That pavilion in the rain

I've written before about jazz writer and lyricist Gene Lees, on the occasion of his death almost two years ago, but as I sat at the piano tonight, celebrating the strides--minor, but satisfying--I've made in the year I've been taking piano lessons as an adult--he came to mind. From the stack of fakebook pages I've accumulated over the past year I'd plucked "Early Autumn"--Johnny Mercer lyrics over music by Ralph Burns and Woody Herman--with its line about the "dance pavilion in the rain," and it brought to mind Lees's unforgettable essay of the same name name.

I quoted from that essay in my obituary post, but its sharply defined nostalgia, which it unquestionably earns, through serious analysis of all the elements that went into the big band world whose loss it's lamenting, seems worth sharing again:

On warm summer nights in that epoch between the wars and before air conditioning, the doors and wide wooden shutters would be open, and the music would drift out of the pavilion over the converging crowds of excited young people, through the parking lot glistening with cars, through the trees, and over the lake—or the river, or the sea. Sometimes Japanese lanterns hung in the trees, like moons caught in the branches, and sometimes little boys too hung there, observing the general excitement and sharing the sense of an event. And the visit of one of the big bands was indeed an event.

Which leads me back to Mercer's lyrics. By 1949, when Mercer wrote "Early Autumn," the big band era was over, even if many bands remained on the road and, presumably, told themselves that they were just struggling through a minor slump. The dance pavilions were, if not "all shuttered down," as Mercer has it, at least headed that way. Mercer's lyrics are written as a plaint from a lover looking back on what he's lost, and pleading for a future--"Darling, if you care, / please let me know. / I'll meet you anywhere. / I miss you so."--but the song overall can be read as an elegy for an era. "A town grown lonely," as streetcars give way to private cars, and nights out give way to nights in, warmed by television and cooled by air conditioning.

In this strange spring of 2012--which feels, today, like nothing so much as a gentle early autumn--we're living in the apotheosis of the era that the postwar boom was ushering in, with me sitting in my house and typing these words to all of you in your houses. It's a good thing, what we have, if we use it well, but so was what was being lost as Mercer was writing, a loss that he, with his tendency to melancholy, saw earlier than most. "I'll meet you anywhere," his speaker vows, but we don't ever learn what the answer was, or if there was ever any answer but silence, broken only by the sound of the rain.

In reality, the "anywhere" we'll meet is bound to be the future, and while it can't make good the losses of the past, perhaps its offerings will at least mitigate them. Noel Coward offers an antidote of sorts to the melancholy of "Early Autumn"--while no less aware of loss--in "Sail Away," from 1961:

A different sky,
New worlds to gaze upon,
The strange enchantment of an unfamiliar shore,
One more goodbye,
One more illusion gone,
Just cut your losses,
And begin once more.

If you're prone to nostalgia--especially for eras you weren't here to live through--I recommend you get a piano. If you're prone to nostalgia--especially for eras you weren't here to live through--I recommend you stay far away from pianos. I trust that you all are smart enough to take your pick.

R. I. P. Gene Lees (1928-2010)

Yesterday, Terry Teachout passed on the sad news of the death of songwriter Gene Lees. Lees wrote the unforgettable English-language lyrics to Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Corcovado"--

Quiet thoughts and quiet dreams, quiet walks by quiet streams,
and a window that looks out on the mountains and the sea, oh how lovely.

--which alone would be a sufficient monument for any mortal. But Lees was at least as well known as a prose writer, and if you've not read his writings on jazz, you have a treat in store.

A good place to start is with Singers and the Song II, a collection of pieces from his Jazzletter newsletter. Along with essays on Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Yip Harburg, and many more, it includes a profile of Johnny Mercer that's one of the finest pieces of biographical writing about an artist I've ever encountered, one that makes both the art and the man come to life:

I know two or three people who despised Johnny Mercer. For others, it wasn't that simple. . . . John was as generous in his praise of good songwriters as he was quietly critical of the shallower practitioners of the craft. As for me, I liked John. A lot. And we got along, perhaps because we shared the lyricist's paranoia, which John once perfectly expressed in a single line: "You get tired of being everybody's lyric boy." He was referring to all the lead sheets and demo tapes sent to you by musicians who think lyrics are dashed off in a moment from ideas picked casually out of the air. Music, as they see it, is the important art. Everybody uses words, don't they?

Set alongside sharp analyses of Mercer's lyrics--including a study of consonance in "I Thought About You" that is revelatory--Lees' descriptions of Mercer's frequent, alcohol-fueled descents into pointedly cruel verbal abuse are heartbreaking, making us ache for this man of such great talent and so little happiness. The portrait in Singers and the Song II actually outdoes Lees' later biography of Mercer, its brevity sharpening its punch.

The most memorable piece in Singers and the Song II, however, is "Pavilion in the Rain," a lyrical, detailed reconstruction and analysis of the big band era. The opening paragraph gives a sense of the tone:

On warm summer nights in that epoch between the wars and before air conditioning, the doors and wide wooden shutters would be open, and the music would drift out of the pavilion over the converging crowds of excited young people, through the parking lot glistening with cars, through the trees, and over the lake—or the river, or the sea. Sometimes Japanese lanterns hung in the trees, like moons caught in the branches, and sometimes little boys too hung there, observing the general excitement and sharing the sense of an event. And the visit of one of the big bands was indeed an event.

The note of wistfulness may seem too much at first, but by the time Lees has finished explaining the rise and fall of the big bands--having brought in copyright law, urban rail networks, remote broadcast technology, taxation, unionization, and more--it is clear what we had, temporarily, how lucky we were to have it, and how much we've lost. Lees earns that note of loss.

Terry Teachout, who knew Lees, has more at About Last Night, plus links to obituaries and some more extensive reflections. Raise a glass to Lees tonight, and if you're enjoying a quiet night of quiet stars, be grateful.