MIDNIGHT MEDLEY -- Song of the Week, Mark Steyn

[Snowden]

MIDNIGHT MEDLEY

Monday, 28 April 2008

Song of the Week #96
"Round Midnight" by Thelonious Monk, Cootie Williams and Bernie Hanighen
and "Midnight Sun" by Lionel Hampton, Sonny Burke and Johnny Mercer

I said last week that we were in a logjam of one-hit wonder centenaries here at the SteynOnline Song of the Week, and so it continues. After eden ahbez and "Nature Boy" and Frank Perkins and "Stars Fell On Alabama", we now offer a brace of centenaries: a first-class musician and a solid second-tier songwriter. Lionel Hampton was born in Louisville, Kentucky on April 20th 1908 and Bernie Hanighen was born in Omaha, Nebraska on April 27th 1908. They never wrote anything together but it seems appropriate to link them because each is partially responsible for two of the best standards created from jazz instrumentals. Sooner or later someone staples words to just about every popular jazz instrumental. But, from Duke Ellington's "Take The A Train" to Bill Evans' "Waltz For Debby", they somehow never quite convince you they're anything other than instrumental pieces to which a lyric has been appended. They fail the test of that marvelous Encyclopedia Britannica definition that Ira Gershwin liked to quote:

SONG is the joint art of words and music, two arts under emotional pressure coalescing into a third.

With lyricized instrumentals, they rarely "coalesce" in the way that, say, "Ol' Man River" or "Over The Rainbow" do. It's like putting words to Beethoven's Fifth: You can do it but the lyric winds up riding the tune like a jockey, rather than achieving, as the Britannica puts it,the status of a third, joint art. Still, there are a handful of exceptions, and we're celebrating two of them this week. With his fellow centenarian Red Norvo, Lionel Hampton was one of the pioneering jazz vibraphonists, but he also has to his name one classy standard song: "Midnight Sun". On the other hand, songwriting was what Bernie Hanighen did - that is, when he wasn't serving as A&R man and Billie Holiday's record producer - so he has a few more to his name, including that fine Billie ballad "When A Woman Loves A Man". But he co-wrote "Round Midnight", which paired with "Midnight Sun" makes for a terrific centenary midnight medley.

Hanighen was a graduate of Harvard and its Hasty Pudding revues and he could do a bit of this and a bit of that: he'd had a college jazz band and he played a hot fiddle. In the early Thirties, looking to break into the music business in New York, he ran into a kindred spirit: Johnny Mercer. Both men liked jazz and were regulars at the Onyx Club and the Famous Door and other celebrated speakeasies in the twilight of prohibition. Swing bands and jazz cats played Tin Pan Alley tunes but most Tin Pan Alleymen, while appreciative of the royalties, weren't always keen on what the hipsters were doing with their songs. Hanighen and Mercer were different. They had a genuine feeling for jazz and they liked to compose jazz-inflected songs. "When A Woman Loves A Man" was a torch ballad they wrote with Gordon Jenkins (who went on to become one of the indispensable arrangers in Sinatra's Golden Age at Capitol). But what they really liked to write was swingy tunes with cute lyrics: "Calling All Squares", "The Blues Sneaked In Every Time", "The Weekend Of A Private Secretary", "Show Your Linen, Miss Richardson". Hanighen wrote the music and Mercer the words, and, although the songs never did much, the boys had a lot of fun. One couplet sums up their oeuvre and its fascination with the comic potential of jazz. It's from "The Dixieland Band", whose eponymous members are thrown off by a wild trumpeter:

He hit a figure that was off the chord
Apoplexy got 'em and they went to the Lord...

Their biggest hit together is the all-time greatest bird song, "Bob White", an ornithological catalogue but with the inevitable jazz twist:

I was talkin' to the whippoorwill
He says you got a corny trill
Bob White!
Whatcha gonna swing tonight?

But Mercer was already on his way to one of the most spectacular careers in American song, and every composer wanted him: Harry Warren, Hoagy Carmichael, Jimmy Van Heusen... The collaboration with Bernie faded away and by the time Hanighen showed up on Broadway in 1946 on the musical Lute Song, starring Mary Martin and Yul Brynner, something rather strange had happened: The composer had become a lyricist; the man who'd put tunes to Johnny Mercer's words was now putting words to Raymond Scott's tunes.

At which point enter Thelonious Monk - or, at any rate, his composition. According to whose version you go with, Monk wrote the music for "Round Midnight" either under the title "Grand Finale" as a teen genius in the mid-Thirties or under the title "Round About Midnight" as a jobbing pianist in New York in the early Forties. But at some point along the way Cootie Williams, a trumpeter for Duke Ellington who'd quit to lead his own band, heard the tune and, as Monk told it, in 1944 he offered the pianist a $300 advance for the theme. In return, the Williams band would record it and Cootie would publish it and give himself a share of the writing credits. Very foolishly, Monk took the deal. And to make matters worse, according to his son, Cootie got all the dough. "In those days," writes his biographer Leslie Gourse, "the record companies simply registered the performer as the composer and shared in the revenues or royalties from the songs."

This is nonsense. "Those days" - 1944 - were the golden age not just of songwriting but of songwriter status, when performers rarely if ever wrote their own material, and the record companies were well used to printing the names Berlin or Porter or Mercer or Hanighen or a thousand lesser names on the labels. If a fellow got suckered in a rights deal in 1944, it wasn't because of the prevailing mores of the industry so much as his own stupidity. "Round Midnight" went on to become the most recorded and performed standard by a jazz musician, and if Cootie Williams never contributed a note, he was one very lucky guy. What we do know for sure is that, notwithstanding Cootie cutting in on the music, the lyric is all the work of Bernie Hanighen. By the mid-Forties, the instrumental was already known as "Round About Midnight", which presumably meant nothing more than that the tune has a general late-night feel. Hanighen trimmed the title but made it one very vivid vignette:

It begins to tell,
Round Midnight
Round Midnight
I do pretty well
Till after sundown
Suppertime I'm feelin' sad
But it really gets bad
Round Midnight...

It's a magnificent tune, haunting and intense, melancholy without being maudlin, and full of interesting descents that a full-time songwriter might have eschewed. Hanighen's contribution was to impose song form on it - deciding where to place the title, and how to vindicate it. The song seems to be getting bluer as the tune progresses from "sundown" through "suppertime" and on to midnight. Heard instrumentally, by Monk or Dizzy Gillespie or Miles Davis, the main theme is very strong, but Hanighen finds a narrative logic in it, and his middle section ends with a line that the gal singers of the Fifties - June Christy, Julie London - . fell in love with:

Darling, I need you
Lately I find
You're out of my heart
And I'm out of my mind...

I love singing "Round Midnight", even though I always feel vaguely guilty that I'm never as blue as the singer ought to be. Bernie Hanighen was a player in the music industry for decades but never before or after did he write a lyric as powerful as this one. Where did it come from? Just a few tricks of the trade he picked up kicking songs around with Johnny Mercer all those years? Nobody knows. But, while "Bob White" and "The Air-Minded Executive" are swell tunes, "Round Midnight" earns Hanighen a place as one of the all-time great one-hit lyricists.

Meanwhile, what of his old songwriting partner? Well, one day in 1954 Johnny Mercer was driving from Palm Springs to Hollywood when he heard an instrumental that caught his fancy. So he pulled into a gas station and called the radio station. He told them who he was and then asked if they'd mind playing the tune again. "I love it," he said. It was, in fact, already nine years old, written by Lionel Hampton and Sonny Burke around the same time Cootie Williams was first recording "Round Midnight". Burke went on to compose (with Peggy Lee) the songs for Disney's Lady And The Tramp, and it seems not unreasonable to assume that, with this instrumental, Hamp came up with the themes - the principal material sounds very vibes-like - and that Burke knitted them together in song form. At any rate, it was a popular number with Hamp's band by the late Forties, and, as Monk and co did with "Round Midnight", they gave it a name: "Midnight Sun".

So, when the disc-jockey played it a second time, Mercer knew the tune already had a title. Which, if you're sitting in your car on the Californiafreeway and figuring you'll write a lyric to pass the time, ought to be a big help. Except that the midnight sun is such a particular situation, it's hard to figure it'd be much use in a love song. That's not how Mercer saw it, though. "The first thing I thought of with 'Midnight Sun' was 'aurora borealis'," he said. "I heard it in the music. It fit the music. I thought, well, what rhymes with aurora borealis?" And, if you're on the freeway, you can't consult a rhyming dictionary. Nevertheless, from somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind, he worked out the answer:

Your lips were like a red and ruby chalice
Warmer than the summer night
The clouds were like an alabaster palace
Rising to a snowy height
Each star its own aurora borealis
Suddenly you held me tight
I could see the Midnight Sun...

For a long time, I used to blow hot and cold on "Midnight Sun". Even if the tune demands it, a three-way feminine rhyme - "meeting/bleating/greeting" - usually comes out sounding either dull or obtrusive or both, and Mercer's choices - "chalice/palace/borealis" - seemed like an exercise in contrivance. But Hamp's theme is so confidently beguiling, you want the lyric to work. And, as Mercer hints in the release, the ornate unreality is the point:

Was there such a night?
It's a thrill I still don't quite believe
But after you were gone
There was still some stardust on my sleeve...

"By the time I got to Los Angeles from Newport Beach," said Mercer, "I had that lyric finished, in my car. So then I called up to find out who published it and if they had a lyric, and would they be interested if they didn't. And they didn't and they were."

In his book The Poets Of Tin Pan Alley, Philip Furia makes an interesting observation:

In 'Midnight Sun', the oldest cliches of the Alley, appropriately it would seem, are pushed to baroque extremes: lips 'like a red and ruby chalice', clouds 'like an alabaster palace', and every star 'its own aurora borealis'. It's as if the lyric itself is a midnight sun, a last blaze of an Alley style extinguishing itself along with the Broadway stage and Hollywood studios its songs once had fueled.

Well, I don't know about that last bit. Mercer himself had plenty of hits ahead of him: "Satin Doll", "Moon River", "Days Of Wine And Roses". But it is striking that he wrote up Hamp's tune as a kind of hyper-pop song - traditional imagery pushed, as Furia says, to "baroque extremes". By contrast, for "Round Midnight", Bernie Hanighen used very ordinary rhymes - "tell/well", "sad/bad" - but rendered extraordinary by the tune they sit on. Two different approaches from two old colleagues writing up two jazz instrumentals. I never met Hanighen, but I found Lionel Hampton a lovely man, who loved songs and surely had more in him. But he also loved being a showman - there's a famous anecdote about him appearing on an aquacade double-bill with Louis Armstrong, who wowed the house, prompting Hamp to climax his set by getting the drummer to dive into the pool. I've never checked out the story, not so much because I'd be disappointed if it never happened but because I have fond hopes that rather than the drummer taking a dive it was the entire horn section. But, as I said, he was savvy about songs, and, given that he and Mercer had both worked for Benny Goodman, you'd think there must have been some other half-formed doodles of his Johnny could have written up. But no, there's just a "Midnight Sun", the obverse of Monk's moody "Midnight". Whatever your midnight mood is, one of the two is sure to fit:

Mem'ries always start
Round Midnight
Haven't got the heart
To stand those mem'ries
When my heart is still with you
And old midnight knows it, too...

Old midnight always does.

SteynOnline - MIDNIGHT MEDLEY