by Ben Yagoda
Jerry Herman, still a few years away from Milk and Honey, got a job in the mid-fifties as intermission pianist at a club called RSVP, tickling the ivories when Mercer took her breaks. Years later he observed that the singer “never possessed a great voice, but watching her night after night was an extraordinarily valuable course in song interpretation. She acted those wonderful ballads she sang with a fierce passion and intelligence that forced you to listen to every word.” All kinds of fans, known and unknown, made it their business to come see Mercer at RSVP. Being a devotee of hers was like being a member of an exclusive club; she became famous for being unknown. One prominent member of the club was Frank Sinatra, who in 1955 was quoted in Walter Winchell’s column in the New York Mirror: “Everything I learned I owe to Mabel Mercer.”
It makes sense that Sinatra was onto Mercer, for he is without question the key figure in this counternarrative. His contributions began in 1953, when everything turned around for him. He had a career-changing movie role in From Here to Eternity, for which he would win an Academy Award; his voice returned to form; and he signed with the Los Angeles–based Capitol Records. The executive who brought him to the label was Alan Livingston, the brother of Ray Evans’s songwriting partner, Jay Livingston. (Alan Livingston had started out working on children’s recordings at Capitol. In that capacity he wrote the song “I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat,” a top-ten hit for Mel Blanc in 1951, and created the character Bozo the Clown. In 1963 he was instrumental in signing up the Beatles.) Since it had been founded a decade earlier by Johnny Mercer and his partners, Capitol had been known as a performers’ label, geared toward bringing out their best. Thus, instead of having to deal with a Mitch Miller–like control freak, Sinatra was assigned the accommodating Voyle Gilmore as producer; the two had a roughly equal (less equal as the years went on) partnership on the selection of songs and their treatment. It was agreed that there would be no whip-cracks or in fact any studio shenanigans. The formula was good songs, a good singer, and good musicians. The final essential member of the team was the young staff arranger Nelson Riddle. Riddle first worked with Sinatra at the singer’s second recording session, at which they recorded four tunes, including “I’ve Got the World on a String,” a Harold Arlen–Ted Kohler song from 1932.
Photographer Sid Avery was at the session and later told Riddle’s biographer, Peter J. Levinson: “When Frank listened to the playback of the recording, he was really excited about it and said, ‘Jesus Christ, I’m back. I’m back, baby, I’m back!’” And he was: even from the first sessions, you could hear that Sinatra and Riddle—and the superb musicians in Capitol’s stable, most of them big-band alumni—were creating one of the defining sounds of the 1950s, a sound of swing, wit, artistry, authority, honest feeling, and relaxed precision.
Sinatra’s first Capitol album came out in January 1954 and established the pattern: impeccably chosen and performed songs, mostly standards, all following a theme. The first disk was called Songs for Young Lovers but the songs were old: two from Rodgers and Hart and the Gershwins, and one each from Porter (“I Get a Kick out of You”), Van Heusen–Burke (“Like Someone in Love”), Hugh Martin–Ralph Blane (one of their Meet Me in St. Louis tunes gender-reversed into “The Girl Next Door”), and Matt Dennis–Tom Adair (“Violets for Your Furs”).
The record went to number two on the Billboard albums chart, and Sinatra’s next several records were commercial triumphs as well. They featured Riddle arrangements and were dominated either by ballads or up-tempo numbers. The latter group all had some variation of a particular word in their titles—Swing Easy!, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!, A Swingin’ Affair!, Sinatra’s Swingin’ Session!!! The insistent repetition and exclamation points were appropriate, for the albums reinvented and reinvigorated swing, long presumed dead. Riddle dusted off the classic big-band vocabulary and, with his trademark flutes and bass trombones, freshened it up. The traditional band-vocalist balance was turned upside down. A listener’s experience of the tracks (and of Sinatra’s live performances henceforth) was that the band followed the singer’s lead in every way. At first, this was just a matter of his command of the lyrics and the rhythm, but within a couple of years he started to insert at strategic points the vocal equivalent of a brass exclamation—a bark or a HUH!—or sometimes an extra syllable or a substitute word that elegantly varied the lyric. Singing “I Won’t Dance” on A Swingin’ Affair!, he replaced a couple of words of lyrics with one of the pieces of in-joke slang he shared with his buddies: “ring-a-ding-ding.” He’d subsequently trade “guy” for “cat,” or “girl” for “chick,” and ultimately have a whole chorus of “doo-be-doo-be-doo” in his 1966 hit “Strangers in the Night.” By that time, the device was stale and prone to parody, if not self-parody. But a decade earlier, it was cool.
The swingin’ Sinatra spawned such admiring mimics as Sammy Davis Jr., who in 1957 alone put out Sammy Swings and It’s All Over but the Swingin’, and Bobby Darin, whose ring-a-ding-ding update of the Brecht–Weill–Blitzstein “Mack the Knife” was the top hit of 1959. But anyone foolish enough to follow Sinatra’s path on the introspective fare was left in the dust. In the Wee Small Hours, whose cover showed the melancholy and pensive singer standing under a streetlamp, came out in 1955 and was followed by No One Cares and Only the Lonely. The repertoire was ballads, most of them standards, but presented in a new and almost revolutionary way. The emotion was real and searing, never sentimental or formulaic. In the era of Jackie Gleason and Mantovani, Sinatra and Riddle created true mood music, a searing brand of 1950s melancholy.
In 1955, Sinatra played songwriting matchmaker, bringing together two of his newly unattached buddies. Lyricist Sammy Cahn had been working with Jule Styne, but Styne was committed to Broadway and Cahn to California; Jimmy Van Heusen’s longtime partner, Johnny Burke, was in poor health. Sinatra put Cahn and Van Heusen together to write the title song for his MGM film The Tender Trap, and then the score for the live television production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The team became Sinatra’s house songwriters, and the commission brought out good things in the veterans. In particular, their title songs for a series of theme albums—Come Fly with Me, Come Dance with Me!, and Ring-a-Ding-Ding!—achieved what no one had been able to do over the span of a decade and more: create a new, absolutely fresh sort of swinging number. Van Heusen’s melodies had a syncopated, sprung rhythm to them, and Cahn’s lyrics were hip precisely in the slangy new way Sinatra was defining the quality. “Come Dance with Me” starts off: “Hey there cutes, put on your dancin’ boots and come dance with me, / Come dance with me, what an evening for some Terpsichore.” (Cahn takes poetic license in subtracting a syllable from that last word for the sake of the rhyme with “dancing floor.”) With Van Heusen’s roller-coaster melody and Billy May’s supercharged arrangement, the song took the premise of Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek”—which was also on the album—and rocketed it twenty-five years into the present.
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Nearly as influential as Sinatra in keeping standard songs alive was the jazz impresario and independent record producer Norman Granz. Standards were the backbone of virtually every record he put out and every concert he promoted—he was the man behind the long-running, globe-trotting Jazz at the Philharmonic series—in his lengthy career, which lasted from the early 1940s till the late 1980s. Granz dipped his toe into bebop but mainly specialized in small-group swing, recording such stalwarts as Lester Young, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Roy Eldridge, Teddy Wilson, and Art Tatum; he deserves credit for helping to keep the swing tradition alive, too.
Granz discovered Oscar Peterson, a prodigiously talented young Montreal pianist, in 1949, and they remained associated for the rest of both men’s careers. In 1952 the two men revived the Lee Wiley notion of focusing on a single composer, with four LPs devoted to highlights from the oeuvres of Porter, Berlin, Gershwin, and Ellington. Granz had grown up loving Fred Astaire—not only Astaire the dancer but Astai
re the singer, who in his movies gave definitive first performances of classics by the Gershwins, Berlin, and Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields. The same year as the Peterson series began, Granz hatched the idea—“for kicks,” he said—of putting together a set of LPs in which Astaire, backed by such top jazz players as Peterson, Flip Phillips, Barney Kessel, and Ray Brown, would put on disk a wide range of tunes that had been written for him in plays and films. The final product, a four-LP set called The Astaire Story, was hugely influential and sounds as fresh today as it did when it was released more than sixty years ago.
The artist most closely associated with Granz was the immaculate-voiced Ella Fitzgerald. Initially a girl vocalist with the Chick Webb band, Fitzgerald signed with Decca in 1942, and under the guidance of the label’s A&R man, Milt Gabler (also Billie Holiday’s producer), cut records with a wide variety of the label’s musicians, including Louis Armstrong, the Ink Spots, Louis Jordan, and the Mills Brothers. Granz became her manager in 1954 and started a new label, Verve, in large part to showcase her talents. Early in 1956, Verve released Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book, a double LP containing thirty-two tracks. It was a revelation—and probably introduced both the term and the concept “songbook” to mean a thoughtful selection of pieces from a given writer or musical genre. William Zinsser later commented, “I thought of jazz and popular song as dwelling in different rooms. Then . . . Ella Fitzgerald broke down the walls.” Granz quickly followed up with a Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong duet album; the repertoire was singing standards and the backup band was Granz’s splendid house musicians. The delightful result, Ella and Louis, was the top-selling jazz record of the year and led to two follow-up disks.
Over the next eight years, Fitzgerald recorded albums dedicated to the “Songbooks” of Rodgers and Hart, Ellington, Berlin, Kern, Arlen, Mercer, and the Gershwins, the last arranged by Riddle. “I never knew how good our songs were,” Ira Gershwin said, “until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.” After Fitzgerald’s death, Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote that the Songbook series “performed a cultural transaction as extraordinary as Elvis’s contemporaneous integration of white and African American soul: Here was a black woman popularizing urban songs often written by immigrant Jews to a national audience of predominantly white Christians.”
And with that, those songs seemed to be everywhere. Former Stan Kenton singer June Christy leaned heavily on the American Songbook in her influential 1954 LP, Something Cool. Mel Tormé, equally cool, released a series of standards-based albums in the mid-fifties and continued to brilliantly till those fields until his death four decades later. Jazz singers Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine teamed up on an Irving Berlin LP in 1957, and Vaughan—who was kind of the anti–Ella Fitzgerald, with her swooping low notes and propensity for improvisation and emotional display, and who had for a decade been confined to uninspiring pop material—did a solo Gershwin disk the following year. Beverly Kenney, a promising young singer from New Jersey, put out six albums of standards between 1956 and 1960, the year she ended her own life with an overdose of pills. Tony Bennett, ever since making his arrangement with Mitch Miller at Columbia, had never stopped singing standards backed by top jazz musicians; his albums in this vein started in 1955 and have never stopped.
The phenomenon struck more broadly than the performers just mentioned and was a matter not only of taste but of necessity. The L in “LP” stood for “long.” This popular new format had a great deal of playing time to fill, and, like the doo-woppers, labels saw the standards as a large body of material for their mainstream singers and easy-listening orchestras to take. In March 1957, Billboard ran an article headlined TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING POSSIBLE WITH THOSE STANDARDS: ABUNDANT RECORD VERSIONS OF OLD SONGS RAISE SATURATION PROBLEMS. The piece, by Bill Simon and Paul Ackerman, gave the example of “Give Me the Simple Life,” a Rube Bloom–Harry Ruby composition introduced in a 1946 B movie called Wake Up and Dream. When the song was first published, the authors noted, it
had no hit records and was virtually forgotten, except for a few jazz vocalists, until a little over a year ago. In the past year, it has been recorded 15 times, is selling more records, more sheet music and getting more performances than it did in the year it was being plugged.
Many of the obscure tunes, once known only to the East Side café connoisseur crowd, now have become so common as to have lost their chic-ness completely. “The Boy Next Door,” which in Tin Pan Alley jargon would be the epitome of “non-commercialism,” has 20 recordings. Cole Porter’s most sophisticated offerings are found in the homes of even illiterate slobs.
Simon and Ackerman pointed out the seemingly inevitable predicament: “When will the repertoire of so-called ‘standard’ tunes be exhausted, and, when the market has been saturated with innumerable versions of each, what will the album producers use to fill the grooves?” They noted that some new tunes “are making the grade,” mentioning Carolyn Leigh and Johnny Richards’s “Young at Heart” and “Cry Me a River.” They also credited “café singers” for “commissioning new material and also perpetually hunting for those obscure show gems.” But ultimately the problem, they ruefully observed, “may call for more resourcefulness than many of our modern writers and a.&r. men possess.”
Any depletion of the song stock was still off in the future; for the time being, there was enough good material for even those who seemed unlikely to put their voices on wax. Chet Baker, an Oklahoma boy whose tenor had even less vibrato than his Miles Davis–influenced trumpet, released Chet Baker Sings in 1956. The entire lineup came from the Great American Songbook, from the Kern–DeSylva “Look for the Silver Lining” and the Donaldson–Kahn “My Buddy,” written in 1919 and 1922, respectively, up to “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” from Guys and Dolls. In between, Baker essayed tunes by the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Hoagy Carmichael, and Styne and Cahn, plus two by Van Heusen and Burke.
Davis himself had a profound impact on the persistence of standards and what they represented. Moving away from Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and the bebop virtuosity of his early years, he became associated with what jazz writers called the “Cool School.” For Davis, that meant in part emphasis on ballads, which he explored with unsurpassed emotional honesty and intensity. Every one of the albums he put out for Prestige starting in 1951 featured standard songs; Blue Moods, in 1955, consisted of four of them: “Nature Boy,” “Alone Together,” “There’s No You,” and “Easy Living.” That year George Avakian heard Davis at the Newport Jazz Festival, playing a riveting solo on Thelonious Monk’s composition “’Round Midnight,” and determined to sign him to Columbia. “I heard and saw jazz’s first modern superstar,” Avakian said in an interview with Marc Myers more than fifty years later. “What struck me was that Miles was the best ballad player since Louis Armstrong. I was convinced that his ballad playing would appeal to the public on a very large scale. . . . It’s really Miles’ melodic playing that put him across with the public on a wide scale.”
Even Davis’s old bebopping colleagues were playing standards, after a fashion. Many of their best-known songs were based on the harmonic structure—“chord changes,” in musicians’ parlance—of classic numbers. Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology” came from “How High the Moon,” and “I Got Rhythm” alone launched a thousand bop solos. Ray Noble wrote “Cherokee” in 1938 as a slow ballad, but Charlie Barnet speeded it up the following year, and it became an up-tempo jazz staple, ultimately turned into bebop via Parker’s “Ko-Ko.”
When Bob Dorough got discharged from the Army in 1949, he moved in with his parents in Amarillo, Texas, and started getting gigs playing piano in a local club, the Aviatrix. He met a couple of hip older musicians from the Air Force band who took a shine to him. Dorough recalled:
They said, “You ever heard Bird and Diz?”
I said, “I heard about ’em.”
They said, “Oh, come over to the pad tomorrow and we’ll play some.
” So they’re playing these quintets with Diz and Bird and the rhythm section. They’d play “Hot House” and then they’d say, “You know, that’s just ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’” And then “Groovin’ High” is just “Whispering,” an old, old song.
Dorough moved to New York in 1950 and breathed in deeply; the prime era of bebop was just fading out. On his first album, Devil May Care, Dorough played and sang a version of Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite,” for which he’d written lyrics. He later wrote a bop-flavored song called “Nothing Like You.” Miles Davis recorded it, with Dorough’s vocal.
One of the most modern of modern jazz musicians, John Coltrane, was a connoisseur of the standards. His biographer, Lewis Porter, suggests that the post-bop saxophonist may have derived the harmonic progression of his 1960 masterpiece “Giant Steps” from Rodgers and Hart’s 1937 “Have You Met Miss Jones?” The following year Coltrane put out an album consisting of extended versions of three Songbook chestnuts—Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” and Gershwin’s “Summertime” and “But Not for Me”—and a brand-new standard, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s anodyne “My Favorite Things,” from The Sound of Music. Coltrane’s not-very-cheery modal version, with its sheets of saxophone notes, became the closest thing to a hit he ever had. In 1963, Coltrane put out two marvelous standards records, Ballads and John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, a collaboration with the soulful singer.
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Mabel Mercer wasn’t the only club singer devoted to the classic songs. The husband-and-wife team of Jackie Cain and Roy Kral (who played piano as well as sang) debuted at Manhattan’s Blue Angel in 1954, offering standards and a recent innovation, based on Ella Fitzgerald’s scat improvisations: songs constructed by putting lyrics to jazz riffs and solos. The influential British-born critic Leonard Feather dubbed it “vocalese” in his 1955 Encyclopedia of Jazz. As befitting the club-singer job description, Jackie and Roy also made it a point to seek out new songs. One they put on the map was a lilting ballad, written by Fran Landesman and Tommy Wolf, that imagined the first line of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” from the point of view of a melancholy hipster: “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.” In 1959, Landesman and Wolf, who were based in St. Louis, teamed up to write a musical comedy satirizing bohemia, The Nervous Set; one of its songs, “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men,” became a part of many singers’ repertoire as well. Landesman also collaborated with Bob Dorough, notably on “Nothing Like You.” Dorough wrote and sang on a dyspeptic Miles holiday tune called “Blue Xmas (to Whom It May Concern).”
