By Steven Suskin COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS [DRG 91479]
It is beside the point to note that Cook sings well; of course she sings well! And it doesn't matter how many years she has been singing, either. These songs — at least some of them — are presumably what she was singing back as a Depression-era kid in Atlanta, before she ever heard of Gershwin or Arlen or Bernstein or Sondheim. Sweet music, charming and affectionate. The disc alternates between olde time traditional Christmas songs and holiday tunes of the Tin Pan Alley variety.
Cook is joined by her longtime musical director Wally Harper, who provided the arrangements as well. Larry Blank did the warmly cozy orchestrations. We've heard these songs before, yes, but Harper and Blank give them a new face without jarring them. The livelier numbers, especially, mix a sense of the occasion with a glint of humor. They take a lot of those old chestnuts roasting over the open fire and made them sound like — well, new chestnuts. (Is it only me, or is the main phrase of "The Christmas Song" — well sung here, by the way — lifted from the final movements of Mahler's Ninth?)
The second track of the album is typical of the arrangements. It begins, deceptively, with Leroy Anderson sleigh bells — ah, you think, here come the cliches — but instead delivers a brisk holiday jaunt of a "Winter Wonderland." "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" is great fun; the song itself is sprightly, but people don't always capture the spirit (which is not of the Yuletide, exactly, coming from Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn.) The arrangement starts with a touch of those chestnuts on the open fire and bump into a bluesy sax solo before letting us catch on to the tune. The orchestration contrasts flutes (on the "let it snow" eighth notes) with the bluesy sax, mixing in a lazy trombone as well.
02 Nov 2003
Christmas albums are generally out of my field of interest. If Barbara Cook wants to make one, though, I am sure to listen. This season's offering from Ms. Cook is "Count Your Blessings," her eighth CD on the DRG label. It offers what we have grown to expect from the singer: A carefully assembled selection of songs perfectly performed, with Cook making it all sound deceptively easy and mighty comfortable. What's not to like?
The disc ends with — what else? — Barbara Cook singing Hugh Martin's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." This combination of very special song and very special singer, in itself, is enough to make you want to "Count Your Blessings."
AND OFF THE RECORD
John Kander and Fred Ebb have been collaborating since 1962, making them what they call "the longest-running composer-lyricist partnership in Broadway history." (Comden and Green were a Broadway songwriting team for considerably longer, although neither wrote music. Schmidt and Jones have been collaborating since 1953, although with a considerably smaller output.)
Kander and Ebb have now collaborated on "Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz" [Faber and Faber]. Greg Lawrence, biographer of Jerome Robbins, is given "as told to credit," although the book is written in the form of a dialogue (with occasional song lyrics). It is bright and breezily engaging, with a number of highly flavorful passages along the way. The overall effect is of sitting with the boys in the den of Ebb's Central Park West apartment. When I finished the book — I got through it in one day — I wanted to head cross town for more.
Unlike so many of these "and then I wrote" books, Kander and Ebb are candid and remarkably unbiased about their work. They seem to have always, mostly, enjoyed themselves. While writing the shows, at least; once the songs reached the hands of producers and directors and performers, things sometimes went astray, as entertainingly related. Not surprisingly, disasters make more interesting anecdotes than successes.
Walking among their yesterdays, one stumbles upon what might be a surprising fact. Kander has written 12 produced Broadway musicals, Ebb 11. Of these, only one — Cabaret -- was a commercial hit. (I have always thought that the original Chicago was marginally successful, but Kander tells us that it never paid back.) All the others posted deficits, mostly of the enormous variety; two of the shows broke then-existing all-time red ink records.
Kander and Ebb are remarkably non-defensive about this. Some of their shows they remember lovingly, others they seem not to have especially liked. (On Woman of the Year. Kander: "That was another show where I don't think our work was so great. It's been a lesson to me that there are shows we have done which I think were really good but received no attention at all — I mean, major flops — and then suddenly we get a Tony Award for a show that is just professional." Ebb: "We were up against a couple of shows that year that I had never even heard of.")
This, I must say, is a pretty accurate reading of the situation. But I wonder how many of Kander and Ebb's contemporaries would make such a statement? The boys are similarly underenthused about Zorba, while they are sincere in their admiration for the 35-performance flop 70, Girls, 70. Kander tells us that it is one of the few shows he went to night after night, and I know exactly what he means; I myself went in "every night at seven plus the two matinees" to watch "Coffee in a Cardboard Cup," "Broadway, My Street" and "Yes." (I was a teenager selling orange drink next door at the Shubert, and thus able to slip into the Broadhurst.) 70, Girls was clunky and unworkable, yes, but lovably endearing.
The fact of commercial success or failure is somewhat beside the point, in terms of quality. But it made an enormous difference at the time, especially to those involved. The phenomenally successful revival of Chicago made Kander and Ebb wealthy beyond bounds, and good for them; but that was 30-odd years after they started writing musicals. While money is only obliquely addressed, Ebb makes a number of comments along the way about how little they earned from this or that. And even with the success of the revivals of Chicago and Cabaret, they currently have three unproduced musicals sitting around for the lack of 25 million.
Kander and Ebb are philosophical up to a point, that is; they are clearly still hurting from the fate of The Rink and Steel Pier. (They consider "Don't 'Ah, Ma' Me," from the former, one of their best songs, and devote more than five of the book's 230 pages to it. I can't say that I agree with their appraisal of the show or the song.) They are also angry and annoyed by their treatment on the film of Chicago, not only by the lack of respect for their work — they were originally billed in twenty-eighth position on the end credit — but by the dollars. Ebb: "We scarcely have any money participation in the movie." Kander: "They have to pay us for the new song, though practically nothing." In the same breath, they point out that Janet Jackson was paid $300,000 to write a new song for the film — a song that they, personally, don't value too highly.
There is also an enlightening discussion of the song "New York, New York." "The Theme from New York, New York," that is; they changed the title due to a threatened lawsuit from the authors of that other song called "New York, New York." (Surprising, no?) After attracting little attention in the film for which it was written, the greatest star of them all recorded "The Theme from New York, New York" and turned it into an all-time chart topper. Messing up the melody, making up his own words when he couldn't remember the lyricist's. How do songwriters feel when their song becomes so famous (and so personally lucrative) that everyone sings it, only they don't sing it the way it was written? Kander and Ebb tell you.
These pages are filled with a whole lot of marvelous stuff, only some of it related to the musicals of Kander and Ebb. Kander talks about his pit musician days, relating a story about a summer stock Kismet with a blacklisted Zero Mostel chewing the scenery as the Wazir. A gag of Zero's was so funny that over the course of a week it grew from fifteen seconds into a ten minute ad-lib, at which point star Bill Johnson (as Hajj) literally knocked Zero thudding to the stage floor. End of ad-lib. Ebb has his own Zero story, about the time he signed up for doorman duty during an elevator strike. Zero circled Ebb's name and wrote, "when he works, I'll work." My favorite quote of the book, from Onna White to dance arranger Kander when they were working on what turned out to be the Devil's Island ballet in Irma La Douce: "John, can you give us a little penguin music?"
"Colored Lights" contains an introduction by Liza Minnelli and a foreword by Harold Prince, both of whom play large parts in the proceedings. What it doesn't contain is an index, which is unforgivable. But I'll forgive them. This is one swell book.
—Steven Suskin, author of the "Broadway Yearbook" series, "Show Tunes," and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He can be reached by e-mail at Ssuskin@aol.com(mailto:Ssuskin@aol.com).
