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Wild About Alec Wilder

  • By Roderick Nordell
  • FACTS. I worry that they sound rather flat without my trombones
  • as someone said in Bernard Shaw's ``Man and Superman.'' So back to those massed trombones that played ``I'll Be Around,'' a Wilder song that has become a classic, while I in the audience sang the words - along with the Friends of Alec Wilder who were celebrating the 10th annual gathering to confirm that to them he will always be around. The celebration was at the soaring modern sanctuary of St. Peter's Church, a landmark of caring for New York's jazz community. The program included Wilder's ``Suite for 19 Trombones in Four Movements,'' stentorian testimony to his deft mingling of jazz and classical elements, as well as to the marvelously varied music possible with nothing but trombones. Wilder, the story goes, fell for the trombone after he heard Jack Jenney's brief solo on ``Star Dust,'' recorded by Artie Shaw's band of half a century ago. It's a romantic, gleaming moment of invention that melted us high-schoolers dancing in somebody's knotty-pine basement after the football game. Some of us can whistle it to this day: another link with Wilder that makes me want my book back. The subtitle of ``American Popular Song,'' which remains in print to this day, is ``The Great Innovators 1900-1950.'' Amazing how the tunes of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and company have survived - even to accompany ice dancing in the 1994 Olympics. Not so amazing, perhaps, since Wilder dissects them from a fellow composer's point of view, seizing on what makes them fresh and enduring or subject to decay. Some of the judgments are controversial, such as Wilder's belittling of Kurt Weill's much-played ``Mack the Knife.'' A couple of years ago, in the Kurt Weill Newsletter, Arnold Sundgaard wrote ``Alec Wilder: Curt about Weill.'' As a librettist for both composers, Sundgaard could offer a context including Wilder's strange lament that ``he had never made it - whatever he meant by that - because he had never owned a tuxedo.'' Wilder could be enigmatic, iconoclastic, and idiosyncratic, Sundgaard says, but ``in matters of music I think he strove to be honest and said what he believed.'' And he wonders if Wilder's view of Weill could simply have been skewed by envy of Weill's use of the sixth interval of the scale in such a celebrated song - an interval that was a favorite of less celebrated Wilder himself. WILDER would probably relish making a rejoinder, perhaps while perusing his own newsletter, with its reports on recent CDs, from Flute Sonata No. 2 played by Laurel Zucker and ``Effie the Elephant'' Suite by tubist Roger Bobo, to ``Moon and Sand'' by Marian McPartland and ``While We're Young'' by NPR's ``Blues Stage'' lady, Ruth Brown. Wilder's music reflects the discrimination with which he listened to others. When he found players or singers he liked, he was just glad if they performed his music, whether published or not. Big band chronicler George Simon describes a Benny Goodman engagement in New York and ``composer Alec Wilder's regular visits with batches of new songs for Peggy [Lee], whom he admired greatly.'' I can't help thinking he would have admired the way his composition ``The Wrong Blues'' is recorded by Keith Jarrett, a pianist who also bridges the realms of jazz and classical music. Jarrett plays the theme slowly and limpidly, revs into elegant improvising, and meanders back. And I think Wilder would be delighted to know that someone in Oak Park, Ill., heard the old recording of his ``A Child's Introduction to the Orchestra,'' obtained the music from the publisher, and put on a local performance. It was so well received that it's going to be an annual affair. ``Art is edited life,'' said Wilder in a radio interview with Marian McPartland. And, in his book ``Letters I Never Mailed,'' he placed himself in the perspective he seemed to want the world to see. He told of going to a gloomy apartment house to pay some young musicians the courtesy of attending their rehearsal of a trio for clarinet, bassoon, and piano. They seemed nervous at having the composer there. ``Well, as you know, I don't think of myself as a composer (Thank God!) I think of myself as a person who has, among other things, tried to write some pieces of music. ``They played. ``They played exquisitely. They played not only musically but with conscience. They played as if that was the whole point of living. ``I nearly wept. ``Fortunately the piece happens to be one of the few of all the hundreds I've written of which I'm unashamed.''

WHOEVER has my copy of ``American Popular Song,'' by Alec Wilder, please give it back.

I never ask people to return books. Why now? Because I've just sung one of author-composer Wilder's own better-known songs, ``I'll Be Around,'' to the accompaniment of almost 20 trombones. I've just read that he enjoyed ``doing good by stealth,'' never admitting to jazz pianist Marian McPartland how he helped put her wonderful program on National Public Radio. And I've just discovered that Wilder has a newsletter published in his name and an organization dedicated to preserving his memory and keeping his music played.

So this time, if I remembered who the borrower was, I would no longer a lender be. I can't honestly echo Wilder, a composer of the eccentric rumpled-professor school, and just say I give my books away: ``Indeed, the books I've given away constitute a kind of huge, floating, national library.''

How can I not wonder who's hanging on to the unsurpassed volume that I've been hyping ever since it came out in 1972?

Fortunately, some Wilder comments remain in introductions I typed up when our band played a jazz concert in a library, where referring to a book seemed appropriate.

Wilder explained, for instance, why we would still play ``It Had to Be You,'' a 1924 tune that Harry Connick Jr. gave new fame in that Harry-meets-Sally movie. In his words, it's a song that ``reaches the listener as a wholly agreeable moment in time.'' Its unusual elements have become usual. There's that remarkable drop of an octave (when the lyrics say, ``But nobody else ... gives me that thrill'') -``one of those mysterious choices that a good [song] writer makes....''

Turning to Jerome Kern's classic ``All the Things You Are,'' Wilder recalls a story: Right after Kern told a friend he thought such a complex piece could never become a hit, he heard someone whistling it in the street. ``Perhaps one should hark back to that old theory that if the opening measures of a song are singable, it doesn't matter how complex the rest of it is.''

Wilder would never have claimed classic status for his own ``Good for Nothin,' '' but it has now been given the permanence of a compact disc. Wilder's bouncy, countryish tune fits a lyricist's pre-feminist humor: Men are good-for-nothin', but women wash their socks and can't do without `em.

The droll performance is from a 78 r.p.m. duet of four decades ago combining Marlene Dietrich's worldly-wise Germanic accents with Rosemary Clooney's all-American fizz. The pairing is as quirky - and successful in its way - as many of Wilder's compositional choices.

Who else would imagine setting the poetry of Phyllis McGinley in a song cycle for mezzo-soprano, bassoon, and harp? Wilder was always calling the back rows of the orchestra to the solo stage - the tuba, for instance, in ``Elegy for the Whale.''

His completed songs, operas, ballets, orchestral works, chamber pieces, film scores, and recordings make a list filling more than 40 pages. Wilder songs have been recorded by such stars as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Eileen Farrell, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan.

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