[Dixielandjazz] Matt Munisteri reviewed

[Robert Ringwald]

Matt Munisteri: 'The Lost Music of Willard Robison' (Joe's Pub, Tuesday)
by Will Friedwald
Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2012
"He has no 'place' in American music -- he is American music." That's how Jerome
Kern famously described Irving Berlin, but the phrase might be better applied to
their contemporary, the vocalist and pianist Willard Robison (1894-1968). Robison's
amazing songs (most famously "Cottage for Sale," "Don't Smoke in Bed," and "Old Folks"),
written in the 1920s and '30s, embraced the entire landscape of American music. Beyond
Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, they encompass jazz, blues, country, gospel, folk, spirituals
-- there's even a classical-style "cantata" in his canon. It's tempting to describe
guitarist and singer Matt Munisteri's album "Still Runnin' 'Round in the Wilderness"
as a sure bet for any year-end best-of lists, but the world has been waiting for
at least a generation for such a perfect collection of Robisonia. Mr. Munisteri shows
how a composer can be so central to our collective consciousness and yet so utterly
neglected.
At the height of the Jazz Age, Robison was not only a prolific songwriter, but a
major bandleader, a radio headliner and a recording artist, who conducted a series
of dance-band discs with his "Deep River Orchestra" and simultaneously produced a
brilliant collection of "personality" records on which he played piano and sang in
a rich, folksy baritone. At the start of the Depression, Robisonia was a bustling
place, easily located at the border of jazz and blues, pop and country, gospel and
folk.
After the war, however, Robison gradually faded into obscurity and alcoholism, and
was banished, as he would have said, to the wilderness. Ironically, his most conventional
song, "Cottage for Sale" became his most popular, thanks to Billy Eckstine. He's
had champions ranging from Peggy Lee to Michael Feinstein, but overall, Robison has
been relegated to the peripheries of the margins.
At a time when American song was dominated by European immigrants who settled on
the Lower East Side, Robison was the voice of the South and the Midwest. His most
obvious heirs were Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer (the latter produced and sang
on an album of Robison songs in 1947), but in the wider sense he laid the groundwork
for Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and any number of singer-songwriters who combine
blues, folk, country and pop. He's at least as important to American music as Jimmie
Rodgers or Woody Guthrie, and was a better composer.
Robison, a Missouri native, wrote of love and heartbreak (as in the touching, site-specific
torch song "Cottage for Sale"), and also of the Job-like tribulations of sharecroppers
and the optimism of backwood preachers gathering their congregations on cotton bales
for want of a church. He was the patron saint of drunks who smoked in bed, and of
the righteous bringing along their hammer and nails to build a house of worship.
He painted rich pastoral pictures of the very ancient ("Old Folks") and the very
young (the mushy "Little Highchairman"), and asserted in syncopated sermons that
it was never too late to pray because the devil is afraid of music. He showed how
sin and salvation were but different sides of the same coin.
With his own rich, folksy baritone, Mr. Munisteri captures the Sunday school cheerfulness
of "Truthful Parson Brown" (with a scalding trumpet intro by Jon-Erik Kellso that
suggests Don Cherry), as well as the absurdly sanctimonious (and unabashedly chauvinistic)
"Revolvin' Jones." "Moonlight Mississippi" is given a funky backbeat that accentuates
the ironies of its imagery, while "June of Long Ago," featuring a wordless vocal
by Rachelle Garniez, restores a lovely, bucolic waltz virtually unheard for 85 years.
Hopefully, thanks to Mr. Munisteri's excellent album, Robison's music will no longer
be lost, running around in the wilderness.
-30


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com