[Dixielandjazz] [Fwd: Weepin' Frankie]

[M J (Mike) Logsdon]

Always interesting when it crosses over.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Weepin' Frankie
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 07:59:39 -0700
From: Steve Schwartz <schwartzo2000 at YAHOO.COM>
Reply-To: Classical Music List <CLASSM-L at listserv.brown.edu>
To: CLASSM-L at listserv.brown.edu

Jerome Moross
Urban Americana
 
*  Frankie and Johnny*
*  Those Everlasting Blues^
*  Willie the Weeper**
 
Melisa Barrick, soprano*
Denise Edds, soprano*
Diane Kesling, mezzo*^
John DeHaan, tenor**
Hot Spring Music Festival Symphony Orchestra & Chamber Chorus/Richard 
Rosenberg
Naxos 8.559086 Total time: 63:29
  
Summary for the Busy Executive: High times with low life.
 
American composer Jerome Moross comes out of the Thirties New York Left. 
He joined such lights as Elie Siegmeister, Arthur Berger, Bernard 
Herrmann, Vivian Fine, and Paul Bowles in a kind of composers' study 
group, under the guidance of Aaron Copland, to talk music and to go over 
one another's work-in-progress. Almost all of them faced a conflict 
between their artistic and political lives. At one time, almost all of 
them wrote in a hierophantic, aggressively Modern idiom, the kind that 
used to empty concert halls and now graces such popular entertainment as 
movies and commercials. On the other hand, they felt a duty to connect 
with the proletariat – the very folks who, if they listened to 
classical-music concerts at all, walked out or switched off the radio at 
the opening measures of Awful Modern Music. Well aware of the problem, 
they either ignored it (Arthur Berger), stopped composing (Ruth Crawford 
Seeger), or looked to vernacular music – American
  folk music, pop, jazz – for a way out. Critics usually credit Virgil 
Thomson for discovering the last. Aaron Copland writes an appreciative 
letter to Thomson and praises him for giving American composers "a 
lesson" in how to use folk music without betraying their artistic 
consciences.
 
Moross resorts to the last path. The Naxos CD includes Those Everlasting 
Blues, an extended aria on the Alfred Kreymborg poem. Moross wrote it in 
1932 at the ripe old age of 19, a student of the radical Henry Cowell. 
There are jazz elements in it, but highly abstracted, like a bit of 
newsprint in a Cubist collage or ragtime in an Ives sonata. I suspect 
many even today would find it a rough ride. In several ways, it typifies 
young man's music, especially in its desire to be taken very seriously 
indeed. But Moross quickly changed. Naxos's inclusion of it in the 
program shows how very far, very quickly Moross went. By 1935, he hits 
on his trademark mix of blues, proto-jazz, vaudeville songs, folk music, 
and camp songs. The new music has the efficiency, elegance, and 
geniality of Mozart, never inflated to bathos. It entertains like a 
Broadway show.
 
Moross wrote the ballet Frankie and Johnny in 1938 for the Chicago 
choreographer Ruth Page. It wittily mixes dance with song. A trio of 
Salvation Army "savin' Susies" comments on the action with raunchy, 
low-down, Mae-Westian take-offs on the well-known bluesy, blowsy tune. 
Frankie works herself up to a jealous rage and shoots her lover to, if 
you listen carefully, very Modern music indeed. I was struck this time 
around by expressive devices borrowed from Stravinsky and Ives. But you 
don't think of either Stravinsky or Ives. You hardly think at all, 
because you're too busy getting the socks charmed off your feet. This is 
at least the third recording of Frankie I know of (the first, originally 
on a Desto LP and transferred to Bay Cities CD 1007, conducted by Hendl; 
the second by Falletta and the New Zealand Symphony on Koch 3-7367-2 
H1), and it's got a lot to recommend it. Falletta and the New Zealanders 
may play more symphonically and more precisely than
  Rosenberg and the Hot Springs Music Festival, but the Americans seem 
to have more fun.
 
For me, Willie the Weeper gives the most pleasure, not least because 
it's new to me. As far as I know, it gets its first-ever recording, 
definitely the first in its orchestrated version. It forms the second 
part of Ballet Ballads (1948), a triptych of ballet one-acters by Moross 
and librettist extraordinaire John Latouche. The trio of dances (Susanna 
and the Elders, Willie the Weeper, and The Eccentricities of Davy 
Crockett) appeared first off-, then on-Broadway to great acclaim. I 
don't believe any of the trio has ever appeared in commercial recording 
until now, which kind of lets you know the shelf life of great acclaim. 
Until now, I've only read about the Ballet Ballads in books. Keeping in 
mind the economics of off-Broadway, Moross provided a piano-vocal score 
but always intended to orchestrate the dances. What with one thing and 
another, however, the opportunity didn't arise until 1966, when CBS paid 
Moross to orchestrate Willie for a show which
  never aired. Obviously I can't speak to the other two parts, but 
Willie's a knockout. As in Frankie and Johnny, Moross mixes song and 
dance, but here even more elaborately, calling for a tenor and chorus, 
with either solo or chorus in every movement. Moross remarked that he 
wanted "to so mix the singing and dancing that you didn't know where the 
singers began or where the dancers ended." Alert listeners will 
recognize the links to Weill and Brecht's Seven Deadly Sins. Indeed, as 
with Brecht's Singing Anna and Dancing Anna, we find a Singing Willie 
and a Dancing Willie, representative of two places in the character's 
psyche. The plot tells about Willie and his reefer, "the magical weed" 
which allows him to escape his dreary life into fantasies of wealth, 
power, sex, and (pathetically) even simple acceptance. Latouche bases 
his text on a couple of urban folk rhymes, "Willie the Weeper" and 
"Cocaine Lil":
 
    Did you ever hear about Willie the Weeper?
    Made his livin' as a chimneysweeper.
 
    Cocaine Lil, Cocaine Lil.
    She lives in Cocaine Town on Cocaine Hill.
    She has a cocaine dog and a cocaine cat,
    and they fight all night with a cocaine rat.
 
Moross comes up with a score that pays homage to the twelve-bar blues 
and to boogie-woogie. Almost all the music varies these forms, with the 
exception of two "pop" numbers, one foreshadowing the later 
Moross-Latouche musical, The Golden Apple, beloved of Broadway cultists, 
toward the end. The work opens and ends in a rolling marijuana haze. 
Along the way we get frenzied blues, seductive blues, sad blues, and so 
on. The blues, of course, has a definite harmonic structure, and Moross 
amazes me with the modulating changes he comes up with, still in the 
spirit of the blues. At one point, I suspect he's in two keys at once or 
dancing on the edge of a shimmering divide between two keys. Latouche 
comes up with so many wonderful lyrics, it's hard for me to decide what 
to quote. At random, I've picked the following from the episode "Famous 
Willie":
 
    In Turkestan, in Kansas City, Kan.
    In Moxie or Biloxi who's the favorite man?
    Who's the chap who is the apple of the pub-a-lic eye?
    It's twelve-tone Willie when he hangs it high.
 
 
But there's also Cocaine Lil's enchantingly syncopated refrain:
 
    'Cause it's oh baby, and gee baby,
    And m-m-m baby, and ah,
    And it's well, well baby, and swell baby,
    Then good-bye baby, good-bye, ta-ta.
 
Obviously, both Moross and Latouche intend something at least a bit 
satiric, but Moross's music humanizes it. It gets us to genuinely care 
about poor Willie, even as he sinks back into stupor.
 
The Hot Springs Music Festival Symphony Orchestra mixes, as a matter of 
mission, professionals with students, and, to some extent, it sounds 
like it. Intonation is professional, but attacks aren't particularly 
crisp. Nevertheless, Rosenberg does a fantastic job getting inside 
Moross's music. The student Festival Chamber Chorus has voices a bit 
young, but the diction and characterization of the words leave many a 
professional group in the dust. Everything has the happy energy of a 
Broadway show. Mezzo Diane Kesling scores a tour-de-force in Those 
Everlasting Blues. This ain't easy music, and she treads a fine line 
between an "operatic" and a vernacular approach. Unlike most 
classically-trained singers, including native speakers, she actually 
knows how to sing in English without sounding like Margaret Dumont or as 
if she's trying to swallow a mouthful of hot mush. It's a solid dramatic 
performance as much as a feat of singing. I can say the same for tenor
  John DeHaan in Willie. He comes closer to musical comedy than Kesling 
does, but his declamation isn't as crisp. Still, a fine job of singing 
and a fine performance as well.
 
The sound is quite good for each piece, but I do want to complain about 
the different recording levels between Those Everlasting Blues (recorded 
much higher) and the two ballets. A comfortable level for Frankie and 
Willie becomes slightly painful with Those Everlasting Blues. A 
comfortable level for Those Everlasting Blues makes you strain to hear 
the ballets. Other than that, a great CD, especially for the price.
 
Steve Schwartz




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