By Steven Suskin
07 Mar 1999
Over the years, there have been any number of Broadway cast albums of non-musicals, featuring entire plays, stretches of dialogue, specially composed incidental music, or comedy sketches. Now we have what appears to be the first album consisting solely of pre-existing recordings used as background music in a play. This has become common practice in Hollywood, and an increasingly profitable one; but the market for Broadway drama is somewhat smaller than that for something like "Sleepless in Seattle." You almost wonder who they think would buy such an album. Listening to "Side Man,: Jazz Classics from the Broadway Play," though, you think maybe this is not such a bad idea.
Side Man, of course, is Warren Leight's play at the Golden, which is still perhaps the best of the season (although stiff competition is coming between now and the Tonys). Leight and director Michael Mayer carefully assembled off-stage music to accompany their play, and it turns out these cuts hold up very well as a trumpet solo-filled jazz album.
Leight based the play on his own childhood, and we quickly learn that the "Clifford Brown" who is so central to the plot was, in fact, quite a horn player. He is represented on five of the album's ten tracks, including a live 1956 performance of "A Night in Tunisia," which provides Side Man's most memorable scene. Also included are performances by Miles Davis, Gene Krupa, and Duke Ellington (with Ella Fitzgerald on the vocal). The album has been produced by Jay Harris, the lead producer of the play, and the vintage tracks sound wonderful.
I've seen Side Man three times now, and there's one thing I don't quite understand: Early on someone asks for the stunning Kern Hammerstein song "Why Was I Born?", which could indeed be the theme of the whole play. This comes in the context of a joke confusing Kern with Cahn. (Sammy? Or is it Gus Kahn?) We hear the joke twice, but we never do get to the song. At any rate, I wholeheartedly recommend Side Man as theatre and this disc as jazz-around-the-house.
