Well Versed

My first acquaintance with the so-called Great American Songbook—the canon of showtune standards minted by a handful of American songwriters in the 1920s and '30s, give or take a decade—came in an unusual and, to my mind, irreplaceable way. Though I was raised on Rodgers & Hammerstein and Lerner & Loewe cast albums and Gershwin concert music, I wasn't familiar with the vintage song catalogs of Berlin, Porter, Kern, the Gershwins, and Rodgers & Hart until I was auditioning for my freshman high school production of Auntie Mame, and got an inside tip that one sure way to be cast would be to present myself as an accomplished cocktail pianist for the play's party scenes—a laughable conceit, as I not only didn't know this material, I had in fact quite limited skills on piano outside a narrow classical repertoire. Still, I managed to squeak my way through readings of "Isn't It Romantic?" and "Embraceable You" well enough to get the gig. I didn't exactly fall head over heels for the stuff, but it was in the bloodstream. (A later high school production of Anything Goes didn't quite seal the deal either, as the songs I was tasked with singing, in the role of Moonface, were Porter's entirely average "Friendship" and entirely awful "Be Like the Bluebird.")

Flash forward to another freshman year, in college, when I was stranded in a dorm room far away from a piano. I was advised (by Cinco Paul, also the source of that choice high school casting tip) to try the baritone ukulele, a four-string instrument tuned like a guitar, minus the low E and A strings. As such it's ideally suited to a beginner, a sort of training-wheels guitar: four strings, four fingers on the left hand, nearly any chord shape within easy reach and in tune with all standard sheet music. And something, I'm not sure what (could have been Cinco again), sent me back to those old standards. From the USC library I checked out books of sheet music by those canonical songwriters; I especially remember paging through the illustrated Rodgers & Hart book and dutifully teaching myself songs I'd literally never heard before: "Mountain Greenery" and "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" and "I Could Write a Book" and "Blue Room." I went on to follow this pattern of learning by reading with many of the other essential songwriters of this era—Arlen and Dubin and Mercer and Carmichael and Ellington, et al.—even after I acquired more books, rented a piano, and graduated to six-string guitar.

How precious to have met these great songs this way, on the page, with my own hands and voice! Without quite intending to, I was recapturing one way this music used to be passed around, and remains particularly well suited to. The impact of this songbook-first approach was profound: Though I soon caught up with iconic renditions of selections from this canon by everyone from Billie Holiday to Chet Baker to Tony Bennett, I don't think of any of their renditions as definitive, even the best of them. These songs are instead texts to be interpreted, like plays or sonatas. I like to think this autodidactic apprenticeship also made me acutely conscious of songs as songs, apart from recordings, and fed my own creative efforts in this vein; but it's hard to untangle affinity from experience here. I think I've always just been much more attuned to the harmony and shape of music than to the finer points of timbre, sound, technique.

I also made a blessed rookie mistake: I learned all the verses. I didn't know that the 32 bars of these songs' choruses were the only thing most singers and jazz players, and listeners, gave a fig about. These verses may have been sung in the theatre (though in some cases, if I recall correctly, they were simply tacked on to fill a standard sheet-music length), but with notable exceptions they were almost never sung on records. In many cases, you can see why: Composers and lyricists did not always bring their "A" game to this task. Many if not most verses for these standards are perfunctory and about as memorable as opera recitative.

There are notable exceptions—not only "Stardust," one of the few standards with a verse at least as memorable as its chorus, but a number that just aren't complete without an introduction. "A Foggy Day (in London Town)," for one, makes little narrative sense without its breezy but hesitant lyrical set-up, over music that foreshadows some of the chorus's indelible scene painting; a chiming time piece, and a sense of time stopping in its tracks, characterize both forms. The verse of "Love Is Here to Stay" is nothing special musically, which may be what I cherish about it—it has the good taste and graciousness not to distract from its soaring chorus's gentle grandeur.

But by far the verse I loved most, and still cherish, is the haunting preamble of "Isn't It Romantic?" The song itself is unimpeachably graceful, sweet, deft, light on its feet; but oh the verse! I think I like it even better than the chorus, with its major-to-minor color shifts and alternating patterns of terse phrases ("I've never met you/But never doubt dear") with long, breathless run-ons ("I know your profile and I know the way you kiss"). Most recordings not by Bobby Short or Michael Feinstein don't bother with it, but Johnny Mathis and Rod Stewart do, interestingly. Jeanette McDonald too, obviously. The version that most closely captures the platonic ideal of how I've always heard it, silky and yearning, intimate and insinuating, is Mel Torme's smoky rubato take:

When people talk about Rodgers' facility with tunes—the infamous Noël Coward quote that Rodgers could "pee melody" comes to mind—I think of this perfectly shaped, evocative set-up for a big tune that almost steals its thunder. And I think of how grateful I am to have met and bonded with this canon the way I did. Do you mean that I may fall in love perchance? Too late.