Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 280 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
Monday, the autumnal equinox will occur at 4:20 AM ET, and we here in the U.S. officially mark the start of fall. I’ve celebrated a wealth of September/fall/autumnal music here in the past, and am opening today with an all-time favorite duo of mine—John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, performing “Autumn Serenade.”
Jazz Profiles from NPR gives some background on Johnny Hartman:
Johnny Hartman was the quintessential romantic balladeer. The only singer to record with John Coltrane, Hartman was mostly known only to true jazz lovers during his lifetime. It took a movie soundtrack — released 12 years after his death — that took Hartman to the top of the jazz charts. […]
Hartman was a master of emotional expression, putting everything he had into every word he sang. With any other vocalist, performing a love song with this kind of intensity could easily come across as being over the top or gushing, but Hartman’s rich, masculine baritone voice never wavered in its sincerity. […]
Born John Maurice Hartman on July 23, 1923 in Chicago, Johnny grew up singing in church choirs and the high school glee club before receiving a scholarship to study voice at the Chicago Musical College. After a tour of duty in the Army during World War II, he won a singing contest conducted by pianist and bandleader Earl “Fatha” Hines. Hartman later joined Hines’ band.
Give it a listen:
Female jazz vocalist extraordinaire Ella Fitzgerald, often referred to as ”The First Lady of Song,” explored the music of a different Johnny—songwriter Johnny Mercer:
John Herndon Mercer (1909-1976), a native of Savannah, Georgia, began writing songs at the age of fifteen and eventually became one of the foremost figures of 20th-century American popular music. His catalog includes many numbers that have become American classics, and his activities as lyricist, composer, performer, and businessman span nearly five decades.
Reviewer Stephen Cook at AllMusic wrote about “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Johnny Mercer Song Book”:
Along with her Rodgers and Hart collection, this is one of the best of Ella Fitzgerald’s songbooks. Fitzgerald’s assured and elegant voice is a perfect match for Mercer’s urbane lyrics and Nelson Riddle’s supple arrangements. In light of this decorous setting, it’s not surprising that Mercer’s swagger-heavy numbers like “I Wanna Be Around” and “One More For My Baby” are skipped in favor of more poised selections such as “Early Autumn” and “Skylark.”
Here’s her “Early Autumn”:
Continuing with Ella, she is joined by Louis Armstrong for this rendition of “Autumn in New York” which they recorded in July 1957. Matt Silver at Philadelphia’s public radio station WRTI tells the story behind this standard written by songwriter Vladimir Dukelsky, better known as Vernon Duke. Silver lists multiple versions recorded by everyone from Billie Holiday to Charlie Parker and Frank Sinatra.
Here’s “Autumn in New York”:
Silver writes:
As I listen to Billie Holiday’s definitive rendition, my mind’s eye produces a one-act play that climaxes and resolves in just under four minutes. Dozens of these same scenarios unfolding simultaneously but independent of each other over the course of one autumn afternoon in New York, a mass of people either blissfully unaware or woefully unaware, cycling past each other like self-contained planets in opposite orbits around the same star.
The leaves fall. A single, overeager snowflake falls. The curtain falls.
That’s Billie Holiday’s “Autumn in New York,” an interpretation that presents maximum leeway for speculation and subtext, one that best represents the active ambivalence and subtly powerful intellect of Duke’s love letter to New York City.
Silver writes about the Charlie Parker version of the song:
Sinatra’s was the only rendition to register on the pop charts. That in itself has no bearing on the question we’re trying to answer, though there’s no need to hold the popular success of Sinatra’s version against him; it’s solid and deserves credit for bringing the tune into the mainstream, even if it does fall short of amplifying the full emotional context of the source material. In short, it’s a good start.
Better yet, is Charlie Parker’s rendition, which he records two years later, in 1949, as part of the legendary Charlie Parker with Strings sessions. Backed not just by strings but by three trumpets, two trombones, and a cadre of additional woodwinds in addition to a standard rhythm section, Bird is nothing short of spectacular here.
Here’s Charles “Yardbird” Parker’s lush interpretation with strings:
Continuing with autumn standards, a songwriter I wasn’t familiar with was Henry Nemo. Sandra Burlingame at JazzStandards penned his biography:
Henry Nemo (1914-) was an actor and songwriter and apparently took his nickname, “The Neem,” from a role he played in 1947’s Song of the Thin Man. That same year he wrote the title song for the screwball comedy, Out of the Blue. He wrote lyrics for several Duke Ellington compositions, the most famous of which, “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” (1938), also included collaborators John Redmond and Irving Mills.
[…]In 1941 Nemo wrote both words and music for the enduring standard “Don’t Take Your Love from Me” which has been recorded by everyone from Doris Day to Artie Shaw to John Coltrane. That same year he wrote “‘Tis Autumn,” which was recorded by the bands of Benny Goodman and Les Brown but didn’t gain in popularity until Nat King Cole had a hit with it in 1949.
Here’s Nat King Cole’s hit version of “‘Tis Autumn”:
Nat King Cole teamed up with blind British pianist composer George Shearing to record an album that included “September Song.”
Music blogger Brad Shirakawa wrote:
Whoever decided to put Nat Cole and George Shearing together knew what they were doing. The result is just plain beautiful music. Not softly-sighing to the point of boredom or silly kids-stuff beautiful. I can’t listen to this LP enough. Cole and Shearing mesh together perfectly. It’s a shame they didn’t do it more often.
Is this hard-driving bop? Nah. It doesn’t even sound like most jazz vocal LPs. No finger snapping, no dance-worthy toe tapping. No big band in the background blaring away. Nat Cole just draws you in to the song, backed by a pianist who knows how to get out of the way. It swings in a smooth, melodic way, but not in a smooth jazz way. Mostly you hear the two men, with strings complementing the melodies in the background.
Here’s “September Song”:
The final autumn tune I’ll play today is probably the most widely recorded of them all: “Autumn Leaves.” Tom Schnabel at KCRW Los Angeles wrote:
“Autumn Leaves“ has been covered many times by different singers. The 1945 French original was called “Les Feuilles Mortes” (as in “Dead Leaves,” which might be more appropriately translated to “Dry Leaves” or “Still Leaves”), with lyrics penned by Jacques Prévert.
French jazz pianist and historian Philippe Baudoin writes on the importance of the song:
“Autumn Leaves” is the most important non-American standard. It has been recorded about 1400 times by mainstream and modern jazz musicians alone and is the eighth most recorded tune by jazzmen, just before “All the Things You Are”. [1] It was a chart hit in both Europe and America and has made regular appearances in films over the years. The composition has an interesting history that can be traced through the various published versions, and its oft-studied musical structure has ties to classical compositions. […]
The premier recording of “Les feuilles mortes” was by French singer Cora Vaucaire (January 1948, Chant-du-Monde) or perhaps by Jacques Douai in 1947, and the first jazz recording of “Autumn Leaves” was probably the one by Artie Shaw (October 5, 1950, Decca). An earlier recording of his (on September 13) was rejected. Two versions were hits in France,the first was in 1949 by Yves Montand, and the second was in 1950 by Juliette Gréco. In America, Roger Williams’s piano instrumental was a number one chart hit in 1955.
The piece was a favorite of jazz musicians Miles Davis, [9] Bill Evans, Harry James, Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson, and Mel Torme. Among the many excellent jazz versions recorded over the years, some of the greatest are those by: Erroll Garner (1955), Cannonball Adderley, featuring Miles Davis (1958), Bill Evans (1959), Bobby Timmons (live in 1961), Miles Davis (live at Antibes in 1963), McCoy Tyner (1963), Eddie Louiss (1972), Wynton Marsalis (1986), Keith Jarrett (live in 1986). One oddity is a 1958 Duke Ellington live performance on which Ozzie Bailey sings the song in French.
Baudoin’s list of recordings is too long to post here. So long that it is hard for me to pick a favorite version. One of the instrumentals on the top of my list is from Cannonball Adderley’s 1958 album “Somethin’ Else” featuring Adderley on alto sax, Miles Davis on trumpet, Hank Jones on piano, Sam Jones on bass, and Art Blakey on drums.
I’ll close with an interesting vocal take from Leslie Odum Jr.:
Please join me in the comments section below for lots more, and I hope you’ll post your fall favorites.
