Easy To Love ~ Month of Great Tunes & Musing on Cole Porter, Gershwin and Ellington
The Year of Aesthetics №45 2022–10–26
I am focusing this month on a project of listening to fine quality tunes or melodies. My criteria for this are tunes that melodies that lend themselves to variation in arrangement, and adaptation. These tunes are protean shifting but at there heart they hold a core that makes them recognizable no matter how to their limits they are stretched by artist. They are tunes that feel like they are made for the artist embracing them, yet they can be treated as unique by several artist.
This idea originated with playing Cole Porter’s Easy To Love, I picked what I thought was the easiest Cole Porter Song in my Cole Porter book (simple arrangements of his work) . I thought this would be a stepping to other works of his. I as an beginner have to start hands separately, and going through repeatedly note by note, his genius in one of his easier tunes is still easy to see in the melody. His base line I found was the deceptively harder part to play. As the hands come together, I just see how amazingly complete the composition is, full of melody harmony and the magic of cords. I finally am stumbling through the pedal work and the una corda and sustain complete the magic. It is wonderful to live with this song for so many days in a row. I am only at the end of the beginning of learning it, yet it was a happy accidents of a lucky Casanova to have stumbled upon it as a first jazz standard for piano.
Porter songs are more than catchy show tunes, they are well composed and full of lovey tricks above are a very vocal and very instrumental versions of the tune.
Maybe the exemplar of this idea is Gershwin’s Summertime, a tune of parental love, of happiness in less than happy conditions and the longing of humanity. A near perfect lyric with best of tune.
Until this morning I did not know that this version of Summertime existed, but it shows that Gershwin's tune tempo and openness of the original allows experimentation to continue.
As an exemplar of a composer of tunes of the highest caliber there is a noble man an aristocrat who ever lived up to the name of Duke Ellington. Two of my favorites tunes of his are Satin Doll and Caravan.
I have chosen the Monk version of Caravan because his covers of Ellington are so full of respect and take the tunes as far as they go. (also the greatest piano player who ever lived playing Ellington makes sense to me.)
For Satin Doll this old original by Duke and his orchestra is just a wonder, he is a man who had two instruments piano and orchestra, and was a master of both. His composition just is open to endless variation but holds its name sake no matter who plays it. I added the Sitts/Harris version to show how mutable and playful the tune itself is.
Disclaimer Ernest Boehm in no way profits from these links, this medium article for musing on ideas and not for profit.