Word: kern
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...party began in January (Kern's 100th birthday was the 27th) when the Postal Service issued a new 22 cents stamp in his honor. It has kept rolling along with concerts, radio and TV tributes, and retrospectives of Kern films from Show Boat to Swing Time. This week marks the premiere of an off- & Broadway revue, Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Jerome Kern, which spans the composer's career from the turn of the century to his death in 1945. In Britain, where the composer met his first stage success (and his only wife), three more revues are wending their way toward...
Unlike many Broadway composers of Kern's day who scrambled to success out of tenements on Manhattan's Lower East Side, he was born in a comfortable midtown apartment, the son of a German-Jewish stabler. Young Jerry would never be the businessman his father hoped for. Sent out to purchase two pianos, the lad returned with 200. But he must have known his future would have more to do with sitting at pianos than haggling over them. He spent his 17th birthday attending a community-theater premiere of his own musical, a parody of Uncle Tom's Cabin...
This was the period of Kern's "Princess Theater musicals," written with Wodehouse (pre-Jeeves) and Bolton. At a time when Continental operettas were all the rage, these "midget musical comedies" -- airy, brash and daringly American -- created a theatrical revolution to a ragtime beat. They set the tone and tempo on Broadway for the next decade and beyond. When the style changed, it was again Kern who reshaped it, along with Oscar Hammerstein II. Their 1927 Show Boat, with its sweeping seriousness and its near operatic transformation of blues and folk music, paved the Great White Way for Porgy...
...Kern's songs became standards on their own sophisticated hummability. Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man, Long Ago and Far Away, Lovely to Look At, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Who? continue to be sung in city parks and shower stalls by folks who neither know nor care what musical produced the tunes. Yet Kern realized better than anyone else that the melodic drama in so many of his songs -- of which the majestic cresting chorus of Ol' Man River is the most famous example -- demanded a dramatic anchor only the lyric theater could provide. Of the thousand...
...Kern's itch to change and perfect is the mark of a meticulous craftsman. It is genius, though, that etches his tunes in the memory. Composer Alec Wilder, in his 1972 study American Popular Song, singled out Kern for exemplifying "the pure, uncontrived melodic line more characteristically than any other writer of American theater music." To listen to a Kern tune like They Didn't Believe Me is to realize how elegantly it obeys the laws of melody and mathematics: each succeeding phrase is both surprising and inevitable. In that one song, written for the 1914 show The Girl from...