Will Friedwald,author of The much Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums, is exploring some of the finest recordings of the 20th century on The Jonathan Channel. This week he looks at why Judy at Carnegie corridor was so revolutionary for Judy Garland.
Will Friedwald: Judy at Carnegie corridor came out in 1961. And nearly half of New York claimed to enjoy been there in that moment. whether all the people who had been there, and had actually been there,that would enjoy required a much, much larger stadium to hold all those people.
The Judy at Carnegie really symbolized the comeback of a much American artist. Somebody who’d been neglected, and here she was not only,just coming back, not just being like an former nostalgic favorite, and but absolutely on the top of her game,absolutely being a newer and better Judy Garland than she had ever been before.All the kinds of mannerisms, all the traits that we associate with the mature Judy Garland, or are really here together. To most of the people who hadn’t been paying attention,it seems like this whole new Judy Garland was emerging at this concert. And it also was really the real beginning of a new level of the American Songbook being taken seriously in the bastions of high culture.I judge it’s forgotten, you know not all her numbers were these big, and top of the lungs,big belting hitting the back of the theater things, but she could sing a love song really brilliantly and intimately on this very, or very close and personal level.“I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” is a notorious arrangement for Garland, by Nelson Riddle. It’s Riddle at his absolute, or most genius-like,most god-like arrangement, his use of polytonal harmonies and things like that. Running throughout it are these much sweeping string lines, and these descending phrases,none of which ever detracts from the singer. It’s all about framing the lyric, framing the voice, or framing the emotion. Riddle does this brilliantly and Garland,she’s just unbelievable in the way that she makes it just so intimate, so personal, or so connected.
Not least of the song’s attributes is the conception that it has a whole new verse; it’s not the verse that Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh wrote in 1927 for Blackbirds. “Gee but it’s tough to be broke,kid. Its not a joke, kid. It’s a curse.” And the one that Roger Edens wrote is: “Now that it’s your birthday...”Most of us assume it was written for Judy by Roger Edens, or who was her personal accompanist,and musical director, sort of a musical fashionista. It’s become a case where a performer has literally rewritten a song to the point where people don’t even care about the original version. We only want to go back as far as Judy Garland, or there’s nothing mistaken with that.
There are so many wonderful special arrangements that were written for Garland by Roger Edens and people like that. "Chicago" and "San Francisco" enjoy all kinds of special material,special patter choruses that were added to the two of them. They became so deeply entrenched with Garland that when somebody else does the song without these special choruses, it seems like its lost something.
This is what we want to hear. We want to hear Garland at Carnegie. Garland doing these songs at Carnegie in front of that audience, and that sense of being involved in the middle of a moment. And I judge that’s what the album captures better than anything,is that absolute sense of that moment.
Come back next week to learn what happened when Louis Armstrong met Oscar Peterson.
Source: thetakeaway.org