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.  

March 11, 2013 Issue

Is it crass to rue the lack of melody in the playing of a jazz standard? I wonder this as I listen to Jason Moran’s abstract version of Johnny Green’s great “Body and Soul” (on Moran’s 2002 album Modernicity). Moran’s interpretation renders the song almost unrecognizable. Whitney Balliett wrote, “Jazz fans relish the shock of melodic recognition and when it doesn’t come they grow disoriented and gloomy” (Collected Works, 2000). That’s the way I feel about Moran’s “Body and Soul.” In a profile of Moran, titled “Jazz Hands,” in this week’s New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson says that Moran “often uses only the parts of a song that appeal to him – in his version of ‘Body and Soul,’ the most recorded standard in jazz, he plays only the A part.” This is an interesting approach, but while I respect the effort, I’m not crazy about the result. It’s like taking a beautiful green artichoke and stripping it of its leaves just to get to its heart. Alec Wilder called “Body and Soul” an “enormously innovative song” (American Popular Song, 1972). It deserves homage, not deconstruction.

Nevertheless, “Jazz Hands” itself is a wonderful piece of writing. It contains three “visits” that I enjoyed immensely: to a practice room at the New England Conservatory of Music, in Boston, where Moran gives lessons to three students; to the KC Jazz Club at the Kennedy Center, where Moran’s group Bandwagon, plus Bill Frisell, rehearsed; and to the Village Vanguard, where Bandwagon was playing. Wilkinson’s evocation of the scene inside the Village Vanguard is superb. When he says, “One night, I occupied the last seat on the banquette, which is beside the drum set and is called the drummer’s seat, because drummers like to sit there to observe,” I smiled appreciatively. This is exactly the kind of personal, specific, journalistic observation I devour. “Jazz Hands”’s ending is equally marvelous:

What I remember most clearly was a moment, at the end of a passage of frantic playing, when, suddenly quiet, all three had their hands poised, their eyes closed, and their breath held. They seemed to be listening as acutely as animals in the woods. Each was waiting for one of the others to make a sound. Instead, a small smile formed on Moran’s lips, and he slowly lowered his hands to his lap, and, without opening their eyes, the others lowered theirs, too.