Have you ever wondered how folks in the music business and other aficionados of popular song spend a free Saturday afternoon? That’s right, they’re all at the Metropolitan Room listening to Lynn DiMenna sing the songs of Johnny Mercer. Her entertaining show on May 2nd, My Huckleberry Friend, A Centennial Salute to Johnny Mercer, marked her debut at the cabaret.
Lynn’s growing roster includes The Oak Room, The Waldorf Astoria, Danny’s Skylight Room, The Tavern on the Green, Town Hall, Birdland, and many more. On April 5th, she participated in a Big Band concert devoted to Mercer songs at Hofstra University; and on April 29th, was the vocalist in a tribute to Johnny Mercer at Fairfield University, a program which was free to the public.
From the first minute she walked on the stage, the gracious Ms.DiMenna’s warm and engaging personality pulled in the enthusiastic audience. More than a hundred of her closest friends, including Andrea Marcovicci, Daryl Sherman, Richard Skipper, and Julie Wilson, filled the intimate room.
The diverse collection, representing thirty years of Mercer’s extraordinary talent, ranged from the sexy Latin tempo of It Had Better Be Tonight to the easy sentimentality of Moon River, both written by Henry Mancini for The Pink Panther and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, respectively. Besides Mancini, more than a dozen of the one hundred and seventy of Johnny’s collaborators were offered – Arlen, Carmichael, Whiting, Kern, and Warren among them.
DiMenna’s versatility was much in evidence throughout This Time The Dream’s On Me, Skylark, Too Marvelous For Words, I’m Old Fashioned, and The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe. Linda Amiel Burns, who founded The Singing Experience, a series of performance workshops, more than thirty years ago, was the director. Lynn was ably accompanied by Steve Doyle on piano, Chris Higgins on bass, and David Meade on drums. Each one has most impressive credentials, having worked with many of the biggest names in cabaret, concert, and recording.
Steve Doyle, who is also a bass player and singer, joined Lynn for the clever Have You Got Any Castles, written by Mercer and Richard Whiting for the movie Varsity Show, and introduced by Dick Powell and Rosemary Lane; and Two Of a Kind, the music by Bobby Darin who later recorded the song with Mercer. Doyle also performed Laura, from the film of the same name, with music by David Raksin and the lyrics supplied by Johnny Mercer a year after the picture’s release.
Although Ms DiMenna performed a few numbers for which the prolific song writer did both words and music, notably Dream and Something’s Gotta Give, there was only one that came with a story attached. A woman from Youngstown, Ohio wrote to Mercer, suggesting a title for a song. He agreed, and gave her half of the credit after he wrote I Wanna Be Around and published it. The song later became a huge hit for Tony Bennett. If anyone should ask, the woman’s name is Sadie Zimmerstedt.
Lynn DiMenna is far too young to have ever sung with Johnny Mercer, a well respected singer in his own right, but one can easily imagine them doing duets of Hit the Road to Dreamland, Blues in the Night, and Come Rain or Come Shine. Still, her presentation reflected an impeccable taste in music, a generous sense of humor, and a voice that encouraged all the right emotions.
If you missed the show, or simply want to hear more of this fine singer, you can catch her on WVOF radio, where she appears regularly with Jeffrey C. Williams on At The Ritz, a program dedicated to the extraordinary range of talented people who inhabit the field of popular music. Or you can run down to the internet and buy her latest CD – Sweet & Swing, featuring a tasty slice of the American Song Book- Berlin, Ellington, Hammerstein, Rodgers, and a lot more.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Blossom Dearie, A Songwriter's Singer, Dead at 84
Blossom Dearie, a small woman with a remarkable little girl voice heard in New York and European cabarets for over fifty years, died in her Greenwich Village home on February 7, 2009. According to her manager, Donald Schaffer, she had been in failing health for several years.
Although her music roots were in jazz as well as popular song, her sound and style were uniquely hers – “…chic, sleek, and squeaky clean, and a voice in a million,” – said Leonard Feather in the Los Angeles Times.
While mostly known as a jazz vocalist, she found that description incomplete. “I don’t want to be called a jazz singer,” she told Feather. “I’m not a cult singer either, and after being called a legend, that sounds too much like an epitaph. I think of myself as a songwriter’s singer.”
Ms.Dearie was a perfectionist who would work on her accompaniments and presentation for months before going on tour. She sang one of the best renditions of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” ever heard, and said it took her ten years to learn. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead said that she had “a nose for witty and neglected material…and tends to lyricism and understatement. While paying proper respect to the songs, she sounds both vulnerable and wise.”
She was an artist with an uncommon ability to translate well-worn standards into new material. In 2001 Variety remarked that “her phrasing is distinctively supple, and the directness of her performance is always refreshing. She remains a genuinely pure and warming rarity in the club circuit.” Pianist Marian McPartland once asked how she managed to sing such perfect chords. Ms. Dearie responded: “By listening to everyone,” giving credit to Bill Evans as an influence; singers such as Frank Sinatra for harmonies; and Count Basie and Oscar Peterson for the rhythms.
Blossom Margrete Dearie was born in the hamlet of East Durham, N.Y., on April 28, 1924. Her father was of Scottish and Irish descent; her mother emigrated from Norway. She reportedly got her first name, Blossom, after a neighbor brought the Dearie family peach-tree blossoms to celebrate her birth. Ms. Dearie began taking piano lessons when she was five, and studied classical music into her teens. She started to listen to jazz when she played in her high school dance band. Early influences included Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, and Martha Tilton, who sang with the Benny Goodman band.
She moved down to New York City in the mid 1940’s to pursue a music career. Within a few years, she had become part of the jazz scene, hanging out with Miles Davis, his arranger Gil Evans, saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and singer Dave Lambert. “I learned a lot from those fellows, really,” she said. “They were a very important part of my early musical education.” Ms. Dearie joined Woody Herman’s close harmony group the Blue Flames, who appeared with his big band. Soon afterwards she sang with Alvino Rey’s orchestra as a member of his vocal group, the Blue Reys. In 1952, while working at the Chantilly Club in Greenwich Village, Dearie met Nicole Barclay, who with her husband owned a record company. The Barclays suggested that it might be a good time to go to Paris as American jazz was the rage. She moved to France and after learning French at Berlitz, formed her own vocal group, the Blue Stars. It was there that she met the Belgian flautist and saxophonist Bobby Jaspar to whom she was briefly married.
Ms. Dearie wrote many of the Blue Stars’ arrangements, including a version of George Shearing’s “Lullaby of Birdland” with a French lyric added. It scored a considerable hit in France and brought her to the attention of jazz impresario Norman Granz, who signed her to his Verve record label. She returned to the United States and with her six Verve albums, recorded between 1956 and 1960 the characteristic Blossom Dearie style emerged.
In the studio Dearie was brisk and precise, aiming to make an entire album of twelve songs in six hours, helped by the engineering talents of Tom Nola, who was particularly successful in making the most of her delicate voice. She remembered: “We would talk about tempos and the arrangements for a few minutes, then I would count to four and away we would go.” Ms. Dearie once told Tony Vellela of the Christian Science Monitor, “I choose the material that I like. The music has to be of a certain standard. If the music is no good, I’m not interested in the song.”
During her long career, she made more than twenty albums, recording over three hundred songs, some of which she wrote. Her best known and most loved recordings are songs by Dave Frishberg, Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Cole Porter and Michel Legrand. It was Legrand’s “Once Upon a Summertime” for which she commissioned Johnny Mercer’s timeless lyrics to go with the memorable melody. Mercer also supplied the words for two of Dearie’s own compositions “I’m Shadowing You” and “My New Celebrity Is You,” the last piece he wrote before his death in 1976.
Beginning with her performances opposite Miles Davis at the Village Vanguard in the 1950’s, she played numerous nightclubs in New York including Trudy Heller’s, the Versailles, the Blue Angel, and Michael’s Pub. In the 1960’s she appeared regularly in London at Ronnie Scott’s. A decade later she performed at Carnegie Hall with Joe Williams and Anita O’Day. The Ballroom, Danny’s Skylight Room, and Pizza on the Park in London, were her regular venues over the past twenty years.
Ms.Dearie walked among giants in the early days of her career – Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, and Sarah Vaughan among them, and held her own. She was best known for qualities not valued in pop singers anymore. Blossom Dearie conveyed more feeling in just a few lines than all the high volume winners on American Idol and the Grammy’s combined.
Although her music roots were in jazz as well as popular song, her sound and style were uniquely hers – “…chic, sleek, and squeaky clean, and a voice in a million,” – said Leonard Feather in the Los Angeles Times.
While mostly known as a jazz vocalist, she found that description incomplete. “I don’t want to be called a jazz singer,” she told Feather. “I’m not a cult singer either, and after being called a legend, that sounds too much like an epitaph. I think of myself as a songwriter’s singer.”
Ms.Dearie was a perfectionist who would work on her accompaniments and presentation for months before going on tour. She sang one of the best renditions of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” ever heard, and said it took her ten years to learn. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead said that she had “a nose for witty and neglected material…and tends to lyricism and understatement. While paying proper respect to the songs, she sounds both vulnerable and wise.”
She was an artist with an uncommon ability to translate well-worn standards into new material. In 2001 Variety remarked that “her phrasing is distinctively supple, and the directness of her performance is always refreshing. She remains a genuinely pure and warming rarity in the club circuit.” Pianist Marian McPartland once asked how she managed to sing such perfect chords. Ms. Dearie responded: “By listening to everyone,” giving credit to Bill Evans as an influence; singers such as Frank Sinatra for harmonies; and Count Basie and Oscar Peterson for the rhythms.
Blossom Margrete Dearie was born in the hamlet of East Durham, N.Y., on April 28, 1924. Her father was of Scottish and Irish descent; her mother emigrated from Norway. She reportedly got her first name, Blossom, after a neighbor brought the Dearie family peach-tree blossoms to celebrate her birth. Ms. Dearie began taking piano lessons when she was five, and studied classical music into her teens. She started to listen to jazz when she played in her high school dance band. Early influences included Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, and Martha Tilton, who sang with the Benny Goodman band.
She moved down to New York City in the mid 1940’s to pursue a music career. Within a few years, she had become part of the jazz scene, hanging out with Miles Davis, his arranger Gil Evans, saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and singer Dave Lambert. “I learned a lot from those fellows, really,” she said. “They were a very important part of my early musical education.” Ms. Dearie joined Woody Herman’s close harmony group the Blue Flames, who appeared with his big band. Soon afterwards she sang with Alvino Rey’s orchestra as a member of his vocal group, the Blue Reys. In 1952, while working at the Chantilly Club in Greenwich Village, Dearie met Nicole Barclay, who with her husband owned a record company. The Barclays suggested that it might be a good time to go to Paris as American jazz was the rage. She moved to France and after learning French at Berlitz, formed her own vocal group, the Blue Stars. It was there that she met the Belgian flautist and saxophonist Bobby Jaspar to whom she was briefly married.
Ms. Dearie wrote many of the Blue Stars’ arrangements, including a version of George Shearing’s “Lullaby of Birdland” with a French lyric added. It scored a considerable hit in France and brought her to the attention of jazz impresario Norman Granz, who signed her to his Verve record label. She returned to the United States and with her six Verve albums, recorded between 1956 and 1960 the characteristic Blossom Dearie style emerged.
In the studio Dearie was brisk and precise, aiming to make an entire album of twelve songs in six hours, helped by the engineering talents of Tom Nola, who was particularly successful in making the most of her delicate voice. She remembered: “We would talk about tempos and the arrangements for a few minutes, then I would count to four and away we would go.” Ms. Dearie once told Tony Vellela of the Christian Science Monitor, “I choose the material that I like. The music has to be of a certain standard. If the music is no good, I’m not interested in the song.”
During her long career, she made more than twenty albums, recording over three hundred songs, some of which she wrote. Her best known and most loved recordings are songs by Dave Frishberg, Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Cole Porter and Michel Legrand. It was Legrand’s “Once Upon a Summertime” for which she commissioned Johnny Mercer’s timeless lyrics to go with the memorable melody. Mercer also supplied the words for two of Dearie’s own compositions “I’m Shadowing You” and “My New Celebrity Is You,” the last piece he wrote before his death in 1976.
Beginning with her performances opposite Miles Davis at the Village Vanguard in the 1950’s, she played numerous nightclubs in New York including Trudy Heller’s, the Versailles, the Blue Angel, and Michael’s Pub. In the 1960’s she appeared regularly in London at Ronnie Scott’s. A decade later she performed at Carnegie Hall with Joe Williams and Anita O’Day. The Ballroom, Danny’s Skylight Room, and Pizza on the Park in London, were her regular venues over the past twenty years.
Ms.Dearie walked among giants in the early days of her career – Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, and Sarah Vaughan among them, and held her own. She was best known for qualities not valued in pop singers anymore. Blossom Dearie conveyed more feeling in just a few lines than all the high volume winners on American Idol and the Grammy’s combined.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
What I've Been Up To & Where I'm Going
My first posting. I'm about to enter Wonderland - writing about the songs I love, and the men and women who wrote them! Much of my published work is available in the archives of the New York Sheet Music Society, the subjects: Blossom Dearie, Johnny Mercer, Jo Stafford, Lynn DiMenna, Sharon Paige, etc. Currently I'm researching stories about Frank Loesser and Margaret Whiting. I'll be writing about songwriters, some well known, others not, and the artists, past and present, who interpreted their work. Looking forward to your reactions and ideas for future postings.
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