Midnight Frolic, II

Note to self: always read the press release carefully before you actually write something! I’d written here a few days ago about the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra’s new record Midnight Frolic thinking the focus was Ziegfeld’s revues. Having received the CD in the mail, I discovered the subject of the album is more narrow, and conceivably more educational than that. The album concentrates on the music of the now-forgotten composer Louis A. Hirsch. (1881-1924) In his wonderfully thorough liner notes, PRO director Rick Benjamin posits Hirsch as a link between the age of Victor Herbert and George M. Cohan and that of Jerome Kern and George Gershwin. He makes a strong case for Hirsch’s brilliance, and goes a long way toward explaining his present obscurity. For one thing, he died young, in 1924, before the recording and broadcasting arts were around to make him much of a household word. (By contrast, Gershwin, who followed in Hirsch’s footsteps by adding blue notes, syncopation and other jazz elements into showtunes, and who also died young, passed away in 1937 — long enough for radio and so forth to spread his fame around). Hirsch was one of the top songwriters of his day, but in a time when sheet music was still the principle medium for dissemination. Also, I would add that Hirsch, who came from a fairly comfortable background and studied music in college both in the U.S. and Berlin, doesn’t fit into what was to become our favored mythical template for the Tin Pan Alley songwriter: the immigrant Rags-to-Riches story we associate with the Gershwins, Irving Berlin and others. But, as Benjamin points out, the years since the mid-twentieth century saw a sort of canonization in popular culture scholarship. Now, we are in a very exciting new phase where many other artists of that era re being discovered and brought to light. Benjamin is a prime mover in this effort — I feel a strong kinship with his instincts, and am genuinely grateful for the pioneering, educational work that he does.

Some interesting tidbits on Hirsch. He was a boyhood friend and neighbor of Jerome Kern’s. After his studies in Berlin, he came back to the U.S. and began song-plugging in the mid aughts. It seems he just drifted into show business. He began working for Gus Edwards music publishing company. Towards the end of the decade he was writing a lot of music for Lew Dockstaders’s minstrels. And from here it was just a short hop to many revues and book shows for the Shuberts (including Vera Violetta, the show that made a star of Jolson) and Ziegfeld until pneumonia stole him early at age 43.

Of the songs on the record, I recognized only “Love Nest” from the 1920 show Mary. And why do I know it? George Burns and Gracie Allen used it as their theme song. (Another example of the power of radio and television as compared with older forms of disseminating information. The other songs were just as popular as “Love Nest” in their own day — I simply never heard of them). I was also very charmed by the “Overture to the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915″, which contains some original Christmas music, making it very timely at the moment.

As always, Benjamin’s fidelity to the original arrangements is unwavering, and the singers he enlists to essay the tunes are mercifully without the usual tendency to drag in modern trends in vocal technique in a misguided attempt to make this already perfect music “more accessible” to listeners. Benjamin’s integrity is a beacon. He should be cloned and the clones should go into Congress. At any rate, I’ll be playing these tuneful artifacts throughout the holidays, I imagine. And I encourage you to do so as well!

Paragon Ragtime Orchestra

Like a Coke bottle striking the head of a Kalihari bushman, I took in my mail the other day and found that a letter of introduction and two new CDs had tumbled unannounced from the heavens. The package was a fan letter from someone of whom I was myself already a fan, Rick Benjamin, founder, director, conductor etc etc of the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra.

I’m sure I alarmed him when I told him the first time I saw (heard) his band perform I bust out bawling. I’m not insane, just an incurable sentimentalist. There is no stronger physical evidence of the metaphysical power of music to transcend time and space than the PRO. Essentially, Benjamin’s modus operandi is to play American popular music from around the turn of the last century, with absolute, complete, scientific fidelity to the original. Aided by his vast personal collections of pit arrangements, old cylinders and disks, historical notations and recollections, etc, he gets the music as close as humanly possible to the original, with no compromises or sops to contemporary taste. You can find hundreds of crappy nostalgia records out there containing half-assed versions of Joplin, Eubie Blake and so forth, but they’re always adulterated by weak-sister choices — this mistaken idea that you “have to” meet the contemporary audience halfway. That just waters down the whiskey, man! The proof that Benjamin’s approach is the right one is the stunning power of his music. It is an EXPERIENCE. It is like living Jack Finney’s Time and Again.

So, I want to plug these two new CDs of their’s.

The first is  Black Manhattan: Music of James Reese Europe, Will Marion Cook, and Members of the Legendary Clef Club. The injustice of James Reese Europe’s present obscurity exceeds even that of Bert Williams’. In the years just prior to the advent of jazz he was the undisputed leader of black American music, not only one of its principle shapers, but its ambassador to the broader (white) world. For many years he was the leader of the celebrated Clef Club, a kind of union and professional organization for African American musicians. The record here contains not only music composed by Europe, but by his Clef Club cohorts, such as Will Marion Cook, best known as the composer of Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cakewalk. See this blog in February for a birthday post on Europe himself. Or buy the disk now and read Benjamin’s extremely thorough liner notes.

Even more amazing is their new release You’re a Grand Old Rag: The Music of George M. Cohan. This disk delivers Cohan’s music as you’ve never heard it, mostly because later producers and arrangers have considered modern tastes “too sophisticated” for the Father of Broadway’s music as it was intended to be played. (And they consider themselves too sophisticated for Cohan in general — a universal error I would love to contribute to correcting.) Best of all they got this guy Collin Pritchard to do “Cohan’s” vocals — and he is a ringer — a ringer. He nails the Rhode Island accent like a native (something this native Rhode Islander considers  an extreme rarity), and speak-sings even better than Cagney. And for dessert, a very funny six minute speech by Cohan himself, delivered in 1938. He ends it with something I thought I would never hear with my own ears — Cohan’s age-old sign-off:  “My mother thanks you, my father thanks you…” And so I began the day by weeping in my kitchen. I take it back — I am insane!

To find out more about these variety artists and the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.