Literally hundreds of CDs have been released this year to celebrate the centennial of Duke Ellington’s birth — at least if you count several boxed-set retrospectives.
Yet the centenary of another formidable American composer — Hoagy Carmichael — has yielded merely one recorded tribute, from the sublime Carmichael interpreter Cory Jamison. Her newly issued “Here’s to Hoagy” disc is as haunting a Carmichael recording as one might hope to hear, but it’s clearly outnumbered by the avalanche of Ellington fare.
It seems inarguable that Carmichael and his devotees have been underserved. Not only did he pen the most frequently recorded of all popular songs, “Star Dust” (with lyrics later added by Mitchell Parish), but Carmichael also gave the art of jazz dozens of its most enduring works.
The list includes such seductive Carmichael melodies as “The Nearness of You,” “Baltimore Oriole,” “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” “Ole Buttermilk Sky” and “Skylark.” In these pieces, and others, Carmichael proved that the art of Tin Pan Alley songwriting would endure long after the deaths of Jerome Kern and George Gershwin, who practically invented the genre.
Carmichael’s songs have inspired a remarkable number of landmark performances, including Ray Charles’ gospel-tinged reading of “Georgia on My Mind” (1960), the Mills’ Brothers’ sweetly harmonized “Rockin’ Chair” (1934), Bob Hope and Shirley Ross’ nocturnal duet “Two Sleepy People” (1938), clarinetist Artie Shaw’s soaring “Star Dust” (1940) and Sarah Vaughan’s vocal transformation of “The Nearness of You” (1973).
Frank Sinatra alone created a formidable collection of Carmichael interpretations, from his radiant rendition of “The Lamplighter’s Serenade” (1942), made during his first recording session as soloist, to “Star Dust,” which he recorded on more than one occasion. The most provocative version was in 1962, when Sinatra offered only the verse, on his haunting “Sinatra & Strings” album (Reprise), as if to say the introductory passage of the song was so formidable that it deserved to stand alone.
So the question endures: Why have so few artists chosen to honor Carmichael on the centennial of his birth, on Monday? The answer, it turns out, is more elusive than one might think.
In recent years, a school of thought has emerged contending that white jazz figures, such as Carmichael, have been overlooked in favor of their black counterparts. This increasingly popular but intellectually dubious position radiates from the pages of Richard M. Sudhalter’s new book, “Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1914-1945” (Oxford University Press).
“Jazz, says the now-accepted canon, is black,” writes Sudhalter, objecting to this point of view. But, adds the author, “the music may not be so much a black American experience as an American experience, with various racial and ethnic groups playing indispensable and interlocking roles. . . . The canon, however, remains in place, and recognition continues to be denied.”
To those who hold Sudhalter’s revisionist view of the music, black musicians have enjoyed acclaim at the expense of whites. Applied to the Ellington and Carmichael centennials, this perspective suggests that Carmichael is overshadowed because he is white.
But that’s not the case at all. For starters, it’s critical to recognize that black culture is credited with primary authorship of jazz for good reason: Virtually every stylistic innovator in jazz has been black. More important, the very syntax of jazz — the blues scales, incantatory repetition, communal dialogue, use of swing and syncopation — all appear to arise from what we know of African antiquity.
Of the white artists who followed nobly in the wake of black originators, Carmichael stands out. But the reasons that America virtually has forgotten the man 100 years after his birth have nothing to do with race and everything to do with Carmichael himself and, more important, the nature of his music.
For if Ellington was the consummate extrovert, a man who lit up every room the moment he entered it, Carmichael was his opposite, a demure, soft-spoken, somewhat world-weary fellow who enjoyed far more commercial opportunities than Ellington ever did.
It was Carmichael, after all, who played himself (or characters loosely modeled on him) in several major Hollywood films, including “To Have and Have Not” (1944), “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) and “Young Man With a Horn” (1950). In each, Carmichael was the sage observer, tickling the keys softly while waxing philosophical on issues of life and love.
Like his screen persona, Carmichael’s music typically was muted, lyrical and soft as a summer’s breeze in Bloomington, Ind., where he was born. In gently rolling tunes such as “Lazy River” and “Can’t Get Indiana Off My Mind,” Carmichael summed up the winsome landscapes of his youth — or at least his idealized remembrance of it.
More than any major songwriter in 20th Century America, Carmichael wrote music about the Midwest — warm, friendly tunes that sneak up on a listener rather than sweep him off his feet.
Ellington’s music, by contrast, was every bit as big, bold and brassy as the man himself. If Carmichael epitomized the modest, down-home values of small towns in the Midwest, Ellington represented big cities of the East Coast in all their hyperkinetic energy, ambition and drive.
Moreover, Ellington was not content to write in the small song form that was Carmichael’s forte. Ellington reached for the stars, writing vast orchestral works such as the “New Orleans Suite” and “Black, Brown and Beige,” stage musicals such as “Jump for Joy” and “My People,” religious works such as the “Sacred Concerts” and film scores such as “Anatomy of a Murder” and “Paris Blues.”
This body of work, unparalleled in size and stature among American jazz composers, in combination with Ellington’s outsized personality, has given him a kind of immortality that Carmichael never achieved nor really sought.
To Carmichael, the reward for his work — like the music itself — is subtler, for his tunes permeate our musical culture as gracefully as his personality still does in his old movies. Carmichael’s melodies, in other words, continue to live, even though his face and his name nearly have been forgotten. Even author Sudhalter, who in his “Lost Chords” books tries mightily to heap credit on white artists at the expense of black, offers no serious discussion of Carmichael or his music in a book that runs 890 pages.
Just as Bix Beiderbecke was vastly overshadowed by Louis Armstrong, a more formidable personality and more ambitious musician of the ’20s, so has the memory of Carmichael been overwhelmed by the larger-than-life persona and immense musical accomplishments of Ellington.
But that doesn’t diminish the uniquely alluring melodies or uncommonly sophisticated harmonies of Carmichael’s songs. They will endure at least as long as Ellington’s fare — but with considerably less fanfare.
FOR THE RECORD, HERE’S WHERE TO FIND HOAGY
Here are a couple of ways to check out Hoagy Carmichael’s music on record:
“Here’s to Hoagy” (LML Music), Cory Jamison.
If the centennial of Hoagy Carmichael is going to inspire just one new recording, then this release deserves to be it. Chicagoan Cory Jamison is nearly an ideal interpreter of Carmichael’s music, her light, lyric soprano befitting the composer’s delicate touch with music and, occasionally, words. The illusion of nonchalance Jamison achieves in uptempo pieces and her straightforward delivery in ballads point to a singer who’s shrewd enough not to oversell the material. With such estimable players as trumpeters Scott Hall and Rob Parton, pianist Dan Stetzel and harmonica virtuoso Howard Levy, Jamison is in superb company. The liner notes include all the song lyrics, which are welcome. (The recording is available at www.LMLMUSIC.COM or at 1-888-856-9202.)
“The Classic Hoagy Carmichael” (Indiana Historical Society and Smithsonian Collection of Recordings).
By far the best compilation of classic Carmichael recordings, this three-CD boxed set — originally issued in 1988 — includes performances by Louis Armstrong, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Billie Holiday, Jo Stafford, Ella Fitzgerald, Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra and Carmichael himself. The accompanying booklet, a 64-page opus, is indispensable.
