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Singer
 WHEN
I WAS 2 OR 3 YEARS-OLD I'd stand on the dinner table and sing
PLAYMATES in perfect pitch. I've the acetate made before 1940 to
prove it. My mother had a sweet voice and lullabied me with excellent
songs like MY WONDERFUL ONE and GOOD NIGHT, SWEETHEART. My sister
knows the lyrics to every song written, is a frustrated lyricist
and taught me my second song, JEEPERS CREEPERS. Johnny Mercer was
the first singer I was conscious of outside my family. The next
was Crosby, not that I appreciated him until years later. I liked
Sinatra from the first time I heard him; listened to the HIT PARADE,
knew all the songs. I began going to the legitimate theater (age
11) with a tired Jake Shubert tab show of BLOSSOM TIME about poor
Franz Schubert unfinishing his symphony (how could we know he was
dying of syphilis?, this was 1947) but it made a lasting impression.
I took singing lessons at the Chicago Musical College, also appearing
in plays. By then I'd seen many of the great conductors, orchestras,
instrumentalists and singers at Orchestra Hall and Ravinia, most
of the repertoire of the NYC Opera, much of the Met, including the
entire RING and DIE MEISTERSINGER, the entire repertoire of the
ballet companies of the day and each and every Gilbert & Sullivan
operetta as presented by D'Oyly Carte, sitting in the lofty third
balcony of the old Great Northern. Between ushering at the Civic
Opera House 3 to 5 times a week and spending all of my money on
theater and concert tickets, you'd have to have been a professional
critic to have seen all that I saw at 15-16 years-old which included
Harold Lang in Jule Styne's revival of Rodgers and Hart's PAL JOEY,
Menotti's THE CONSUL and Bobby Breen's revival of PORGY & BESS
(the latter so many times I knew some staging by heart). Had no
pretensions about becoming a singer (though I was a soloist in school
choir) but knew singing was important for an actor. Paul Robeson
was my favorite singer. I wanted a similar deep bass voice and was
delighted when my vocal coach told me I wasn't a tenor. Was one
of one hundred voices when Bernstein conducted Mahler's Resurrection
Symphony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. There were
auditions and 3 weeks of rehearsals I'll never forget. Now, the
more cacophonous the music the better I liked it. Bartok, Berg,
Schoenberg, Hindemith and Bliss became favorites and I gobbled-up
Stravinsky while my high school music teacher said she wanted to
jump out the window each time she heard The Rite of Spring.
AND THEN I HEARD JAZZ! Never pleased with
my voice I began digging other singers who lacked legit chops; Fats
Waller, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Nellie Lutcher, Rose Murphy,
Al Hibbler, Hoagy Carmichael, Ishkabibble (with Kay Kyser) and Skinnay
Innis (with Hal Kemp) all had eccentric, serio-comic deliveries
and they acted the songs. I'd already seen B-Fine Eckstine with
Duke Ellington (1945). Every young singer wanted a deep baritone
like Eckstine's. Ella's 10 LP with Ellis Larkins was influential
and I saw Slim Gaillard as many times as I saw Art Tatum because
he was opposite the Maestro on the bill at the old Blue Note. Chicago
was wide-open and I was a serious-looking 15 year-old. Long-playing
records were revolutionizing the music business and I was working
in the big record store in town, behind the Chicago Theater. Crazy
as I was about Lee Wiley's records on Columbia, as a treat for my
loyalty, Nat Hale, of that firm, took me next-door, i.e., backstage
to meet Louis Armstrong in his dressing room. At this time (1952),
I thought Fred Astaire and Judy Garland were the greatest interpreters
of American songs. Because of LP's I discovered Chevalier, Trenet,
Piaf and Sablon, listened to Harold Arlen (singing), Kaye Ballard
and David Craig on Caedmon, George Byron (very legit and well-articulated),
Martha Raye (very underrated), Jackie & Roy with Charlie Ventura.
I'd been listening to Nat Cole all along, but only with the Trio.
In years to come, other singers delighted me and, though there's
not room enough to list them all, Tony Bennett, Bobby Short, Mabel
Mercer, Sarah Vaughan, Bobby Dorough, Shirley Horn, Matt Dennis,
Bobby Troup, Ivie Anderson, Blossom Dearie, Audrey Morris, Mildred
Bailey, Dave Frishberg, Jerri Southern and the incomparable Meredith
d'Ambrosia top the list. Then, there's the great Joe Derise who
taught me so much about singing and liked my sound enough that we
cut some sides in 1968 with Zoot Sims, Clark Terry, Jimmy Raney,
Mel Lewis, Richard Davis with Stosh McGlaughlin on piano doing the
excellent arrangements. The 1984 sessions with Joe Albany are the
final recorded legacy of this oft-mentioned, rarely-recorded, genuinely
seminal pianist who died 4 years later and had the unfair distinction
of being fired by Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Lester Young and
Charles Mingus, the probable reason being that he played too much.
Joe could be self-effacing to the point of feigning stupidity; he
was wont to play the fool. This was a mask, for he was truly possessed
of (by) a far-reaching intellect. The subject of two documentary
films focusing on his drug addiction (and from which he received
bobkes) he quoted from Shakespeare's SONNETS, read Proust and knew
a zillion tunes and who wrote them. Joe was brilliant, whatever
his faults. When he died, major newspapers on both coasts and in-between
printed extensive obituaries. What they should have given him was
$100,000 a year and the Presidential Medal of Honor for he was the
major link between Nat Cole and the Teddy Wilson style and Bud Powell
and Bebop and he died broke.
Our goal was to form a true classical duo, a 50-50
give and take which might sound foreign to devotees of Doris Day
(even Ella) with Andre Previn, or Tony Bennett with Bill Evens.
Having taught myself to play piano in recent years, I accompany
myself on the 21st Century sessions of THEN
& NOW and I'm joined on three tunes by Dave Schnitter,
Virtuoso tenor saxophonist. Schnitter made his debut with Art Blakey's
Jazz Messengers and has since become an internationally-recognized
masater with many CD's and records to his credit. I recorded ALONE WITH COLE PORTER & OTHERS in the summer of 2005 and am working on volume 2 of same as well as a cabaret act. - S.E.
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