John Bommarito interviewed Professor Brent Wagner and Assistant Professor of Music Tyler Driskill about an upcoming event at Kerrytown Concert House on The Song Break:
John Bommarito: You're listening to The Song Break on 891 WEMU. This hour of music, if you've been paying attention, is dedicated to the work of Harold Arlen. The song Break as you know, if you listen regularly, is a show that celebrates the Great American Songbook and the modern-day songbook by simply celebrating the art of the song. There's a new lecture series at the Kerrytown Concert House in Ann Arbor that began last month called “The Great American Songbook: What Makes it Great?” It's a collaboration between Kerrytown Concert House and two gentlemen who are joining me on The Song Break. Please welcome Professor Brent Wagner, Emeritus Chair and Professor Musical Theatre Department at the University of Michigan. Welcome, Brent.
Professor Brent Wagner: Thank you. Good to be here.
John Bommarito: And Tyler Driscoll, pianist and vocalist and Assistant Professor of Music in the U of M Musical Theater Department as well. Welcome.
Tyler Driskill: Thank you, John. So great to be with you.
John Bommarito: Brent, are you a musician, too?
Professor Brent Wagner: Yes, I grew up playing the piano. And so actually, these songs of the Great American Songbook, I would buy the Rodgers and Hart Songbook or Jerome Kern or, you know, Harold Arlen, and I'd play them at the piano. In addition, of course, to hearing them on the radio.
John Bommarito: Of course. Well, that seems like a good way to start a career as a professor in music. Tyler, how long have you been playing the piano?
Tyler Driskill: Goodness. Since the age of about 6 or 7. I started playing classical piano, but always played a lot by ear, which I think lent itself to my appreciation for popular song.
John Bommarito: Which is your favorite of the Great American Songbook writers, by chance?
Tyler Driskill: Goodness. That's a tough question to answer. I would say if it's limited to two. I would say Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer are right up there for me.
John Bommarito: Okay. I have in the past done an entire show of just Cole Porter songs, and that went over pretty well with listeners. They responded to that because those songs are timeless, and they've been done by so many people from so many eras. They stand the test of time.
Tyler Driskill: Yes indeed, they do.
John Bommarito: Well, that's great. Well, the next performance and lecture is Part Two. We missed the first one. We didn't get a chance to connect for some reason, but the Harold Arlen Edition lecture, which is why we're featuring him today, just the songwriting and the collaborations that Harold Arlen did. This takes place this coming Sunday, October 13th at 4 p.m. at the Kerrytown Concert House. So which one of you came up with the idea to present this series and to discuss and perform these extremely important songs there?
Professor Brent Wagner: I think it was probably both of us talking together. I think I maybe had the initiative about Kerrytown, but Tyler and I have done a lot together through the years. We did an online songbook series, history oriented for two years recently. And then I, for many years, taught musical theater history classes at the University of Michigan and invited Tyler to my class often, and he would play the piano and talk about the songs from a musical standpoint. And I would talk about the lyrics. We sort of entertained ourselves and the students and loved doing that so much that we wanted to find ways to continue if we could.
Tyler Driskill: I would give Brent much of the credit for this brainchild. Monica Swartout-Bebow at Kerrytown had invited me to do a concert series featuring famous composers, famous songwriters, but lesser-known works, and I think this flowed naturally from that series. And I just it's been such an honor and a treat to collaborate with Brent over the years in the classroom and on the stage.
John Bommarito: So, Tyler, you're hinting that we're not going to hear the biggest of the biggest hits. You're going to hear a little deep cut action going on in this show.
Tyler Driskill: Well, I think, you know, it will cover a lot of terrain. I think my responsibility with the companion concerts is to try to feature lesser-known works. Professor Wagner can probably speak to generally the songs that we share in the lecture series.
Professor Brent Wagner: Well, yes. And I think we have to cover the famous ones because that's probably why people are coming to start with. But you know, with Harold Arlen, it's interesting because there were three major lyricists Ted Koehler, Yip Harburg and of course, Johnny Mercer. And three major songs that we have to talk about are with each one with one of the different lyricists. You know, “Over the Rainbow” with Yip Harburg, “Blues in the Night” Johnny Mercer and “Stormy Weather, Ted Koehler. And those three have really, I think, entered the American Songbook at the highest level and are probably there to stay.
John Bommarito: They're the ones that get covered a lot, tend to stay there a long time. Yeah, that's for sure. It's the song Break on WEMU. I'm John Bommarito, here with Brent Wagner and Tyler Driscoll, both from the University of Michigan. I'm going to offer a hypothesis or two during this conversation. In regards to the modern-day songbook, which you're not doing, but maybe someday you will. To me, what makes something a standard is how often the song gets covered by the original writer and their contemporaries. So I would argue that things like “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen, “Fragile” by Sting and “Creep” by Radiohead, not necessarily songs that you would stick in the same category. But I, as a huge music fan, see those songs continually covered and covered and covered and covered. And I imagine that is what makes these songs that we're talking about now. That's what qualifies them as standards, right? Is that…would you guys would agree?
Tyler Driskill: I would say that in the future, we're probably going to see the emergence of a second generation of the Great American Songbook. I think, you know, when we talk. About the Great American Songbook, we are strictly focused on the writers of a particular era. You know, the 20s through perhaps the early 60s.But with any kind of art form, musical theater, opera, things get categorized over time. So, it wouldn't surprise me if there emerged down the road, sort of a second collection of American contribution to popular song.
John Bommarito: I've been calling it the modern-day songbook.
Tyler Driskill: I like that.
Professor Brent Wagner: Absolutely. I think, like Tyler says, there needs to be a distance before we really know what we have as a collection anyway. We can identify single songs of recent years, but perhaps not collate them into a larger system, whereas we could with this era. But, you know, when Alec Wilder wrote that sort of definitive book, The American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, he felt that the era ended in 1950. And there is a foundation, the Great American Songbook, that Michael Feinstein writes. And I looked his definition up on their website just to see when is this songbook? And it's, like Tyler says, they link it to the early 1960s from the 20s. But I think, you know, in the 50s even then, Ella Fitzgerald was one that really established the notion of the Great American Songbook because she recorded those, I think it was eight albums of the Songbook series, all devoted to one writer. And that was a little unusual at the time. Norman Granz, of course, was the mastermind. And these were not just short albums. There would be double album sets, you know. Three, four albums I think we're in the Gershwin collection. And at that time, that was, I think, alerting everybody in the late 50s or early 60s that there indeed was a great period of American songwriter, and then it extended past then. But it's a unified era. I think we're looking at now.
Tyler Driskill: With the advent of rock and roll and rhythm and blues in the 50s, we see a divergence. You have artists like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra that are covering songs within the Great American Songbook. But I think we're at that point. We've entered an era of the singer songwriter. So, there's just there are different trends in songwriting. But, you know, writers like Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer were still around in the 60s and still writing and still crafting these wonderful songs. So, there's a bit of an overlap, which is kind of neat to explore.
John Bommarito: Sure. But then Lennon and McCartney and Paul Simon and all these people came along. Now those songs are being covered. “Yesterday.“ Isn't that the most covered song of all time? Beatles
Professor Brent Wagner: I think it was usually it was paired with “White Christmas” as one of the most recorded songs of all time. So, The Beatles certainly had many songs contributing to the Great Songbook, whether it was American or not. You know, it was it was a huge contribution.
Tyler Driskill: And the fun thing about that song is it's still a 32-bar song form. It's A-A-B-A. So, it’s drawing from all those formulaic traditions of all the great writers.
John Bommarito: Sure. and they were fans, I mean, McCartney has his album Kisses on the Bottom, where he covers a lot of that stuff. So, clearly, he was a fan. Why do you think there are so many versions of these songs, I guess? Well, some that went towards Brent. Many of them were hits. Why did the people keep recording them at the time?
Professor Brent Wagner: Well, I think there's a number of things. I think one thing was that these songs overlapped with a really expanding era of musical theater, of musical film. Tin Pan Alley, of course, supplied some of the early ones, and those would have been strictly pop songs. And it paralleled, I think, the beginnings of radio and the real takeoff of the recording industry. And so, these all kind of converged. And then you had the great movie musicals of the 30s with people like Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and others. Gershwin, in fact, writing for movies. And I think people were attracted to the melodies, the harmonies and the rhythms, which is pretty vague, but they were just…they were written to be embraced by everybody. Even if you wrote a song specifically, as Arlen/Harburg did for Judy Garland. I read recently that there are still over 5,000 recordings of “Over the Rainbow.”
John Bommarito: There are quite a few.
Professor Brent Wagner: Yes. And whether that's the exact number or not or somebody exaggerated, I think people were excited to put their own stamp on these songs and you'd find them whether it was Ella Fitzgerald or Miles Davis doing Gershwin. Or, you know, Lawrence Tibbett singing Vincent Youmans’ "Without a Song” in an encore. Later on, it almost got extreme. But I think people just gravitated to these songs because of the craftsmanship.
John Bommarito: That more or less aligns with what my hypothesis was on the answer for that. It was, basically the music industry and business was developing. It wasn't just sheet music anymore, right? So now there was recordings to buy. And to monetize that the record labels, and I come from a record store background before I got into radio. There was money to be made. So, “hey, you should do a version of that song. You should do a version of that song.” I wasn't there. I don't know if that's what happened, but that's kind of how I pictured why.
Tyler Driskill: I think you just described the Capitol Records story.
Professor Brent Wagner: Which was Johnny Mercer, of course. Yeah, absolutely. And many of these songwriters were, to a degree, performers themselves. Not to the way that they were singer songwriters, you know. But they could perform their own material. And Johnny Mercer, I'm thinking of in particular, was well-known as a performer. And Harold Arlen that we're about to feature was actually quite well known for his own recordings. He had a flair for his own music as well he should, I guess. Where somebody like Irving Berlin could sing his songs but, you know, didn't put out recordings or anything of the songs.
John Bommarito: You’re listening to The Song Break on WEMU. I'm John Bommarito here with Brent Wagner and Tyler Driscoll. They're teaming up for an event at the Kerrytown Concert House this Sunday. The Harold Arlen edition of a lecture series, part of the series that has been going on at the Kerrytown concert house for, well, just one month we missed, right? We're going to talk about the rest of the series in a bit. But Tyler, as a performer, when you're not doing great American Songbook style like you're doing at Kerrytown, what else do you like to perform? Do you do originals of your own? Do you have your own music?
Tyler Driskill: You know, I do do some arranging, but I haven't written really anything original in a long time. Students would say that I do a lot of improvising at the piano and principally using these songs. So, I guess one could argue that, you know, I am writing just, you know, using these songs as vehicles.
Professor Brent Wagner: I should cut in and say that Tyler, in addition to everything else, is a monumentally skilled dance class accompanist. And that may sound like, you just pull out the sheet music and play, but it's not as easy as that. And it's a very rare skill. And whether it's tap or styles or ballet. Ballet is especially difficult. He's a wizard at that and I love to come to those classes whenever I could when I was chair and just sit and listen to the great songs being played and falling on deaf ears because the students were worried about their steps. But it was just wonderful to hear these great songs used in so many ways.
Tyler Driskill: Well, it is nice to be in that environment because I feel like I can plant earworms and sometimes if I know the students are preparing for an exam in Professor Wagner's class, I will actually plant many of those songs in a barre, in a ballet class just to test them. They like that. They enjoy that.
John Bommarito: That's good. Professor Wagner, I've got an idea. If you just required your students to purchase a ticket to get an A, the show would be sold out, right?
Professor Brent Wagner: Well, don't think I haven't thought of that.
John Bommarito: No, I’m just kidding.
Professor Brent Wagner: Well, yeah, that's right. You know, you have them buy textbooks so why not buy a ticket here?
John Bommarito: It's education. Why not? It is an educational experience, even for those who aren't your students. For folks like me who…I feel like I know a lot, I'm sure attending this I could learn a whole lot more because you guys are more experts on it than I am.
Professor Brent Wagner: Well, in a way it is a little like a lecture performance series. We have students from the department who will be performing, but we talk a lot about the songs and how they're structured, and we'll look at the musical line in it, or the harmonies and how they enhance the meaning of the song and what the lyrics do that make a song special. Because if our subtitle is “What Makes It Great,” I think just performing the songs wouldn't be enough. So, we really try to explore with the audience there what it would be like to explore these in a class, and that's our goal.
Tyler Driskill: It really is a joy to approach these songs from many different angles. The lyrics, the harmonic construction, the form. You know, I get to do little mini music theory lessons in the context of a lecture. It's just really special to be able to share these songs with this audience.
John Bommarito: These are pretty compelling reasons to go to Kerrytownconcerthouse.com to get more information about the series. Again, it's Part Two this coming Sunday, October 13th. Kerrytown Concert House in downtown Ann Arbor. 4 p.m. show. Third part is coming up in November, right November 22nd. If I’ve got that right.
Tyler Driskill: November 22nd is the companion concert.
John Bommarito: Right, that's the one that just has concert, but no lecture.
Tyler Driskill: Correct. So that'll feature the songs of the previous two writers, both Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen.
John Bommarito: And we're going to dig into Irving next hour to kind of just preview some of those songs people might be able to hear at that concert. Future concerts feature Duke Ellington's music. There's a Carolyn Leigh one.
Professor Brent Wagner: Carolyn Leigh, yes. In fact, I bet you know her songs. Maybe not her name.
John Bommarito: I don't.
Professor Brent Wagner: “The Best is Yet to Come,” Cy Coleman. She wrote with him. Of course, that was Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. “Witchcraft” was a big hit for Sinatra. And others like that. They she did a lot with Cy Coleman. And so, I want to bring her name to attention because she's not a name everybody knows.
John Bommarito: And there we go. It's an educational series again kerrytownconcerthouse.com to get more information about it. Thank you, Brent Wagner and Tyler Driscoll for joining me on the program today. It was a pleasure to meet you both and to hear about this upcoming series.
Tyler Driskill: Thank you, John. It's pleasure talking to you.
Professor Brent Wagner: Yes, it was wonderful to have this opportunity. Thank you.
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