Cécile McLorin Salvant / Jerome Kern / Alec Wilder / Lorenz Hart

Last night, searching Cécile McLorin Salvant’s name on YouTube, I found her 2016 “Live in Budapest,” with Renee Rosnes (piano), Rodney Whitaker (bass), and Louis Nash (drums). What a terrific concert! Salvant sings “Easy to Love,” “The Gentleman Is A Dope,” “Never Will I Marry,” “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” “All Through the Night,” “Cry Butterfly, Cry,” among others – all swinging! It whetted my appetite for more Salvant. YouTube is loaded with her videos.

I watched one of her singing “Yesterdays,” accompanied by the Aaron Diehl Trio. Wow! That song is gorgeous, drenched in melancholy. Who wrote it? I couldn’t remember. I looked it up in Alec Wilder’s American Popular Song (1972). Answer: Jerome Kern. Wilder writes, “It is an extraordinarily evocative song, simple in construction, narrow in range (a tenth), and unforgettable.” I agree. Reading Wilder, I got thinking about his writing. He wrote one of my all-time favorite New Yorker reviews – “Orange Juice for One” (October 18, 1976), an assessment of a book of tributes to Lorenz Hart called Thou Swell, Thou Witty. Here’s a sample:

Hart was a contemporary of Ira Gershwin, E. Y. Harburg, John Mercer, Otto Harbach, Dorothy Fields, Cole Porter, Howard Dietz, and Oscar Hammerstein II, After careful examination of the work of these people, I still find myself returning to the two who most please and nourish me: Lorenz Hart and John Mercer. And I believe that the reason for this is by no means that they were such masters of their craft but that in their craft they were vulnerable to the point of self-revelation. And in revealing themselves they also revealed their profound need to put to paper their attitudes toward love, life, irony, absurdity, loneliness, and loss. The other lyricists wrote well, but I never sensed that need, that hunger. I was aware of craft and cleverness, style and polish, but no deep self-involvement.

Wilder knew what he was talking about. He wrote at least two songs that have entered the Great American Songbook: “I’ll Be Around” and “While We’re Young.” I’d love to hear Salvant sing them.