Cy Walter
This review ran in the February issue of DownBeat.
Cy Walter
The Park Avenue Tatum
SWCD32
Begin the Beguine
Body and Soul
Broadway Melody of 1940 Medley: I've Got My Eyes On You / Between You And Me/I Happen To Be In Love / I Concentrate On You
By Jupiter Medley: Everything I've Got / Nobody's Heart/Careless Rhapsody / Jupiter Forbid
Crazy Rhythm
Dancing in the Dark
Embraceable You
Falling In Love With Love
Higher and Higher Medley: Nothing But You / From Another World/Every Sunday Afternoon / It Never Entered My Head
I Can't Get Started
Just One of Those Things
I Get a Kick Out Of You
Lady in the Dark Medley: My Ship / This Is New / Jenny
Liza
Pal Joey Medley: Bewitched / I Could Write a Book / Plant You Now, Dig You Later
Panama Hattie Medley: My Mother Would Like You / Make it Another Old Fashioned, Please / Let's Be Buddies / Who Would Have Dreamed / Fresh as a Daisy
It's Only A Paper Moon
'S Wonderful
The Blue Room
The Way You Look Tonight
Very Warm For May Medley: All The Things You Are / Heaven In My Arms/All In Fun / In The Heart Of The Dark / That Lucky Fellow
Waltz In Swing Time
You Never Know Medley: From Alpha to Omega / At Long Last Love / For No Rhyme Or Reason/You Never Know / What Shall I Do? / Maria
Total Time: 78.57
Who was Cy Walter? Unless you used to drink at the posh Drake Hotel in the early sixties, you probably don’t know. However, a small group of devotees have kept his name alive, and they are why we have The Park Avenue Tatum, a collection of his 1940’s recordings. This is the first CD of Walter (1915-1968), and it firmly establishes him as one of the finest interpreters of the golden age of show music.
Walter’s art is far more advanced than any other cocktail pianist. In addition to a sophisticated harmonic language, his intricate arrangements exhibit an astonishing amount of counterpoint: the low, high, and mid-registers of the instrument relate in euphonious polyphony. Jazz pianists from this era always wanted to know, “How good is your left hand?” By any standard, Walter’s is very, very good.
It’s interesting to compare Walter and Art Tatum on “Begin the Beguine,” which they both treated as a virtuoso showpiece. Walter tells the song’s sophisticated story better than Tatum, who doesn’t follow the composer’s elaborate form. (“Beguine” has the longest form of any standard, closer to a rondo in classical music than a 32-bar pop song.) Tatum swings harder. I’d call the match-up a draw.
Jazz history has shamefully ignored Walter, but in his heyday he was well known among Broadway’s elite. Richard Rodgers preferred Walter to any jazz pianist, since Walter always honored the song instead of merely "blowing." One of the finest things on The Park Avenue Tatum is Jerome Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight,” which Walter plays as a hushed reverie. Suddenly you understand why Kern hated up-tempo bebop versions of his music.
Walter is probably best understood not in the context of either jazz or Broadway, but in the tradition of classical composer/pianists like Leopold Godowsky and Ignaz Friedman, both virtuosos who loved to transfigure Viennese waltzes and other light fare into complicated piano music. Walter’s beautiful chorus of “All the Things You Are,” with the melody singing chastely in the middle-register, decorated on top and bottom with delicate slides and runs, sounds considerably like a Godowsky treatment of a Schubert song.
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Cy Walter seems to be in the air these days; I feel part of a delightful conspiracy to get his name known again.
Very special thanks to my close friend and wonderful pianist Mike Kanan, who has introduced many, including myself, to the music of Cy Walter.
Terry Teachout's blog post on Walter is the definitive Walter essay; I had had a hard time avoiding mimicking it in my own review.
There is now a great, family-run Cy Walter website with Mp3s. Click here to listen to the version of "All the Things You Are" reviewed above. In the extensive archive, there are even scans of his scores! In the guestbook, Denny Zeitlin has also written an appreciation of Walter.
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I have been thinking of Denny Zeitlin lately: I've long known that Zeitlin's powerful solo performance of "Billie's Bounce" (a bitonal fantasy, with the theme in F and G simultaneously) was an important early influence, but while searching for the composer of "Milk" (see this post) I discovered that Zeitlin wrote the fabulous music for this skit. Zeitlin: It was done around '72 or '73, and called "1 to 10", performed with bass and drums, and sometime later, overdubbed by Grace Slick singing/saying the numbers 1 thru 10.
This is also an important (even earlier) influence! Thanks, Mr. Zeitlin!
