[Dixielandjazz] Lewdness is where you find it.

[Stephen G Barbone]

What? Musicians, Songwriters and Poets have dirty minds? Certainly not we OKOMers. What's that you say, about "When love congeals, it soon reveals, the faint aroma of performing seals, the double crossing of a pair of heels, I wish I were in love again." So much double entendre out there in the American Songbook, so little time. <grin>
Cheers,

Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


NY Times - June 8, 2012 - By Stephen Holden

Singing Wholesome Lyrics, Depending on Your Ears



Lewdness in song is where you find it. And if you’re looking for dirt, it’s everywhere. I can recall being a seventh grader in a church choir surrounded by tittering children embarrassed at having to sing the word  “bosom” in a popular hymn. In her new cabaret show, “Into the Garden,” at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency, the radiant Maude Maggart focuses on Michael W. Balfe’s Victorian parlor song “Come Into the  Garden, Maud,” based on a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Putting a sly emphasis on certain words, she makes it more than an invitation to go on an early-morning nature walk and scent the “woodbine spices” and “the musk of the roses.” Ms. Maggart notes that Marie Lloyd, a popular British music-hall performer who specialized in dirtying up innocent songs, scandalized a watchdog organization investigating double-entendres by performing her suggestive version before a committee.

Singing it at Tuesday’s opening-night show with John Boswell at the piano, Ms. Maggart had it both ways at once. Her otherworldly voice, whose rapid vibrato evokes butterfly wings beating against the sky, distilled the ideal of Victorian purity. And yet. Perception and interpretation of lyrics is only one theme in Ms. Maggart’s far-reaching examination of popular music on both sides of the Atlantic over the last century or more. In her view, styles may have changed, but the content is the same, human nature being what it is. In the early 20th century, she observes, animal dances with names like the Grizzly Bear and the Turkey Trot were all the rage.

As the show goes along, Ms. Maggart’s perspective widens. What could be more contemporary than George M. Cohan’s bluntly cynical, “Life’s a Funny Proposition After All,” written in 1904? “We’re born to die, but don’t know why, or what it’s all about/And the more we try to learn the less we know,” the song recalls. The showstopper is a medley of “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star,” which Oscar Hammerstein II reportedly sang to Jerome Kern on his deathbed, and an ethereal rendition of “All the Things You Are” infused with the intensity of a prayer.

Her version of the evening’s capper, the breezy “A Hundred Years From Today,” from the revue “Blackbirds of 1934,” offers the best argument I can think of for unbridled hedonism:

Don’t save your kisses, pass them around

You’ll find my reason is logically sound

Who’s gonna know that you passed them around

A hundred years from today.

In other words, make the best of that stroll into the garden and get right into it.

“Into the Garden” continues through June 16 at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency, 540 Park Avenue, at 61st Street; (212) 339-4095, feinsteinsattheregency.com.