It is rambunctious, scholarly, tendentious and often funny ('a hoot' would have been Wilder's expression). It's a completely essential guide to developing (or keeping in check) your own taste in popular song.
Many's the song I've given another listen and fallen for because of Wilder's gentle prompting. It feels... avuncular. It's like getting advice from your favourite uncle. Unless, like me, you only had one uncle.
* * *
Once again I find myself sending people away from the site, but please visit the Wilderworld site. The quality of the material there is perhaps a little like the curate's egg, but the rarity of much of it is sufficient compensation.
Besides the many versions of the immortal 'I'll Be Around', try listening to 'The Sounds Around the House' and the demo of 'In The Spring of the Year'.
(from the Institute for Studies in American Music newsletter, 1987)
It's not on the site, but his last song, 'A Long Night', which he wrote for Sinatra, is also quite beautiful.
Does this give me an excuse to post some Mabel Mercer in the near future?
I'll Be Around - The Mills Brothers
A Long Night - Frank Sinatra
2 comments:
While it might seem plausible, "A Long Night" wasn't written for Sinatra, and I strongly question that it was the last song Alec Wilder wrote, although it was likely the last new song recorded during his lifetime. The song was originally written prior to Sinatra's "She Shot Me Down" recording under the title "I've Been There," during the time when Wilder was still collaborating with Loonis McGlohon. If I recall the story as Alec related it to me over lunch at one of the little hole-in-the-wall restaurants he frequented (and I think I do in this instance), Loonis had been doing some projects with Johnny Hartman, and presented "I've Been There" to him. Hartman, as it turned out, had recorded another, lesser song of the same title, so Loonis and Alec made the change to "A Long Night," but the song languished until Alec's astonishing and unexpected rapprochement with Sinatra.
You met Wilder? That’s incredible. I’ve got ‘Letters I Never Mailed’, really enjoyable if at times enigmatic little volume that shows he was some raconteur.
Can’t really imagine Hartman singing ‘A Long Night’: it seems it requires a voice devoid of fruitiness for it to work, but sounds perfectly plausible.
Post a Comment