Irving Berlin - Vol II: “Daddy Played With All His Fingers”

This post was inspired by two things: reading A Daughter’s Memoir by Berlin’s daughter, Mary Ellin Barrett, and seeing the following clip of Berlin playing the piano, the only one extant to my knowledge:

Irving Berlin on his 75th birthday, who, despite the caption on the Pathé website, is playing “Oh, How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning!”

If your browser doesn’t support the clip, you can find it here at the Pathé Website.

The clip confirms the image of Berlin that Barrett captures so tantalisingly in her book:

It is easy to summon up that man at the piano singing in a high, wispy, always true voice, hunched over the keyboard, head cocked a little, faking the accompaniment, hands off the keyboard when the notes were too hard, harmonies sketched in with thirds, a single finger in the bass, everything about him pressing out the music––hands, mouth, shoulders, head, eyes.

True to all the rumours, he only seems confident of the black notes. And it also confirms my suspicion that Berlin was not playing the piano on the album Irving Sings Berlin.

My curiosity in Berlin’s composition was piqued even more when I read the reference to his transposing piano, which used a pedal to switch (or transpose) from one key to another, which suggests that he had a sensitivity to the key of the piece. Here’s Barrett’s account of it:

Daddy played with all his fingers [...] Though he only played in the key of F-sharp, the black note key that fell easily under his fingers, he needed to hear songs in different keys. Patiently, he explained the mechanism to me. One pull of the knob, and as he continued to play in F-sharp, out the notes would come in C or G or E-flat, or whatever key was right for singing that particular song.

I suspect his lack of formal training is analogous to the situation of a great writer with a poor grasp of sentence boundaries and punctuation. This fascinates me: I have always loved Wilder’s idea (put forward in American Popular Song) that Berlin approached song writing as “a craftsman rather than a composer.”

But even if he was merely (merely!) a melodic genius, I find no explanation of the fully chromaticised melody of ‘That Mysterious Rag’, which assumes an underpinning of very complex melodic changes. (If you don't believe me, check out the sheet music here.)

SOME WORTHWHILE BERLIN LINKS

1. A passing note: The New England Jazz station WICN has a short piece about a very interesting low point in Berlin’s life, 1930-1932, during which he composed two very different masterpieces, “How Deep Is The Ocean” and “Say It Isn’t So”. It features quite a few quotations from Philip Furia’s Irving Berlin: A Life In Song. Has anyone read it? It sounds really good.

How Deep Is The Ocean - Jack Payne (1932)

(No audio preview available.)
Say It Isn't So - Charlie Palloy, g & v (1932)

2. According to Bennett, Berlin wrote his first lead sheet in 1932, for the sublime melody “Soft Lights and Sweet Music”, suggesting he’d been having some music lessons. (His musical interpreter, responsible for translating Berlin’s melodies and harmonies into sheet music, had for forty-odd years been Helmy Kresa, of whom I know very little and would also like to know more!)

Soft Lights and Sweet Music - Bing Crosby (1932)

3. Walter Rimler writes well of Berlin’s omnivorous versatility as a composer on the Red Room site.

4. You may have noticed this is the second of two posts on Berlin. The first one, on some of his early work, is here.

5. There’s also a post about his voice and singing of his own material here.

6. Here’s a nice post at Time magazine, with the writer Richard Corliss’s fantasy Berlin CD tracklist.