[Dixielandjazz] Irving Berlin - "He Was American Music"

[Stephen G Barbone]

NY TIMES - November 30, 2008 - by Jesse Green
Irving Berlin’s Snow Business

IF you didn’t know better, had never been taught the proper technique,  
you might approach a piano with your hands flat and fingers splayed,  
as if instead of striking the keys you were going to dribble them.  
This may be why Irving Berlin, who never studied music except with his  
ear, favored the ebonies over the ivories when he first started  
playing. His melodies found their home among the black keys, making  
excursions as necessary to the white, with the result that the tunes  
all emerged in the absurd six-sharp thicket of F-sharp major or its  
corresponding D-sharp minor.

The first song for which Berlin wrote both music and lyrics was  
copyrighted in 1908, and the last ditties found among his papers are  
dated 1987, two years before his death at 101. He didn’t last that  
long as an artist by being inflexible. Realizing that his black-key  
proclivity limited his reach, he purchased a series of rare  
instruments called transposing pianos. They featured a mechanism that  
could shift the entire keyboard up or down, causing the hammers to  
strike the “wrong” strings and thus play his tunes in any desired key.  
What started in F sharp could now become the F of “Puttin’ On the  
Ritz” or the C of “Cheek to Cheek” — a good thing for his publishing  
business, which depended on amateurs buying sheet music to play at  
home on their spinets. But how did those songs get to be what they  
were in the first place? Did his lack of training somehow make his  
style universal?

Hoping to see if the magic was in his pianos, I recently tried one at  
the New York City headquarters of Ascap (American Society of  
Composers, Authors and Publishers), of which Berlin was a charter  
member in 1914. But the instrument, temporarily stored under a tarp in  
a hallway, was decades out of tune, its famous mechanism jammed. Music  
played on it was muddy and untransposable.

The mystery is why so much of Berlin’s catalog is not similarly stuck  
in the past. Of his 1,250 known songs (some with only lyrics extant),  
perhaps a fifth are top-drawer and an astonishing 100 still live in  
our ears. (Recent licenses include “Anything You Can Do” for an N.F.L.  
promo and “They Say It’s Wonderful” for “Spider-Man 3.”) They are not  
the most technically advanced of what we now think of as the Big  
Five’s standards; Gershwin, Kern, Porter and Rodgers, all trained  
musicians, had more sophisticated tools at their disposal. But the  
Berlin standards hold their own with aficionados while surpassing all  
others in popular acceptance. Bing Crosby’s version of “White  
Christmas,” first released in 1942, has sold more than 125 million  
copies, making it the best-selling recording of all time.

Certainly the producers of “Irving Berlin’s White Christmas,” which  
opened for a holiday run at the Marquis Theater on Nov. 23, are  
betting that even (or especially) in an economic downturn, audiences  
will flock to what they already love. Hoping to offer Broadway and  
regional theaters a seasonal alternative to “A Christmas Carol” and  
the Grinch, they have packed the lavish stage musical with goodies  
from the Berlin catalog. The show, directed byWalter Bobbie, with a  
book by David Ives and Paul Blake, includes the catchiest numbers from  
the 1954 Bing Crosby-Danny Kaye movie on which it’s based — including  
“Sisters,” “The Best Things Happen While You’re Dancing” and of course  
the title song. But it also interpolates Berlin standards like “How  
Deep Is the Ocean?” and “Blue Skies.” As each tune starts, you feel  
the rush of reunion with something long thought unrecoverable.

Still, as at reunions, you study the effects of time. To give the  
score a unified feel, the musical team of “White Christmas” — the  
music supervisor Rob Berman, the orchestrator Larry Blank and the  
vocal and dance arranger Bruce Pomahac — has passed all the songs,  
which were written over a 40-year period starting in 1915, through a  
mid-’50s strainer. This makes sense for the story, which is welded to  
the Eisenhower years, but homogenizes the oddities and variety of the  
raw material. Whether written in the style of ragtime, jazz, Tin Pan  
Alley, big band, Hollywood or Broadway, the songs come out sounding  
not unlike a Bing Crosby holiday special.

This cool suavity does no damage. After a while you realize that the  
show, or any other iteration of Berlin tunes, is a mechanism, like his  
magic pianos, for rendering them in the key of another time.

The originals, notated by musical secretaries because Berlin couldn’t  
do so himself, tell a fuller story. He was never cool in the ’50s  
sense. The stance his songs take toward the listener is plainspoken  
and even aggressive: an outsider’s stance. They were written to be  
popular, not to illustrate specific dramatic situations or entertain a  
coterie.

Others of the Big Five found their sound in the opera house, the dive,  
the theater, the boîte; Berlin found his in the street. This is what  
Kern meant when he said that Berlin had no place in American music: he  
was American music.

“There are composers who make you come to them, and there are  
composers who ask you to meet them halfway,” Mr. Pomahac said. “Of the  
Big Five, Berlin is the first one to race across the room and grab you  
by the lapels.”

This was often literally true. He liked to sing his songs in the face  
of his listener, a trait perhaps picked up during his days as a  
busker, a music plugger and a singing waiter. If he didn’t make an  
impression, he didn’t make a dime.

But for all their swagger and humor, Berlin’s songs betray a not-so- 
secret undertow of sadness. It’s no surprise that he would set  
lovesick ballads like “How Deep Is the Ocean?” in a minor key, and we  
have come to recognize the minor-key uptempo number (“Blue Skies,”  
“Puttin’ On the Ritz”) as a Berlin trademark. But a tour of the  
catalog reveals a pervasive tropism toward melancholy.

While swimming confidently toward their goal, his songs frequently  
pass through invisible seams of sadness on the way. Think of how  
wistful even “White Christmas” is. Underneath the last, sustained word  
of the climactic lyric “May your days be merry and bright,” Berlin  
gives us an F-major chord that turns suddenly, piercingly minor. The  
brightness is literally diminished, as the dream of the past is  
diminished by time.

Berlin came by this sentiment honestly. His father, a cantor in whose  
temple he first heard the way music can recapitulate loss in the flick  
of a note, died when he was 13. His first wife died of typhoid fever  
contracted on their Cuban honeymoon. Irving Berlin Jr., his son by his  
second wife, died on Christmas Eve at three weeks.

These losses do not explain the drive that led an immigrant from  
abject poverty at 5 to wealth and celebrity at 19 and has sustained  
him at the heart of American culture ever since. Nor do they explain  
how he, nearly alone among his generation of composers, became the  
kind of businessman who had the clout and savvy to defend his  
property. As his own publisher, he kept an iron grip on his copyrights  
and licenses, which will continue to serve his reputation at least  
until the copyrights expire.

But his insistence, in melody if not always in words, that nothing  
lasts forever turned out to be a trick for the ages. Even in “God  
Bless America,” an anthem that sounds as if it were not composed but  
mined, the word “America” descends into tonal ambiguity as its  
syllables play out. The man couldn’t help it. As he wrote in another  
classic you can hear at the Marquis: “If my song can start you crying,  
I’m happy.”