Hoagy Sings Carmichael With Johnny Mandel and The Pacific Jazzmen [From the Archives]

 © -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Hoagy Sings Carmichael With The Pacific Jazzmen [Pacific Jazz CD 0777 7 46862 2 8] has sat in my collection for a long time, but I never knew its origins until I read the following in Richard M. Sudhalter’s Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael [Oxford/2002].

Sadly, like Bing Crosby, Hoagy Carmichael and the impact he had on American popular music, especially during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, is pretty much lost to 21st century music listeners.

But if you do have an interest in the life and music of Hoagy Carmichael, as his son, Hoagy Bix Carmichael states on the book’s dust jacket: “There’s nobody on the face of this musical earth better suited to write a book about my father than Dick Sudhalter. And as expected, he has done a wonderful job.”

“Toward the end of 1956, Hoagy’s Decca recording contract, in force since 1938, finally expired. …

However inauspicious a way it might have been to end so long and fruitful an association, it also formed a prelude to one of Hoagy Carmichael's finest moments on record. Richard Bock, owner of World Pacific Records, had been a fan for years; now, with Hoagy free of record-company commitment, nothing prevented him from recording the songwriter in a new and challenging setting.

New Yorker Johnny Mandel had done his band business apprenticeship toying trombone with, and arranging for, Jimmy Dorsey, Boyd Raeburn, Buddy Rich, Woody Herman, Artie Shaw's short-lived 1949 bebop band, and — perhaps most telling of all — Count Basie. He'd worked as a radio staff arranger in New York, studied at Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard, contributed scores to NBC television's Your Show of Shows, arranged an album for singer Dick Haymes.[Mandel’s career as a composer of many beautiful songs including Emily, Close Enough for Love, The Shadow of Your Smile, et al was yet to come].

Bock's idea was simple: feature Carmichael singing his own songs, backed not by slick studio bands, tack-in-hammer pianos, or warbling vocal trios, but by a tightly knit group of ranking modern jazzmen, playing carefully textured and swinging arrangements.

"We went out to visit him," said Mandel. "Forget now whether it was in Hollywood or Palm Springs. Found him there behind the bar, mixing drinks; really hospitable and gracious. We just got right to talking. He had pretty clear ideas of what he wanted to do, and what he didn't want to do. He realized he wasn't a straight ballad singer, didn't want to do things like 'One Morning in May,' that had all sorts of sustained notes and big intervals. He didn't try to sing 'I Get Along Without You Very Well,' for instance. But he could always do the character-type ballads, like 'Baltimore Oriole,' 'Georgia,' and the rest."

Mandel, in the process of winning respect as a master songwriter in his own right, chuckled at the memory of those first "brainstorming" sessions. "Hoagy hated bebop ... I remember he came to hear Woody's band when it was really hot, and said something like, 'Aw, give me an old bass horn any time.' He meant it, too.

"When I was with Basie, around 1953 or so, we came to town and Hoagy was there — he was doing this TV show, Saturday Night Revue. He just kinda walked around thinking, with his tongue in his cheek, looking kinda glum, and I took him for just a kind of moody guy. Also, some of the guys on the band had told me he was a real far-right Hoosier-type Republican, kind of an Indiana cracker. Johnny [Mercer] was a bit like that too, I guess-though I never saw it in either of them."

Hoagy Sings Carmichael was recorded at three sessions, September 10,11, and 13, 1956 — with a band full of outstanding jazzmen: trumpeter Don Fagerquist had been in Les Brown's brass section for the 1955 "Hong Kong Blues" date; Harry "Sweets" Edison was an honored Basie veteran, then enjoying a career renaissance through his muted obbligato work on the arrangements Nelson Riddle was using to showcase Frank Sinatra; Jimmy Zito, another Brown alumnus, had ghosted the "Art Hazard" solos for Young Man With a Horn.

Alto saxophonist Art Pepper was new to Hoagy, as were pianist Jimmy Rowles and drummer Irv Cottler. An old Carmichael friend, Nick Fatool, replaced Cottier on drums for the third session. Said Mandel: "I spotted his vocals wherever I thought they'd be most effective, stuck 'em in the middles, usually. Remember, I didn't have a big band there — rather, a small band trying to sound big. So voicings were important.

"As a singer? He was a natural. Knew what to keep and what to throw away. Didn't try to be a capital-S singer: more often he approached the songs conversationally, like an actor, like Walter Huston doing 'September Song.' And you know, those are really the most effective readings for those sorts of things, rather than somebody doing something with a straight baritone. You never knew beforehand how he was gonna sing something: when be was going to talk it, where he was gonna leave spaces."

He not only leaves spaces, but on several songs confines his vocals to a decidedly secondary role, giving the major melody expositions to the band. Again and again, his vocals strike the ear as measured, thoughtful, Carmichael taking his time, never pushing his vocal resources beyond their limits, He opens "Two Sleepy People" with only Al Hendrickson's unamplified guitar; carries "Rockin’ Chair" away from its familiar role as a piece of quasi-vaudeville material and returns it to its origins as an end-of-life valedictory, with Rowles, on celeste, underscoring its reflective, pastoral quality.

Art Pepper gets most of the solo space and is particularly distinctive on "Ballad in Blue" — incredibly, the song's first vocal treatment on record since its publication twenty-two years before. "Two Sleepy People" teams him with a cup-muted Fagerquist for a closely intertwined duet, distantly echoing the long-ago "chase" choruses of Bix and Frank Trumbauer.

But the saxophonist's — and perhaps the album's — most stirring moment belongs to "Winter Moon," newly published at the time, with one of Harold Adamson's most affecting lyrics. Pepper establishes the melody, a heartfelt cry in icy emptiness:

Where is love's magic?

Where did it go?

Is it gone like the summertime.

That we used to know?

(The song remained in his mind. Twenty-two years later, his life shattered by heroin addiction and a decade in prison, Pepper recorded it again.

Though cushioned by strings and rhythm, it is a performance of almost unbearable intensity, glowing in a clear, glacial light, hypnotic, agonized.)

The line of descent from "Ballad in Blue" to "Winter Moon" is clear. The desolation of love lost shadows both lyrics, casting both melodies in minor-mode darkness. But unlike its predecessor, "Winter Moon" allows no ray of light to penetrate its interior. Melodically and harmonically sophisticated, emotionally complex, it is a work of its composer's maturity, a regretful backward look at a brighter past, "a kind of art song," in singer Barbara Lea's words. "Not at all what you'd think of as 'typical' Hoagy Carmichael except in its air of longing, something once had and now lost."'

Mandel concluded Hoagy Sings Carmichael with a swinger, a Basle-inflected recasting of "Lazy River" with a sassy, strutting trumpet solo by Sweets Edison. Again, Hoagy rises to the task. "You could tell from that, especially, that he would have been a great jazz musician," the arranger said. "In singing 'Lazy River,' he ... didn't try to sing the line exactly, [because] he realized what would fit his range and vocal quality, especially at that tempo. He was very smart about that, [and] his approach was very jazzy."

George Frazier's sleeve essay spoke for all concerned in declaring that

“...it strikes me as enormously reassuring that an individual who in bygone years made music with men of approximately his own age, background and attitude should be sufficiently uninstitutional to record with a group of musicians (with one exception) so lately undiapered that some of them had not yet been born when Star Dust was becoming the theme song of a whole era. To me, the results of this collaboration sound absolutely marvelous.''

Here are the rest of George Frazier’s excellent sleeve notes with the above excerpt placed in the larger context of his essay on the album.

The trouble with most institutions is that they're too institutional. In their resolute resistance to change, their anachronistic aversion to progress, and their almost insular insistence upon continuing, so to speak, to stock high-button shoes, they permit themselves to become period pieces — often, to be sure, redolently recherche du temps perdu period pieces, but, nevertheless and notwithstanding, almost always very, very aging ones as well. Providentially, no such indictment can be brought against Hoagland (Hoagy) Carmichael, who, institution though he he, has neither a closed mind nor, rather more pertinently, a closed ear.

At any rate, here, in Hoagy Sings Carmichael, a man approaching the ordinarily stodgy, look-before-you-leap age of 58, a man whose earliest musical inspiration was the silvery explosiveness of Bix Beiderbecke's cornet; whose "Lazy Bones" was a delight as long ago as the summer dusks of the '30s, when, with the waters slapping against the shores of the Glen Island Casino, the Casa Loma (ave atque vale) used to play it, as the radio announcer so quaintly phrased it,"for your dancing pleasure"; and whose "Riverboat Shuffle" remains, after all these fickle years, the rousing anthem of the chowder and marching societies that gather nightly in unsolemn conclave in such Dixieland mosques as Jazz, Ltd. in Chicago and Eddie Condon's Sign of the Pork Chop in New York — here, in Hoagy Sings Carmichael this man, or, if you will, this institution, this tradition, this living legend — joins with some of the more explorative spirits in contemporary jazz to achieve fresh interpretations of a batch of his most appealing compositions.

I do not think it either maudlin or churlish to say that Carmichael — his croaky voice, casual manner, diminutive, wizened figure, and bulging songbag — is somehow part of all of us who love worthwhile popular music — the way, for instance, that Tommy Dorsey was, part of us, which is to say that when Tommy died, the part of us that had responded to his "Marie, Song of India," "I'll Never Smile Again," and all those other untarnished treasures died a little too. Carmichael, who was horn in Bloomington. Indiana, on November 22, 1899, has been part of us for quite a while.

Although he spent considerable extracurricular time playing piano with school and college bands. Carmichael would probably have become a practicing attorney (an occupation for which he prepared himself at Indiana University) had it not been for the fact that the Wolverines, a group he admired prodigiously, dazzled him by recording his first composition. "Riverboat Shuffle," for the Gennett label. Subsequently, when the Paul Whiteman Victor of his "Washboard Blues" sold far beyond his most youthfully intemperate expectations, he made up his mind to become a full-time songwriter. It was a salutary decision, for since then he has composed the music to such memorabilia as "Stardust," "Lazy Bones," "Georgia on My Mind," "Rockin' Chair," "One Morning in May," "Snowball,""Lazy River,""Small Fry," "In the Still of the Night," "Judy," "Two Sleepy People," "Skylark," "The Nearness of You," "Old Buttermilk Sky," "Doctor, lawyer, Indian Chief,""Ivy," "Memphis in June,""Blue Orchids,""Hong Kong Blues," "I Get Along Without You Very Well," "New Orleans," "Baltimore Oriole," "Winter Moon" and "Ballad In Blue." As if that were not enough, though, he has managed to bolster his reputation by being a fairly ubiquitous (and almost invariably engaging) performer, not only on radio, television and phonograph records, but also in such motion pictures as Young Man with a Horn, Canyon Passage. The Best Years of Our Lives, Johnny Angel and To Have and Have Not (in which, by the way, he miraculously succeeded in lending individuality to a role almost infringingly in direct apostolic succession to Dooley Wilson's Sam in Casablanca).

Everything considered, it strikes me as enormously reassuring that an individual who in bygone years made records with men of approximately his own age, background and attitude should be sufficiently uninstitutional to record with a group of musicians (with one exception) so lately undiapered that several of them had not yet been born when "Stardust "was becoming the theme song of a whole era. To me, the results of this collaboration sound absolutely marvelous. How they will sound to Hugues Panassie*, however, may be rather a different story. [*Panassie was a French Jazz musician/critic who basically had little use for modern Jazz.]

I wonder what Hugues Panassie's reaction will be to the lovely, understated instrumental stuff behind and between Carmichael's singing — to Art Pepper's alto saxophone, Don Fagerquist's trumpet. Jimmy Rowles's piano, Harry Klee's flute and Johnny Mandel's arrangements. (I omit mention of Harry Edison, one of the chief participants, because once upon a time he played with Count Basie and I would therefore imagine he could be faulted by Panassie only on the grounds of the company he keeps in this album.) I hasten to state that this is no gratuitous crack, which is why I should probably explain that I was a Panassie man even before Bullets Durgom was a band-boy and just about the time that Le Poivre Martin was running the bases like no other wild horse of the Osage in history. As a matter of fact, if memory serves me, it was in 1931 that the monsieur himself persuaded me to abandon the Harvard backfield and become a regular contributor to a wilful little French periodical called Jazz-Tango-Dancing could not have cared less whether the hell I punted on third clown or not. As its guiding light, its father confessor, its raison d'etre really, M. Panassie was simply superb — sensitive, informed, communicative, dedicated, stimulating, and, above all, not the slightest bit tactful. Indeed, in those headstrong years, he was, I think, as provocative and, more often than not, as competent a jazz critic as has ever raised his voice in a Down Beat poll. And as time went by and his book, Le Jazz Hot (literal translation: Le Jazz Chaud), was published in this country and (without any connection whatsoever) people started shagging shamelessly in the aisles of a movie cathedral in Times Square, he — M. Panassie, naturellement! — became an institution. That was all to the good, and, God wot, it still would be if only he had not allowed himself to become so damned institutional! I think somebody should inform mon capitaine that we employ the T-formation these enlightened days.

A week or so ago I received a copy (complimentary!) of a hook called Guide to Jazz ("Valuable information," says the jacket blurb, "on every aspect of jazz, by Hugues Panassie. author of Le Jazz Hot, and Madeleine Gautier.") Inasmuch as I was soon to commence setting down these observations, I thought I'd better have a look at what Papa Panassie had to report about Art Pepper, Johnny Mandel, Jimmy Rowles. Harry Klee and Don Fagerquist. As it turned out, my old squadron leader seems never to have heard of them. At any rate, their names do not appear in Guide to Jazz or, as the expression goes, Sonny Tufts! I do not mind saying that I find this appalling. There is, of course, line upon line about the likes of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, which is as it should be, for the Ellington band, after all, is as incandescent as they come and Louis is a perpetual pure blue flame and, to my ears, no jazz record of the past decade was any more exciting and enduring than his "Mack the Knife." Still and all, though, a guide — a truly eclectic and informative guide — should be mindful of the fact that any art form progresses and that, as it does, it breeds bright new voices. I think that Panassie should realize, at infuriatingly long last, that many of the new, even the experimental, forms are now being absorbed into the mainstream of jazz and that Gerry Mulligan and Pee Wee Russell have more to say to each other than he, Panassie, would like to believe. In any event, it is true that the progressives — the moderns, the cool ones, or what you will — have modified their radicalism and, in doing so, grown close to the basic jazz. In the course of this, they have broadened, enriched and revitalized an art form that, like any other, cannot endure by remaining stagnant, by sitting back and preserving the status quo.

Hoagy Sings Carmichael, which utilizes eleven musicians and Carmichael, was recorded in Los Angeles at the Forum Theatre, a large legitimate house with excellent acoustics. Carmichael feels that the background in the modern idiom — the fresh instrumental voices and the imaginative Mandel arrangements — stimulated him to sing differently and perhaps better than ever before. The highly contemporary accompaniment, he says, made him feel younger, a fact that I think will be immediately obvious to anyone acquainted with his records of other years. I also think that it is equally obvious that he might have done much to inspire the boys in the band, as the saying goes.

There is great, great beauty and talent in this album. For one thing, the Mandel arrangements are marvels of unobtrusiveness designed to highlight the singing. Indeed, subtle is the word for the whole enterprise. Although I dislike programmatic album notes — notes, that is, that inform you, rather patronizingly, what you should like, and so forth — I'm afraid that I cannot resist a few observations along such lines. One is that Art Pepper, who has been away from music for much too long a time, is simply superlative, with bite to his attack, body to his tone and a disciplined architecture to his improvisation. He is, mon capitaine Panassie notwithstanding, a great alto saxophonist. As for Harry Edison, well, there has never been a time when his playing failed to move me deeply. But the other trumpeter, Don Fagerquist, who takes solos in "Skylark," "Winter Moon," "Rocking' Chair" and "Ballad In Blue," was new to me. I think he's simply fine. And so, for that matter, is Jimmy Rowles, who plays so sensitively in, among other things, "Two Sleepy People."

But enough of this sort of thing. I'm beginning to sound as dogmatic as Pappa Panassie.”

— George Frazier

Original liner notes

The Case for Hoagy Carmichael by Richard Sudhalter [From the Archives]

 © -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"Play me a Hoagy Carmichael song and I hear the banging of a screen door and the whine of an outboard motor on a lake — sounds of summer in a small-town America that is long gone but still longed for."

—William Zinsser, The American Scholar, 1994

There’s a dance pavilion in the rain,

All shuttered down ….

- Johnny Mercer, Early Autumn

On warm summer nights, in that epoch between the wars and before air conditioning, the doors and wide wooden shutters would be open, and the music would drift out of the pavilion over the converging crowds of excited young people, through the parking lot glistening with cars, through the trees, and over the lake-or the river, or the sea. Sometimes Japanese lanterns hung in the trees, like moons caught in the branches, and sometimes little boys too hung there, observing the general excitement and sharing the sense of an event. And the visit of one of the big bands was indeed an event.

The sound of the saxophones, a sweet and often insipid yellow when only four of them were used, turned to a woody umber when, later, the baritone was added. The sound of three trombones in harmony had a regal grandeur. Four trumpets could sound like flame, yet in ballads could be damped by harmon mutes to a citric distant loneliness. Collectively, these elements made up the sound of a big band.

It is one that will not go away. The recordings made then are constantly reissued and purchased in great quantities. Time-Life re-creates in stereo the arrangements of that vanished era, while the Reader's Digest and the Book of the Month Club continue to reissue many of the originals. Throughout the United States and Canada, college and high school students gather themselves into that basic formation-now expanded to five trumpets, four trombones, five saxes doubling woodwinds, piano, bass, drums, and maybe guitar and French horns too-to make their own music in that style. By some estimates there are as many as 30,000 of these bands. The sound has gone around the world, and you will hear it on variety shows of Moscow television—a little clumsy, to be sure, but informed with earnest intention.

Why? Why does this sound haunt our culture?

For one thing, it was deeply romantic. …

It was also dramatic.

- Gene Lees, Singers and the Song II

“Beyond argument, he's the key precursor of that phenomenon of our own times, the singer-songwriter. Whether Billy Joel or Elton John, Dave Frishberg or Bob Dorough, or the countless others who have made an industry of devising and performing their own material, all share a common ancestor in the wiry little guy at the piano, hat back on his head, often bathed in cigarette smoke as he chides "Lazybones" or "Small Fry," exhorts an "Ole Buttermilk Sky" to be mellow and bright, or extols the fragrant memory of "Memphis in June."”

- Richard Sudhalter, Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael

Through their music, songwriters and/or lyricists like Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer, and Matt Dennis, help us evoke time and place whether it be watching the clouds take shape during a languid midwestern summer, or fishing and bird watching along the shores of the Savannah river or the hip, slick and cool atmosphere of the New York club scene.

In the frenetic pace of today’s world, I think we need the nostalgic pauses of the songs written by Hoagy Carmichael because they help put us in touch with ourselves.

They cater to and cultivate our imagination which in turn, helps us visualize our dreams and desires.

If for no other reasons, their work needs to be remembered because ... “..., great songs are indestructible artifacts, impervious to time and changing fashion.” [Richard M. Sudhalter]

In his INTRODUCTION to his brilliantly research and easy and fun to read biography Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael [Oxford: 2002], Richard Sudhalter makes the case for Hoagy’s relevance to our times, this way -

“Our United Airlines 767 had barely lifted off the runway at Santiago when I found myself in conversation with my two immediate neighbors in row fourteen. Young, female, and blonde, they radiated a particularly American, particularly effortless, brand of assured good health.

They were college juniors, they said, and had just backpacked their way across the Andes, actually scaling some of the glaciers viewed distantly from the cruise ship I'd just left at Valparaiso. For the next hour they held me in thrall with tales of towering ridges and tenebrous valleys, mystical dawns and dazzling sunsets—all with a verve and immediacy hard to resist.

Finally, with things starting to flag a bit, came a few questions. What was I doing down here? What did I do in life besides ride in airplanes? Well, I explained, I played the trumpet, specialized in jazz, and had just finished entertaining passengers on an eco-cruise with the music of Hoagy Carmichael -

Their blank stares halted me in mid-sentence. "Hoagy... Carmichael ... ?" I repeated, enunciating each syllable slowly and clearly. "You know—'Star Dust?' " Not a blink of recognition. " 'Georgia on My Mind?' 'Rockin' Chair?' " I reeled off the familiar titles. " 'Ole Buttermilk Sky?'" Still no sign. Nothing. Oh come on, kids, I thought — and started humming the opening bars: "Sometimes I wonder why I spend the lonely night..."

"Oh, right," one of my companions declared, furrowing a radiant blonde brow. Haltingly, as if summoning the Pythagorean Theorem from the darkest recesses of memory, she ventured, "I'm sure I heard my mom singing that once ..."

Perhaps that's just the natural way of things: America is world-famous, after all, for celebrating the new, living in the moment. How quick we are to discard, to expunge what's not immediately relevant to us. Surely it wasn't all that long ago that Hoagy Carmichael — wise, thoughtful, casual in a grown-up, seen-it-all way — was a familiar, even reassuring, presence in our midst. But a lot of mileage now separates his times and ours: change

remains the constant, and we dare not forget that those sorts of seismic shifts have always gone on, were even going on in Hoagy's own lifetime.

He spent his first songwriting years in Indiana and New York, immersed in the almost gnostic subculture of hot jazz, a music that burst into 1920s America in its own kind of youth rebellion. By his mid-thirties he was in California, rebel no more, blending into the movie establishment, and he spent the rest of his career writing songs for, and acting in, films.

But then as now, Hollywood trafficked in ephemerality, and too many of the movies that brought Hoagy Carmichael — his face, his image, his songs — to a mass public now repose quietly on video store "classics" shelves, ignored by anyone not expressly seeking them out.

Various of the tunes escaped their films to join the roster of much-loved popular standards, alongside "Georgia on My Mind," "Skylark," and of course the incomparable "Star Dust." But all that exists on the far side of an immense generational divide. From time to time a k. d. lang will recycle "Skylark," or ex-Beatle George Harrison will have a go at "Hong Kong Blues." But for the most part there's no reason why today's kids would have the slightest idea about — or interest in — an old song celebrating the purple dusk of twilight time.

Broadway composers seem to have made out better. Perhaps it's because George Gershwin celebrated life and romance in fast-moving, superhip New York, Cole Porter's reach extended to high-society Paris and Venice, and the melodies of Richard Rodgers melded smartly with the acidulously world-weary lyrics of Larry Hart. Those songs never need reviving because they always seem to be around, and surely more youngsters today know them than know those of Hoagland Carmichael.

But anyone with enough curiosity to stop, look, and listen is bound to find that Hoagy and his songs are still very much alive and — here's the key word — relevant, occupying territory recognizably theirs alone. His melodies and (more often than is popularly realized) lyrics have little in common with the Ruritanian [references to romantic adventure and intrigue] conceits of Jerome Kern, the arch topicality of Porter, or the cutting-edge smarts of the Gershwins. But they have unrivaled strengths of their own.

Hoagy Carmichael's songs can evoke place and time as vividly as the work of Edward Hopper or Sinclair Lewis, the essays of H. L. Mencken, or the humor of Will Rogers. But they're not period pieces. They deal with eternal things: youth and age, life and death, a longing for home. Relatively few of the best known Carmichael songs, in fact, are about love — at least in any explicit, boy-girl, moon-June sense. Hoagy's love songs have their own spin: "I Get Along Without You Very Well," for all its bereavement, remains stoic, never approaching standard-issue "Body and Soul" self-pity. "Skylark" and "Baltimore Oriole" apostrophize birds in the service of amour; "Two Sleepy People" looks back on young romance with wry affection.

Finally, and above all, there's "Star Dust." Rangy, arpeggiated, structurally unconventional in its ABAC format, it stands alone; outfitted with its Mitchell Parish lyric, it's a song about a song about love. No other song even begins to challenge its unique primacy as a kind of informal American national anthem. Even the resolutely yuppified National Public Radio, selecting its "100 most important American musical works of the twentieth century," found time for a lengthy, affectionate Susan Stamberg ode to "Star Dust."

Numerically speaking, Hoagy didn't write many songs—perhaps 650 at a conservative estimate, a mere handful compared to, say, the prolific Irving Berlin. But quantity is at best an unreliable unit of measure: Carmichael's songs are personal statements, most often nourished and reinforced by his own performances.

Beyond argument, he's the key precursor of that phenomenon of our own times, the singer-songwriter. Whether Billy Joel or Elton John, Dave Frishberg or Bob Dorough, or the countless others who have made an industry of devising and performing their own material, all share a common ancestor in the wiry little guy at the piano, hat back on his head, often bathed in cigarette smoke as he chides "Lazybones" or "Small Fry," exhorts an "Ole Buttermilk Sky" to be mellow and bright, or extols the fragrant memory of "Memphis in June."

It's possible to talk of songs as having a "Carmichael flavor." Not that they all sound alike or conform to any one model: far from it. Overall, in fact, they're a pretty diverse lot. Yet they remain unmistakably his, and, in all but a very few cases, it's hard to imagine them having been written by anyone else. If such perennials as "Georgia on My Mind," "New Orleans," and "Moon Country" evoke the Southland, it's worth noting that Indiana, set on a firm east-west axis alongside Ohio and Illinois, can also be seen latitudinally, contiguous geographically and socially with Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas.

Except for Duke Ellington, whose primary activity was not songwriting, Carmichael is arguably the only major tunesmith whose musical roots are

discernibly in jazz. Though his later career grew in another direction, he never lost his early affinity for, and love of, the dynamic music of his youth. No coincidence, that some of Louis Armstrong's most majestic recorded moments are in performances of "Star Dust," "Rockin* Chair," and other Carmichael songs.

I discovered Hoagy Carmichael early in life, through the crystalline miracle of Bix Beiderbecke's cornet. Seeking out Bix inevitably meant running across Hoagy's "Riverboat Shuffle," "Washboard Blues," and the original, medium-tempo incarnation of "Star Dust." To a kid growing up in the Boston suburbs of half a century ago, the pair of them seemed American exotics, equal parts roaring-twenties college hepcats and Saturday Evening Post Norman Rockwell archetypes.

Imagine all that farmland. Those golden wheatfields and deep blue big-sky summer horizons. Lakefront ballrooms, with no ocean within thousands of miles; nocturnal expeditions into Chicago to find hot jazz in basement cabarets and South Side dance halls. What a wondrous world of discovery and exuberantly, timelessly youthful music!

How easy, too, and how welcome, to bask in the magenta glow of Carmichael's two published memoirs, The Stardust Road and the more matter-of-fact Sometimes I Wonder. But what about a biography? Books on Gershwin, Porter, Youmans, Kern, and the rest were easy enough to find, as were studies of Armstrong, Ellington, Benny Goodman, and other jazz notables. But no Hoagy. Had his own two books said everything that needed to be said?

Even shorn of its subject's embellishments and elisions, the story asked to be told, and the music badly needed addressing. Alec Wilder's brief Carmichael section in American Popular Song had made a start; various estimable writers, from William Zinsser to John Edward Hasse, had added much of value. But a full biography, of both the music and the man, was still yet to come.

I'd like to think that future generations, backpackers and music scholars alike, will read here about Hoagland Carmichael and respond to the American vision so lovingly preserved in his music, a vision now receding much too quickly from view. It's an idealization, of the people we'd like to think we once were and those we want to believe we still can be: open and decent, worldly but appreciative of simple pleasures; pragmatic yet principled, secular yet deeply moral. In our quest to find what's best in ourselves we need all the help we can get, and there's nothing like a Vorbild [person or thing that serves as an example : a shining, admired, good role model"] or two to speed things along. Above all, great songs are indestructible artifacts, impervious to time and changing fashion.

With all that in mind, then, I invite you (and my quondam traveling companions, wherever they are) to enter Hoagy Carmichael’s world—a world sprinkled, in the most truly magical sense, with Stardust.

SOUTHOLD, NEW YORK                                                                                          

R. M. S.

Hoagy's in the Hall

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The August 2016 edition of Downbeat brings the news that as part of the 64th Annual Critics Poll, composer Hoagy Carmichael has been elected to the magazine’s Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee.

The significance of Hoagy’s election is explained in the following excerpts from John McDonough’s feature entitled Immortal Composer.

“... Hoagy Carmichael, the man who found "Stardust" … now takes his place in the DownBeat Hall of Fame.

It is long overdue that the Hall of Fame shift its attention from musicians—whose composing has been done largely as a self-serving avocation—to the full-time, professional songwriters who wrote for the world. They are the hidden second front of jazz history—the heroes who worked alone, found their inspiration behind the scenes and provided those musicians with the unique literary inventory on which they erected many of their greatest performances.

Carmichael is an ideal composer to open this second front. More than anyone, he wrote popular music from a jazz sensibility, which maybe why "Stardust" still endures. According to the Tom Lord Jazz Discography, it has been recorded 1,520 times since October 1927— and that includes only the jazz recordings, not the thousands of "popular" versions by artists as varied as Nat "King" Cole, Willie Nelson, Ringo Starr and Rod Stewart, and Billy Ward and the Dominos. Other Carmichael classics at I home in any jazz set include "Georgia On My Mind" (1,019 recordings), "The Nearness Of You" (828 recordings), "Skylark" (804 recordings), "Lazy River" (466 recordings) and the traditional Dixie favorite "Riverboat Shuffle."

Many of the early recordings of these standards have been interred with their time, interesting now as quaint artifacts trapped in the grooved amber of a vanished chic. They stand forever where they were planted in time, as tastes and styles move merrily along. But the work of a great composer is never finished, only latent. It slides through cycles of swing, bop, doo-wop, soul, gospel, country and come-what-may, embracing, then shedding, the characteristics of fashion like a literary Leonard Zelig. Such songs exist in the future, not the past, patiently awaiting a new generation. …

Carmichael came by his jazz instincts near their source, which in the 1920s was Chicago, where the best musicians of New Orleans and the Midwest were converging. Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Nov. 22, 1899, he came of age in the early '20s as Gennett Records in nearby Richmond began recording the first important records in jazz history — Jelly Roll Morton, the King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band with Louis Armstrong, and the Wolverines with Bix Beiderbecke. Carmichael's first composition, "Riverboat Shuffle," was recorded for Gennett by the Wolverines in May 1924. He soon felt the impact of the Beiderbecke horn and personality (so much so that he briefly tried to play the cornet). ...

His destiny was decided in Richmond in October 1927 when he recorded a peppy original called "Star Dust" (compounded soon afterward into the one-word title "Stardust"). Irving Mills, who had published "Riverboat Shuffle," signed him to a contract and printed the first sheet music run of the song as a piano piece. A Mills staff writer, Mitchell Parish, added the famous lyric—"Sometime I wonder why I spend the lonely night... "—in 1929. But early recordings persisted in treating it as a jazzy tune, and Carmichael resolved to leave the music business for investment banking after the market crash. Then, in 1931, Bing Crosby and Armstrong recorded their versions of "Stardust" as full blown love songs with the Parish lyric. Crosby

provided the romance. Armstrong gave it fire. From that point forward, Carmichael's path as a composer was clear, and few jazz artists from Ben Webster to Archie Shepp have dared tamper with the soul of "Stardust."

Today, both the song and its composer endure. "After careful study," musicologist Alec Wilder wrote in 1973, "I think it is unquestionable that Hoagy Carmichael has proven himself to be the most talented, inventive, sophisticated, and jazz-oriented of all the great craftsmen."

Hoagy passed away in 1981.

Hoagy and Bix - "In A Mist"

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Hoagy Carmichael, the famous songwriter, published two versions of his autobiography: the first was entitled The Stardust Road (1947) and the second was Sometimes I Wonder (1965) which he wrote in collaboration with Stephen Longstreet.

Both are nostalgic, and both depend upon an extraordinary recollection of decades-old dialogue — or perhaps in the case of Sometimes I Wonder, on collaborator Longstreet's novelistic talents.

Both books, of course, focus on Carmichael's early, close friendship with Bix Beiderbecke [1903-1931], the cornetist who along with other members of what came to be referred to as the “Austin High Gang” were among the first White Jazz musicians to take up the clarion call of Jazz masters such as Joe Oliver and Louis Armstrong who had brought the music “up the river from New Orleans” and performed it nightly during the mid-1920’s at the famous Lincoln Gardens in Chicago.

Aside from being the title of one of Bix’s few compositions, “In A Mist” might also serve as a reference to the cloud of alcohol that constantly surrounded Hoagy and Bix. The continual ingestion of booze was to kill Bix at an early age and make Hoagy into what some have referred to as a “mean drunk” in his later years.

Excerpt from THE  STARDUST  ROAD

“Christmas Eve in New Castle, with the little maimed tree, was somewhat different from the night I went up to Chicago to see Bix. It's the summer of 1923. We took two quarts of bathtub gin, a package of muggles, and headed for the black-and-tan joint where King Oliver's band was playing.

The king featured two trumpets, piano, a bass fiddle, and a clarinet. As 1 sat down to light my first muggle, Bix gave the sign to a big black fellow, playing second trumpet for Oliver, and he slashed into "Bugle Call Rag."

I dropped my cigarette and gulped my drink. Bix was on his feet, his eyes popping. For taking the first chorus was that second trumpet, Louis Armstrong. Louis was taking it fast. Bob Gillette slid off his chair and under the table. He was excitable that way.

"Why," I moaned, "why isn't everybody in the world here to hear that?" I meant it. Something as unutterably stirring as that deserved to be heard by the world.

Then the muggles took effect and my body got light. Every note Louis hit was perfection. I ran to the piano and took the place of Louis's wife. They swung into "Royal Garden Blues." I had never heard the tune before, but somehow I knew every note. I couldn't miss. I was floating in a strange deep-blue whirlpool of jazz.

It wasn't marijuana. The muggles and the gin were, in a way, stage props. It was the music. The music took me and had me and it made me right.

Louis Armstrong was Bix Beiderbecke's idol, and when we went out the next night to crash a …  dance where Bix was playing with the Wolverines, I learned that Bix was no imitation of Armstrong. The Wolverines sounded better to me than the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. Theirs was a stronger rhythm and the licks that Jimmy Hartwell, George Johnson, and Bix played were precise and beautiful.

Bix's breaks were not as wild as Armstrong's, but they were hot and he selected each note with musical care. He showed me that jazz could be musical and beautiful as well as hot. He showed me that tempo doesn't mean fast. His music affected me in a different way. Can't tell you how  — like licorice, you have to eat some.

The course of a wandering mind and an unreliable memory is erratic. The path of this piece is helplessly jagged from an absence of chronology.

However, there is a time. There is one time, a little fraction of an era, to which my mind reverts. I can remember that time clearly.

That is the spring of 1924.

I expect that Bix brings this about. He of the funny little mouth, the sad eyes that popped a little as if in surprise when those notes showered from his horn.

The spring of '24. Seems like the moon was always out that spring ... seems like the air of those nights was doubly laden with sweet smells. The air was thick and soft and pale purple. Grass was greener . . . moon was yellower.

Of course it helps to be young, and I was young.

Take a drink of whisky that tastes like kerosene in your mouth and a blowtorch

going down. "Best I ever tasted."

"Wonderful. Have another, Hoagy, and turn the record over."

The Wolverines had played a dance on the campus — one of ten dances I had booked for them — and Bix and I were lying in front of the phonograph early in the morning. We were playing the "Firebird" music of Stravinsky.

"Wonderful. Have another slug."

"What's wonderful?"

"Music."

"Sure. Whisky too."

"Guy used to be a lawyer."

"Who?"

"Stravinsky."

"Naw, Rimsky-Korsakov touted him offa the law."

"Touted him offa the torts, huh?"

"I dunno who he slept with."

"I said torts."

"Hell, I've slept with tarts myself."

"It's wonderful. Wonderful. Let's have another drink."

"Sure is. Turn the record over."

There was a long silence. "Why'nt you write music, Hoagy?" Bix asked softly.

"Naw, you're the one that writes the music. Every time you put that horn up to your mouth you write music."

"You write music, Hoagy," Bix said again like he hadn't heard me.

"You write yours different every time."

"What's wrong with that?" Bix asked. "I like it different. Like Rimsky-Korsakov. He heard this Stravinsky, told him to give up the law . . ."

"The torts ..."

"Leave that crummy joke alone," Bix said. "I got that crummy joke."

"Stravinsky study law?"

"Sure. Young guy like you. He studied law then Rimsy — ah, hell, you know who I mean — he told him to write music. So he wrote his. They dance to it."

"Dance to it?"

"Sure." Bix got up and did an entrechat, fell down and lay where he fell. I turned the record over. "Ballet," he said. "Hell, it's wonderful."

"Sure is," I said. "Give me another drink."

We lay there and listened. The music filled us with some terrible longing. Something, coupled with liquor, that was wonderfully moving; but it made us very close and it made us lonely too. With a feeling of release and a feeling of elation . . . and a feeling of longing too.

Silence. The record had come to a stop. A long silence and I was afraid to speak; afraid I'd spoil something. I can see Bix now, lying there, the music still playing in his head and me knowing it ... afraid to speak; afraid I might spoil a note.

Finally I spoke. A little shyly. "I'm learning to be a composer."

"Who's teaching you?" Bix asked idly, rolling his head on the floor so he could look at me.

"Everybody," I said. "Everybody's teaching me to be a composer. I learned to be a composer a long time ago. Every time I see a pretty girl I learn more how to be a composer. Every time I play a Bucktown dance I learn how to be a composer."

"Nothing wrong with you," Bix said, "except you're drunk."

            

“So’re you.”

"I never said I wasn't." He stopped. "Music kind of hits together in your head. Hurts you across the top of your nose if you can't blow it out . . ."

"But you can't blow it all out."

"You can try."

"Bix," I said.

"Yeah."

"Like what . . . kind of like with a girl . . . ?"

There was another long pause. Bix started up the phonograph and we lay there and listened to the music. Bix wasn't thinking about what I had asked him. He was feeling something, though, and I was, too. It was the same thing but we couldn't put the words to it. It disturbed us. Ours were a medley of moods.

"Kind of," he said, but he hadn't thought about it.

"Like going first to school when you are a little kid and being scared?"

He nodded, narrowing his eyes and looking at me.

"Like a quick storm comes up on the river . . . and a horn . . . Maybe Armstrong or Oliver, and the storm . . ." he said.

"Put on the next record, let's have a drink."

"Like playing a steam calliope on a riverboat with it hot as hell and the people dancing, all wet with sweat. Like blowing a horn," Bix said. "Like blowing a cornet. Like blowing a cornet."

"Bix," I said, "I'm gonna play a cornet."

"Sure. Everybody ought to play a cornet. Fun. Let's have a little one."

We had a little one and the sound washed over us as we lay there . . . two kids, kind of drunk, full of something and not able to put the words on it. But together, awfully together.

"Funny little horn," I said. "I'm gonna play me a horn."

It was nearing the Christmas holidays. Bix blew into Indianapolis and asked me to go down to Richmond with him to hear him make some records. He phoned me at my house and I hurried down to pick him up, in my new Ford, a Christmas present to myself.

When I found him he told me that he was on his way to make some records for Gennett, the same outfit that had made our record in the fall. I was delighted to go.

Remembering my own nerve-racking experience, I thought it would be doubly pleasant to be there with no worries of my own. I asked Bix who was going to be with him on the date.

"We're going to make some records in 'slow-drag' style," Bix said, "and I've got some guys who can really go. Tommy Dorsey, Howdy Quicksel, Don Murray, Paul Mertz, and Tommy Gargano. They are going to drive down from Detroit and meet me."

"Boy," I exclaimed, "that's really gonna be somethin'. What are you gonna make?"

"Hell, I don't know. Just make some up, I guess."

"How about me driving you over tonight?"

"That'll be swell ," Bix said. "The guys are bringing three quarts . . ."

"When do we leave?"

"Oh, three or four" Bix said, the idea of sleeping never entering his head. He looked at a clock that showed midnight. "Let's go over to the Ohio Theatre and jam awhile."

"Now you're talkin' . . ."

We got to the theater after closing and took our places at the grand pianos in the pit. There, all alone, we banged out chorus after chorus of "Royal Garden Blues."

And each interpretation was hotter than the one before. First one of us would play the bass chords while the other played hot licks and then we'd reverse the process. When we finally wore out it was time to leave.

We started for Richmond. And that night I reached greatness.

Bix is dead now, and you'll have to take my word for it, but on that night I hit the peak. We were halfway to Richmond, of a cold dark morning, when we stopped and for some reason Bix took out his horn.

He cut loose with a blast to warn the farmers and to start the dogs howling and I remembered that my own horn, long unused, was lying in the back of the car. I got it out.

Solemnly we exchanged A's.

"Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,'" Bix said.

He had hit one I knew pretty well and I was in my glory.

And then Bix was off. Clean wonderful banners of melody filled the air, carved the countryside. Split the still night. The trees and the ground and the sky made the tones so right.

I battled along to keep up a rhythmic lead while Bix laid it out for the tillers of the soil. He finally finished in one great blast of pyrotechnic improvisation, then took his horn down from his mouth.

"Hoagy," he said thoughtfully, "you weren't bad."

I had achieved greatness. We drove on into the night.

SOMETIMES I WONDER

Traveling with a big band is like being an inmate in a traveling zoo. Gags, ribs, girl trouble, money trouble, just trouble, bull sessions, card games, taking over the spare upper. Socks are traded, shirts stolen.

Chicago ran wide open. The Capone mob liked show folk. Whiteman, a powerful drinker in those days, had target practice with pistols, and beer drinking contests with some of the gang chiefs; at least, he often told the story.

In the Uptown Theatre in Chicago, where Whiteman's orchestra was playing, I stood in the wings and watched the boys go. Bing was often late. Between shows we gathered in the small basement rooms backstage and played hot jazz. Bix and Jimmy Dorsey were almost always in on these sessions. I also practiced what, for lack of a better word, I called my singing. I had a good deal of it to do in "Washboard" and the damn recording date was approaching.                                                                                                   

Bing [Crosby] came around while I was rehearsing once and stood there, hands in pockets, smoking a pipe.

"Mind if I glom on to the words, Hoagy?"

"No—but why?"

"I'd just like to learn it," Bing said, expressionless.

"What for?"

"It's such a swell number, chum, I'd like to learn it."

"Well, sure."

I didn't realize until later that Whiteman wanted some voice insurance in case I bombed. He wanted somebody there who could do it if I didn't. Bing was being kind to me. He didn't hint to me I might flop. They wanted to make a good record whether I was on it or not. Bing was always kind and calm, but he was more given to living it up before he became an American institution.

So I exercised my voice and observed life backstage. Crowds of jazz followers flocked to the stage entrance to see Bix. Many were musicians. They'd crowd around him and urge him to play.

"Come on Bix — just a few bars."

Bix didn't like meeting so many people. "It's driving me nuts. I try to remember them all, to keep them straight in my mind and not offend anyone."

"That's fame, Bix," I said.

"It's bad for my nerves. I get the heebie-jeebies."

There was always a bottle in his room. I would hear Whiteman ask, "How's Bix feeling this afternoon?"

Bix was Whiteman's pet. He loved Bix as if he had been his own boy. 

But the bottle stayed.

The side of "Washboard Blues" was made at the Victor studios, with "Among My Souvenirs" on the other side. I was so nervous I ruined a half-dozen master records and the best of a double-time trio arrangement. I had a lot of vocalizing to do and the piano solo I had done for the Gennett record was included in the arrangement. It was, for me, nerve-racking, jumping from one act to another. Whiteman remained calm.

"We'll get it all on this one."

I looked at Bing to step in for me. He looked away.

The control man said, "Recording — side six."

The opening notes began. Finally we got a master that was approved. When Leroy Shield came out of the control, I thought I saw a tear on his face. We were emotional slobs about music in those days.

I was a limp, wet, wreck — so relieved I was still alive and now silent.

Paul Whiteman was the biggest thing in bands. His father had been a classical musician who had a high school named after him in Denver. But Paul never practiced his violin properly, became a packing house worker (our early jobs crossed here), then a taxi driver. He drifted into popular music and soon had it organized.

As the King of jazz, he was the big name in the business, taking a fatherly interest in his men. He was a powerful liver, drinker, and worker. My being with him far exceeded anything that had happened to me musically so far. How much more it meant than the acquisition of an LL.B. college degree! College men would soon be peddling Hoover apples on street corners.

Any inner contest between Hoagy the musician and Hoagland the lawyer

never bothered me from that day on. I would be forced into mundane work

and might even have deep indigo periods of doubt and discouragement about my ability to succeed as a hot composer, but it was now certain that the basic pattern of my life and work was set. It was not a turning point, it was a break-through, all troops committed.

I left Chicago after the recording session in a burst of jubilation hardly comparable to anything I had known before.”

The following video tribute to Hoagy Carmichael and Bix Beiderbecke features Michel Legrand's arrangement of Bix's In A Mist with solos by Seldon Powell on tenor sax, Art Farmer on trumpet, Frank Rehak on trombone and Phil Woods on alto sax.