Straighten Up and Fly Right by Will Friedwald

Author:Will Friedwald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

What was Jenkins’s approach to working with Cole? “Well, you sit down at the piano, and he’d sing it through, if he had an idea, he might want to start with a verse or he might want to do this, but he never said how he wanted the backgrounds written. He’d heard things that I did that he liked, so he figured I would know.” Jenkins also noted that Cole was such a professional that often one take was all they needed; however, if Jenkins thought they needed another take, no matter how many they’d done, Cole would always go along with what he wanted. (He also added that to get this out of Garland, contrastingly, he had to “lock the door of the studio and make her do it again!”)85

No one ever seems to have asked Jenkins if he had a hand in selecting the songs on the two albums, but, as it happens, a lot of them do derive from the maestro’s own experience, at least indirectly. Jenkins came of musical age during the height of the radio era of the ’30s, when there was a phenomenon that has long since been forgotten known as the pop-music maestro. These were larger than life characters who were to radio what auteurs like Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford were to the movies, such as Isham Jones and Victor Young, two of Jenkins’s key mentors. Others, Johnny Green, Andre Kostelanetz, and British Ray Noble, were all composers, songwriters, conductors, orchestrators, and marquee-name bandleaders, a genre that largely vanished after the war.

Young, who, as we’ve seen, had died just a few weeks earlier at the age of fifty-six, exerted a particularly pertinent influence on Jenkins. A Jewish composer who studied classical music at the Warsaw Imperial Conservatory, Young wrote songs that were much favored by black musicians (more than the songs of most of his contemporaries), and a disproportionate number of them became all-time jazz standards. “Love Is the Thing” had already been recorded by two of Cole’s favorites, Ethel Waters and Billy Eckstine (as well as the Mills Blue Rhythm Band and Andy Kirk); black female jazz pianists were also fond of it, among them Hazel Scott, Beryl Booker, and Cleo Brown.

Conversely, the album’s iconic opener, “When I Fall in Love,” had virtually no history at that point, but had most likely come to Cole by way of a young pianist-singer who had cut her teeth on the King Cole Trio. Young and Heyman had written it for a quickly forgotten film called One Minute to Zero and doubtless it would have fallen off the face of the earth had it not been for Jeri Southern, who recorded it with her own piano and orchestra conducted by the composer in 1952. Cole would then inspire dozens if not hundreds of jazz musicians (most notably Bill Evans) as well as soul singers to pick up the song’s mantle. Young’s “Where Can I Go without You?,” which boasts a stellar lyric by Peggy

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