AUTUMN IN NEW YORK: VERNON DUKE'S BROADWAY [Ghostlight 7915583302]
We are always more than happy to welcome a celebration of Vernon Duke, who would have turned 101 last October. Autumn in New York: Vernon Duke's Broadway, from Klea Blackhurst, naturally enough brings us the familiar hits, along with some of Duke's little-known gems. What's more, she has unearthed some rarities that I have never heard publicly performed.

I, for one, am cheered for another chance to hear little-known songs like the playful "I Like the Likes of You" and the jaunty "Not a Care in the World." This last is from an ill-fated show that limped into town one stormy day in the winter of 1942, and expired the next. The show disappeared without a trace, but just listen to this song! Among the other surprises are four efforts from the brief-lived team of Duke & Dietz. (Duke had a tendency to wear out his lyricists, a chain that started with Harburg.) "Sailing at Midnight" is especially lovely. Two columns back, I welcomed Philip Chaffin's "A Warm Spring Night" for his inclusion of lost songs like "Sailing at Midnight" and the Schwartz Dietz "Haunted Heart" (which reappeared in my last column, on the studio cast album of Inside U.S.A.). Now, we have a second good rendition of "Sailing at Midnight"! "Poor As a Churchmouse," "Indefinable Charm" and "Dancing in the Streets" all sound far more interesting than you might imagine from looking at the sheet music.

This CD is good news for Duke fans, and show-tune fans as well, and I suppose I could leave it at that. However, and I hate to start this sentence with however, there are some quibbles. Ms. Blackhurst's voice is distinctive, I suppose you could say. Blackhurst is known for her renditions of Merman songs; this style works well for some numbers, but for other songs borders on being too much. This is a matter of taste, yes, and let us give the singer the benefit of the doubt in this area.

This disc also has a few damaging lapses, starting with start — "start" being the word accompanying the key musical note in "I Can't Get Started." It is hard to believe that any singer, making a CD-length study of Vernon Duke, could manage to sing the phrase "I can't get started" wrong every time; or maybe she has purposely chosen to sing it this way? While I generally avoid musicology in this column, the only way to describe what I'm talking about is to say that — in the key of G — she sings "can't get start-ed" as D D E G, instead of the D D E-flat G that Duke wrote. This E-flat, I'm afraid, is one of the major distinctions of the song! Ms. Blackhurst sings it wrong, four times no less. (The fourth time she gives us D E-flat E-flat G.) She gets the title phrase at the end of the song wrong, too, on both refrains, giving us a lazy B B B D instead of Duke's B C A E. If we're here to celebrate the composer, is it too much to ask that we sing his notes? On his most famous song, no less.

Arranger Michael Rice has otherwise done a good job, preserving the harmonies and countermelodies Duke wrote into his songs. (The accomplished Russell Bennett admitted that Duke was the hardest of the Broadway composers to orchestrate, due to the rich complexities of his harmonies.) But why let your singer get away with demonstrably wrong notes in the most noticeable places?

Even so, fans of good musical theatre writing of the second quarter of the twentieth century can't help but be pleased with "Autumn in New York." And let it be added that Blackhurst has provided a thoughtful and well-written liner note. Continued...