Stardust Melodies(ISBN=9780375420894) 英文原版 下载 pdf 百度网盘 epub 免费 2025 电子书 mobi 在线

In Stardust Melodies, Will Friedwald takes each of these

legendary songs apart and puts it together again, with a staggering

wealth of detail and unprecedented understanding.

Each chapter gives us an extended history of one

song—the circumstances under which it was written and first

performed—and then explores its musical and lyric content. Drawing

on his vast knowledge of records and the careers of performing

artists, Friedwald tells us who was responsible for making these

songs famous and discusses in depth the performers who have left

their unique marks on them. He writes about variations in

performance style, about both classic and obscure versions of the

songs, about brilliantly original interpretations and ghastly

travesties. And then there’s the completely unexpected, like Stan

Freberg’s politically correct “Elderly Man River.”

This is a book for all lovers of American song

to explore, argue with, and savor.

INTRODUCTION

AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

STAR DUST(1927) 

THE ST．LOUIS BLUES(1914) 

MACK THE KNIFE(1928) 

OL’MAN RIVER(1927) 

BODY AND SOU L(1930) 

I GOT RHYTHM(1930) 

AS TIME GOES BY(1931)

NIGHT AND DAY(1932) 

STORMY WEATHER(t933) 

SUMMERTIME(1935) 

MY FUNNY VALENTINE(1937) 

LUSH LIFE(C．I938) 

　　Will Friedwald is the author of Jazz Singing: America's

Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond; Sinatra! The

Song Is You: A Singer's Art; The Warner Bros. Cartoons; and

Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. One of the leading

contemporary writers of liner notes for music albums, Friedwald

lives in New York City.

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　　Chapter 1

　　STAR DUST (1927)

　　music by Hoagy Carmichael

　　words by Mitchell Parish

　　Lucy is holding a saxophone. It turns out, as she informs friend

Ethel Mertz, she's an amateur musician. Who knew? Lucy then blows

into the mouthpiece and produces a few dyspeptic squawks. "It kind

of sounds like 'Star Dust,' " says Ethel, diplomatically. "Yeah,"

Lucy responds, "everything I play sounds like 'Star Dust.' "

　　Somehow this least expected of testimonials to "Star Dust"

resonates particularly loudly. By the mid-1950s, when I Love Lucy

was the most popular show in America (and therefore, one assumes, a

credible barometer of national taste), "Star Dust" had already been

around for twenty-five years and was long established as the most

popular of popular songs. Ten years later, it was estimated that

Hoagy Carmichael's classic had been recorded at least five hundred

different times and its lyric translated into forty languages.

(Although over the years, on record labels and in various other

places, it has sometimes been spelled as a single word, the correct

title is given as two words, "Star Dust.")

　　Long before Lucy, "Star Dust" had also become archetypal Tin Pan

Alley: its dreamy, somewhat meandering melody had inspired

thousands of other tunes, its metaphor lyric had launched God knows

how many other reveries of love and loss. Small wonder that

everything Lucy played should remind her of the song. Yet long

after its canonization, "Star Dust" remains a maverick: its

construction, its history, and its unique place in the celestial

firmament of essential American music stamp it as a song like no

other.

　　The song's melody and lyric are both uncommonly introspective for

a popular song. The tune, especially intricate, but without being

fussy, is almost delicate in the way it unfolds, yet at the same

time, it's masculine enough to withstand extremely tough treatment

at the hands of such macho, hell-for-leather improvisers as Coleman

Hawkins and Roy Eldridge. Mitchell Parish's words are, if not as

urbane as some by Cole Porter or Lorenz Hart, sensitive in a way

that few pop songs are. Yet what makes all this sensitivity unique

is the long association of "Star Dust" with male performers,

especially boy singers and jazz musicians. Although a number of

women have sung it, the major recordings are predominantly by men

(with the unlikely exception of Ella Fitzgerald).

　　"Star Dust," it would seem, is a love song made for men to

express the way they feel about women. That's how Ben Webster

played it, as a solo feature with Duke Ellington's orchestra. Up

until 1940, Webster had been known primarily as one of the

hardest-hitting tenormen in jazz, famous for his rough-and-tumble

up-tempo playing and his gritty blues technique. (Off the

bandstand, as well, Webster had a reputation for settling

disagreements with his fists, and did not restrict himself to

exercising them only on members of his own sex.) It was at the

Ellington orchestra's famous 1940 dance in Fargo, North Dakota

(famous primarily for being an early example of a remote concert

recording) that Webster's rhapsodically romantic treatment of "Star

Dust" was first documented. The song became a staple of his

repertoire for years after he had departed the Ellington ranks, and

Webster would periodically prevail upon Jack Towers, the engineer

who had recorded the Fargo concert, to cut him a few 45-rpm acetate

pressings to hand out to friends.

　　According to legend, composer Carmichael (1899-1981) was thinking

about a girl when the melody of "Star Dust" first hit him, around

1926. Until then, he had regarded the making of music, whether as

performer or composer, strictly as a sideline. His piano playing

had supported him through law school (Indiana University), but on

graduating he gave up practicing the piano to practice law ("and be

a real success") with a firm in Miami. It didn't last. By 1927,

Carmichael was back in Indiana, and back to music.

　　If Hollywood had ever filmed Carmichael's life (Gary Cooper would

have gotten the role, and Hoagy himself would have played his own

fictitious sidekick, named "Cricket" or "Smoke" or something), the

scene of "Star Dust"'s creation would have been shot against a

painted backdrop of a nocturnal sky rich with starlight. Our hero,

while paying a nostalgic visit to his alma mater, happens to pass

the campus's lover's lane, or "spooning wall" as it was known, and

begins thinking about all the girls he'd loved and lost in his

college days. While pondering one old school romance in particular,

the kernel of a melody just pops into his head. A frantic

Carmichael dashes in search of a piano and locates one in the

campus coffee house-a cozy little joint called the "Book

Nook"-where, oblivious to all else, our hero works the melody out

and gets it down on paper. Shortly afterward, he plays it for a

friend and former classmate named Stu Gorrell, who remarks that it

reminds him "of the dust from the stars drifting down through a

summer night." From there comes the title "Star Dust." "I had no

idea what the title meant," Carmichael later said, "but I thought

it was gorgeous."

　　The legend, as is often the case, probably isn't true: according

to Richard Sudhalter, currently in the process of finishing the

first serious biography of Carmichael, Hoagy had been working on

the tune at least since early 1926, possibly while still in Miami.

Thus the whole story about the spooning wall and the Book Nook may

have been a later invention, although the wall notion would later

find its way into the lyric.

　　Carmichael introduced "Star Dust" on records in a session for

Gennett Records, the number-one label for jazz and blues in the

Midwest, on Halloween, 1927. He recruited a symphathetic band of

friends who usually played under the leadership of pianist Emil

Seidel, although in this case they were credited on the original

label as "Hoagy Carmichael and His Pals." The verse is introduced

by trumpeter Byron Smart, following which the main melody is laid

out by one of the alto players (Gene Woods or Dick Kent). Then

Carmichael plays a one-chorus piano solo (a true solo, as he is

completely unaccompanied) that immediately sets up a brilliant set

of variations on the song. The arrangement is in D natural (two

sharps), which, as Sudhalter observes, must have been the key

Carmichael felt best suited his piano solo. He certainly wasn't

doing the horns any favors by throwing them into "sharp-infested

waters."

　　The original 1927 tempo of "Star Dust" is considerably faster

than we're accustomed to hearing, especially in the wake of Nat

King Cole and Frank Sinatra. This has misled many historians to

describe "Star Dust" as having originally been a "stomp" or a

"ragtime" number. Although the melody has the feel of a jazz

improvisation, particularly one by Hoagy's hero Bix Beiderbecke,

make no mistake: "Star Dust" was always essentially a reflective,

contemplative tone poem. Indeed, back at the beginning, Carmichael

even wrote a set of love lyrics to the tune. But love songs, like

every other kind of music then, were also meant for dancing, and

the idea of a band or a jazz-influenced pop singer doing a number

in slow rubato (really slow out-of-tempo balladeering, as we know

it today, was not heard in pop music until the coming of Sinatra,

decades later) was all but unknown. Carmichael's 1927 disc of "Star

Dust" moves along at a comparatively fast clip, yet it's slower

than most other recordings by Carmichael's compadre Emil Seidel or

by any other band of the era.

　　It has also been widely reported (by Alec Wilder, among others)

that the verse was added only later, at about the time Mitchell

Parish wrote his famous lyric. But the verse is there on the 1927

premiere recording by Hoagy and pals. Just listen: the disc opens

with a guitar intro (the instrument was just beginning to be widely

heard in the new age of electrical recordings; banjos had dominated

in the acoustic era) before the trumpet takes the now famous verse,

which can be heard on virtually all the early "jazz" versions of

the tune. The apocryphal story of the verse being written later on

was to work against Carmichael: for years a rumor persisted that

the verse wasn't written by Carmichael at all but by Don Redman, a

composer and arranger who worked for Carmichael's publisher, Irving

Mills. As with the persistent gossip that Fats Waller actually

wrote some of Jimmy McHugh's songs, there's nothing to back it

up.

　　Although Redman didn't write the verse, that pioneering jazz

orchestrator (also saxophonist, bandleader, and novelty vocalist)

does play an important role in the career of "Star Dust." Redman,

who had spent the earlier part of the twenties as musical director

for Fletcher Henderson's band, was by then the leader of McKinney's

Cotton Pickers. The McKinney's band, based in Detroit, seems to

have been the first to record "Star Dust" after Carmichael, working

under the pseudonym of "The Chocolate Dandies." (This was in

October of 1928, nearly a year after Carmichael had recorded the

entire song, verse included.) Carmichael brought his own chart to

Detroit and met with Redman, who, according to Sudhalter, "filled

it out and corrected the voicings," although he left it in

Carmichael's key, D major.

　　Apart from the evidence of the verse existing on the original

Gennett recording, there's the evidence of one's own ears. A single

hearing of its melody, which is even more meandering and ruminative

than the chorus's, should be enough to convince anyone that the

verse is by the same hand that penned the central chorus melody.

The chord changes in the verse are slightly more conventional than

they are in the chorus, as we'll see, but the melody of the verse

is either the work of the same mind-it uses the same kind of range

and intervals-or the mind of a darn clever forger.

　　There's one particularly lovely record of "Star Dust" from 1987

by avant-garde jazzman Archie Shepp, most of whose career can be

regarded as a rebellion against the traditional musical values that

"Star Dust" had come to stand for. What we find here, however, is a

romantic tenor treatment of the great love song in the best Ben

Webster tradition, done as a duet with the remarkable expatriate

pianist Horace Parlan. The oddest thing about this recording is

that the CD booklet credits the song to "Carmichael-Redman,"

inserting Don Redman's name and omitting poor Mitchell Parish

entirely.

　　Paradoxically, in its time, "Star Dust" was hardly a traditional

song. Compared to most pop songs of the late twenties, "Star Dust"

is conventional in certain aspects but in many others it's rather

daringly different, for its day or any other. It consists of a

thirty-two-bar chorus that can be broken down into four eight-bar

sections, as well as a sixteen-bar verse, something that can be

said of about ninety percent of the items in what we consider to be

the Great American Songbook. The current edition of the published

sheet music is in C. The melody moves primarily in thirds.

Sometimes these are major thirds (as C to E) and sometimes minor

thirds (as B to D). While this is uncommon, Sudhalter notes, there

are are other songs of the period that do use these bigger

intervals as organically as "Star Dust" does, among them

"Coquette," "Make Believe," "I'll Get By," and "All of Me."

　　"Star Dust" also has an uncommonly wide range. And while other

songs do this, too-"Night and Day" covers an octave and a fifth

whereas "Star Dust" travels only an octave and a third-these other

songs generally use their high and low notes as a means of

heightening the drama. "Night and Day" saves its low G for a

climactic moment, but "Star Dust" uses its widely polarized

high-highs and low-lows as an integral aspect of its basic melody.

At the start of the second bar we're on a low D ("spend") and

exactly four beats later we're holding a high E for a whole

measure, and a bar after that we're back down at low D. As I say,

this is no special effect; it's simply the bread and butter of the

"Star Dust" melody. The song never stops jumping high and then

stooping low.

　　When we talk about the structure and the harmony of any given

song, we're usually talking about two separate, if interrelated,

issues. With "Star Dust," however, it's impossible to discuss one

without the other. As we've noted, the song is thirty-two bars in

length, but it's not laid out in typical A-A-B-A form. With most

songs, it's immediately apparent where the eight-bar sections begin

and end; with "Star Dust," the start of the B section is more

ambiguous. The form is A-B-A-C, but even that isn't clearly spelled

out, and each section is eight bars long.

　　In many songs-"I'm in the Mood for Love," for instance-we get a

recurrence of the tonic chord at either the beginning or end, or

both, of each eight-bar section. This doesn't happen on "Star

Dust." The tonic normally helps serve notice that one section is

ending and a new one is beginning, but in "Star Dust" the chords

keep progressing right through the start of the new segment. And

the lyric matches this movement: rather than stop a sentence and

start a new one, lyricist Mitchell Parish pins an ongoing thought

to this passage, which just continues uninterrupted. The B section

melody begins at the start of bar nine, on the last three words of

the line, "when our love was new." Those words fall on the V chord

(the fifth, which in C major is G), and in fact this is the only

time in the chorus when Carmichael gives us the same note (G) three

times in a row. Instead of the tonic (C), we linger on the

unresolved dominant and don't get to the tonic again for another

two measures.

　　The song starts on the IV (F) chord in major, then shifts, in bar

3, to minor (Fm+7); we don't spend any time to speak of on the

tonic until bar 5, where it arrives, appropriately, on the word

"melody." Traveling through the circle of fifths, we pass through

the iii (Em7), the VI (A7), the ii (Dm7), and hit the iv (Fm+7)

again. The harmonies of the opening section are reminiscent of the

1918 "After You've Gone" and anticipate Gerald Marks's 1931 jazz

classic "All of Me," among many other songs. The difference is that

those other two songs employ some of the same chords in a more

conventional fashion. In "Star Dust," the subdominant (Dm7) leads

to the dominant (G) at the start of the B section, expressed in two

bars of variations on the dominant chord (G7, Gdim7, G7 again, and

then G7 with an augmented 5th to correspond with a D-sharp on the

word "in-spir-a-tion"). The B section also dwells on the II chord

("But that was long ago . . ."), either a D9 or a D7.

　　The return to the A section is in itself striking. As noted, the

transition from A to B is so subtle that we don't even notice we're

changing sections. The shift back from B to A is more pronounced,

and jarring in fact, because it brings us back to A before we've

really registered it mentally that we've left A to begin with. This

second A section, which begins with the words "Beside a garden

wall," is identical to the first melodically and harmonically (only

the lyric is different), the only time anything

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书籍介绍

In Stardust Melodies , Will Friedwald takes each of these legendary songs apart and puts it together again, with a staggering wealth of detail and unprecedented understanding.

Each chapter gives us an extended history of one song—the circumstances under which it was written and first performed—and then explores its musical and lyric content. Drawing on his vast knowledge of records and the careers of performing artists, Friedwald tells us who was responsible for making these songs famous and discusses in depth the performers who have left their unique marks on them. He writes about variations in performance style, about both classic and obscure versions of the songs, about brilliantly original interpretations and ghastly travesties. And then there’s the completely unexpected, like Stan Freberg’s politically correct “Elderly Man River.”

This is a book for all lovers of American song to explore, argue with, and savor.