a popular newspaper cartoon. From 1929 his main activity was in Hollywood, where in 1934 he became the first composer to receive an Academy Award in the newly designated category, Best Song. That song,
The Continental, was introduced by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as a seventeen minute sequence in
The Gay Divorcee. |
Let's Do It (1928) Cole Porter |
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By 1928 Cole Porter (1891-1964), who had been trying unsuccessfully to promote his popular songs for years, finally had both a hit song and a hit show, with the risqué bestiary
Let's Do It from the show, Paris. Porter had been inspired since his college song-writing days by the patter catalogue songs found in Gilbert and Sullivan. His own 'list' songs are high points of verbal virtuosity. In
Let's Do It, and the later You're the Top (1934), each successive image and illusion vies to 'top' the last. The catalog technique is not just a framework for witty images, but also a device for building intensity.
Let's Do It was incorporated into the l960 film adaptation of the musical
Can-Can. |
When I Fall In Love (1951) Edward
Heyman/Victor Young |
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Victor Young (1900-1956) realized many accomplishments in a relatively short life. He spent much of his childhood in Poland, studying the violin. He toured the United States as violin soloist, as concert master in theater orchestras, and as composer of popular music in top dance bands and radio shows. He moved to Hollywood in 1936 where he eventually scored over 300 films (including,
For Whom The Bell Tolls, The Quiet Man, and Shane), received twenty Academy Award nominations, and for work on Disney's
Pinocchio (1940) received an Oscar for best score and best song
(When You Wish Upon a Star). He also received posthumously an Oscar for
Around The World In Eighty Days (1956). His many songs seem almost an afterthought, but many Standards are among them.
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They Can't Take That Away From Me (1937) Ira
Gershwin/George Gershwin |
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Gershwins and Fred Astaire
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George Gershwin (1898-1937) wrote his first Hollywood song in 1923. Silent film meant it was never sung on-screen, but it was a "theme song" used to plug the picture. George and Ira Gershwin came West again in 1936 to score
Shall We Dance for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. This time Los Angeles became their permanent home as it had the New York expatriates Moss Hart, Lillian Hellman, Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields and Harold Arlen. Astaire-Rogers musicals always had the same formula: first they met, initially not liking one another through a misunderstanding, next there was a musical reconciliation, and finally a happy fade-out. They
Can't Take That Away From Me movingly extends the inevitable rapprochement. In no other song did Gershwin begin each line with five repeated notes ("The way you wear your . . .") which come round again and again as the singer spells out for his loved one some of the things he finds enchanting about her. Nostalgia is tinged with humor when we learn that even singing off-key is one of her perfections. This was the only Gershwin song ever nominated for an Academy Award.
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Don't Get Around Much Anymore (1940) Bob Russell/Duke Ellington |
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The Ellington recorded legacy from the beginning of the 1940s contains an extraordinary body of music. Lovely ballads and mood pieces date from this period, some of them written by Ellington's sidemen. The titles include
Ko-Ko, Concerto for Cootie, Harlem Air Shaft, Chelsea
Bridge, Take the 'A' Train, and Never No Lament (later retitled
Don't Get Around Much Anymore). Words were later found for works originally designed only for instrumental performance. The lyrics of Bob Russell give the melodies genuine sentiment even as he uses colloquial idioms and slang. When, in 1942, Billboard began printing its Harlem Hit Parade, the first black music chart,
Don't Get Around Much Anymore was listed as number one. |
Part II
Mood Indigo (1930) Barney
Bigard/Duke Ellington
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Duke Ellington
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The leading music venue in Harlem during the 1920s and 30s was the Cotton Club. It was a whites-only club that catered to a bewildering mixture of tastes, from the most high-minded intellectual curiosity to cultural and erotic slumming. A young band leader named Duke Ellington (1899-1974) was engaged there in 1927, and quickly achieved success for himself and the club. Unhappy accompanying the Club's chorus line every night, Ellington announced his move away from the dance idiom with
Mood Indigo, a melancholy, otherworldly work that explored new jazz sonorities, expanded conventional jazz forms, and bore a completely accidental resemblance to Ravel.
Mood Indigo caused a sensation when first performed on the radio. It would be the band's first big hit, and its most-requested number for more than forty years.
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My Funny Valentine (1937) Lorenz Hart/Richard Rodgers
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Rodgers and Hart were close friends who had worked together since Rodgers was sixteen and Hart was twenty-three, but they were exact opposites and the relationship was difficult. In a 1929 newspaper interview they characterized one another. Rodgers said, "Hart is careless and rumpled; a riveter could be going full blast outside the window and not disturb him while he's writing lyrics." Hart said, "Rodgers is methodical and temperamental, but he becomes infuriated if a cat walks across the carpet when he's composing." Their 1919 musical
Babes in Arms contained three great songs: My Funny
Valentine, Where or When, and The Lady Is a Tramp. They were so eager to include the already composed
My Funny Valentine in the show that they named a main character "Valentine". The singer of this song is not uttering endearments. The singer is addressing someone on a first name basis. |
I Can't Give You Anything but Love (1928) Dorothy Fields/Jimmy McHugh |
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During the Cotton Club's heyday much of the music for its revue was written by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields (daughter of vaudeville comedian Lew Fields).
I Can't Give You Anything but Love was heard in Blackbirds of 1928. The young Dorothy Fields did not tell her father when she teamed up with McHugh. She knew he would violently oppose her association with a mobster-operated Harlem night club. As it turned out, she could not have chosen a physically safer place to begin her lyric-writing career. Fields went on to work with major composers in film and theater. She wrote the books for many musicals. (She got the idea for
Annie Get Your Gun while working as captain of the kitchen at the Stage Door Canteen.) McHugh and Field were succeeded at the Cotton Club by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler. They wrote
I've Got the World on a String for the club in 1932, and it became a national hit.
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Dorothy Fields/Jimmy McHugh |
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Tea for Two (1925) Irving Caesar/Vincent Youmans |
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Vincent Youmans |
No, No, Nanette was a
smash hit, the quintessential example of the sing-and-dance show
of the period and contained the
Standards Tea for Two and I Want to Be Happy. Written
with an amazing economy of musical material, getting its effect by
the simplest means,
Tea for Two illustrates a popular music style of the 1920s: A
tune with symmetrical, short, repeated musical phrases, often
containing repeated notes, and with lyrics that adapt to the
musical repetitions, that employ inside rhyming, and manage to be
sentimental, flippant, and vaguely humorous at the same time.
Picture you upon my knee,
Just tea for two and two for tea,
Just me for you and you for me . . .
Tea for Two became a mainstay with singers, even more so with
jazz musicians, and the stuff of kid tap-dance recitals for
decades.
No, No Nanette even enjoyed a successful 861 performance
revival in the early 1970s.
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Pennies from Heaven (1936) John Burke/Arthur Johnston |
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Poverty was the theme of many hit songs of the thirties:
In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town, Found a Million Dollar Baby in a Five-and-Ten Cent
Store, and Brother Can You Spare a Dime, the anthem of the Depression, made popular by Bing Crosby. When prosperity rains from the sky it's not gold, jewels or large bills of currency, but
Pennies from Heaven. Other songs of the Depression years sought to dismiss fears and boost morale:
Smile, Darn Ya, Smile, On the Sunny Side of the Street, Who's Afraid of the Big Bad
Wolf?, and Happy Days Are Here Again, the campaign song for Franklin D.
Roosevelt. Pennies from Heaven was also a popular film starring Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong. |
The Way You Look Tonight (1936) Jerome Kern/Dorothy Fields |
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Jerome
Kern |
Jerome Kern (1885-1945) created the music for his shows before any words were written. Like Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, Kern liked to improvise everything at the piano and then have someone else write it down. He was very conscious of the basses and harmonies under his tunes and by the time he was satisfied with them they were very hard to improve. Robert Russell Bennett, the arranger and orchestrator of countless American musicals, has described how he transcribed melodies as Kern sat at the piano improvising tune after tune, then labeling it by number when it was complete. Kern would later request Bennett to make a piano and voice arrangement of the tunes he needed, identifying them by number.
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A riff from
The Way You Look Tonight
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This fragment became The Way You Look Tonight from the 1936 film,
Swing Time. Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern shared an Oscar for this Astaire-Rogers musical. Bennett got his paycheck. |
Puttin' On the Ritz (1929) Irving Berlin |
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Irving Berlin |
Irving Berlin (1888-1989) cornered his own market by starting a publishing company in 1919. He zealously controlled his copyrights, guarded his songs against satire, and made a lot of money. He also owned a theater, the Music Box, where he tried out new numbers in lavish revues. Here he introduced his contribution to the Jazz Age: a jerky, ragged, yet refreshing, syncopated rhythm pattern that he would use later in such songs as
Puttin' On the Ritz. Berlin's first affiliation with talking pictures was a song for the Marx Brothers farce,
The Cocoanuts. He provided the title number, together with two other songs, for the 1929 film
Puttin' on the Ritz, starring Harry Richman. Clark Gable hoofed to this tune with top hat and cane in
Idiot's Delight (1939); Fred Astaire gave it one of his greatest dance routines in
Blue Skies (1947); and Peter Boyle and Gene Wilder served it up as an amusing parody in
Young Frankenstein (1974).
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