by Nils Peterson
I
End of a strange day. Sitting with a drink, listening to jazz vocals, old songs, talking slow, the way one does at such an hour. Particularly if one’s companion is one’s self. Melancholic but mellow. Sipping a vintage of old age at l’heure bleue.
And from Tony Bennett
Someday, when I’m awfully low
When the world is cold
I will feel a glow just thinking of you
And the way you look tonight
But it’s an old Bennett making a quick grab at the high notes and almost getting there – though still comfortable and easy with the sway of word and music. The Someday here for us both. One knows about the dementia. No Lady Gaga in this version to help. Just old age dealing as well as it can with pitch and memory and vision – and singing, and yes, singing, and yes, one thinks of Yeats:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…
For his 75th birthday, Dave Brubeck invited a bunch of “Young Tigers and Old Lions” to a recording studio and composed and recorded an original celebration of each. The only unoriginal melody was the second track, “How High the Moon,” sung by Jon Hendricks – bringing his now old man’s voice – all the bassness out of it, but not soprano – thin, quavery, black. He sings “Somewhere there’s heaven, it’s where you are” – and yes we believe it – that there is one and it’s where she, whoever she might be, is – Dave Brubeck rumbles beneath in sweet elegiac support. The more Hendricks’ voice lost, the more beautiful it became – is there a blessing then in loss, a wisdom? A young critic says it’s too slow, takes too long, but young critics are too impatient to hear well.
And now Sinatra’s “Send in the Clowns,” the truth of a special longing in his voice not the strutting bluff stuff of “I Did it My Way” way. More the regret of “losing my timing so late in my career.” Maybe it’s about Ava. I’d like to think so.
Back to the Someday which is today,
Lovely, never, never change
Keep that breathless charm
Won’t you please arrange it?
‘Cause I love you
Just the way you look tonight
And whoever she might be is here again with her all her “breathless charm.”
She was first here for me when I was a boy listening to the radio and the verse above was the theme song for an advertisement for a face cream. So I heard it again and again. I’m glad I can’t remember the name of the face cream.
P.S. I’m eleven or twelve, had heard Sinatra or Como croon “September Song,” but over the crackly Philco comes Walter Huston half-singing, half-talking “but it’s a long, long time from May to December/And the days grow short….” Something of me understood it was a voice, an old man’s voice, sounding of truth and dry leaf, not a baritone making pretty music.
II
Fred & Ginger Face the Music
A single rose in a white vase on the table – a long, languid gracefulness. It’s Fred Astaire, I think for moment and remember the last 10 minutes of an old movie.
Fred had joined the Navy to escape Ginger. Why that would be so, I can’t imagine. However, at movie’s end, Ginger’s in a gorgeous flowing gown, Fred, white tie and tails. She’s leaning on some kind of column, looking away, far away, far far away – working hard at moving on.
There’s music. Fred glides over, does a turn. She ignores him. Another turn, she ignores him. At Fred’s third turn, Ginger’s body moves. She hasn’t moved it. It has moved of itself and carried Ginger along with it. Soon they’re dancing. Soon the music makes Fred sing, – “There may be trouble ahead/ But while there’s moonlight/And music and love and romance/Let’s face the music and dance.”
That’s such a good place to stop, but I can’t. The bridge carries me over, well, you can fill in with the rainbow if you wish, “Soon we’ll be without the moon/Humming a different tune and then” … and then the verse, “There may be teardrops to shed/So while there’s moonlight/And music and love and romance/Let’s face the music and dance.” What a wonderful way to use that old contrary phrase, “Let’s face the music.”
If we’re going to have to face the music, let’s face it with a dance.
Good advice.
Footnote. No one seems to know the origin of the phrase “Face the Music.” One theory has it that it was advice to an actor who had stage fright, the sense being that you faced the orchestra pit and said or sang your lines. Seems like a long stretch to me. Another comes from British military life. When you disgraced your regiment, you were drummed out of it, drummers ominously beating some solemn steady beat while you marched in front of your former comrades so they could see your disgrace. The trouble with this is that the phrase seems to have originated in America.
Nevertheless, caught up in my Fred Astaire fantasies, I imagined him being drummed from the corps for something like making a not-unwelcomed pass at the Colonel’s daughter and being kicked out. I hear the solemn drumbeat and then halfway to his exit he smiles, stops marching, gives his feet over to a jazzy syncopation against the drumbeat and taps his way out the door. He turns, gives an impudent salute, exits, who knows, maybe to run off with the colonel’s daughter and the two of them face the music and dance. Of course the daughter would be played by in Ginger in the movie version of this footnote.
III
While knotting my shoes which, as I get older gets harder, I realized that if I were Catholic I would prefer to go to a church, well, cathedral really, in which the mass was sung in Latin. I’ve sung many of the great mass settings which are in Latin, and I know enough Latin to understand what I’m singing and my conductors always insisted that I have a sense of what the sounds coming out of my mouth meant, but while tying my shoes I realized that I didn’t care about the understanding, what I wanted was the incantory sound, the glorious AH of Ave, the dark EH of Requiem, the round OH of Gloria. It was the sound that penetrated me, of what has sometimes been called “the holy vowels,” – think of the OM sound that some feel is the heartbeat of the universe. How rich it is to say, richer even in a chant. Some would say, and I for the moment agree, it is the all-encompassing sound. So if I were Catholic, understanding the words of the mass would get in the way.
Remember the end of Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur”?
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
How great that ah! is. It is an Ah of Awe, and we feel awe deep down, and the exhalation of our saying is prayer.