Program III

JAZZ: BURTON LANE AND JULE STYNE

Wednesday, August 31, 2011 • 5:00 & 8:30 p.m.
Thursday, September 1, 2011 • 5:00 & 8:30 p.m.

Burton Lane (1912-97)
   I Hear Music
   Everything I Have is Yours
   Howd’ya Like to Love Me
   Moments Like This
   Old Devil Moon
   Too Late Now
   How About You

Jule Styne (1905-94) and Sammy Cahn (1912-1993)
   It’s You or No One
   I’ve Heard that Song Before
   Some Other Time
   I’ll Walk Alone
   I’m Glad I Waited for You
   It’s Been a Long Long Time
   Time After Time

Nicole Pasternak, vocals
Tom Artin, trombone
Rose Mary Harbison, violin
John Harbison, piano
John Schaffer, bass
Todd Steward, drums

The great flowering of American popular song, especially its connection to musical theatre, was actually brief – roughly the early 1920’s to the middle ’50s.

Rock, spanning some sixty-five years, has held a much larger sway. In the increasingly abundant account of the theater song, Burton Lane and Jule Styne are held to be the last of a breed, writers who graced the end of an era with the kind of range and invention that characterizes the American Songbook.
Burton Lane was discovered, while still a teenager, by George Gershwin. He became a kind of apprentice-protégé to the still-young master: his early songs are distinctive, but bear a certain Gershwin stamp. Lane went on, through a long career, to compose successful films (High Society) and musicals (Brigadoon, On a Clear Day).

Lane wrote few songs, by the heady standard to the pop music world, but his best (as in “Too Late Now” or “Old Devil Moon”) are up in the Gershwin-Porter class. Jule Styne didn’t reach those heights, but wrote far more good songs than Lane. He was at his best in somewhat formal theater ballads, of which “Time After Time” is the best known. Our concerts seek to bring special focus to the songs he and Sammy Cahn wrote as a script for the end of World War II, both the waiting for the troops to come home, and the return. Many of us claim a relative who was forever marked by that war, some of us even remember those songs dominating the air waves through the ‘40s (and we know they were there at the front as well). In a country that has been sending soldiers to war for the last ten years, we notice a certain lack of such markers (they were present during Vietnam), emblems that can eventually serve to bring back a historical moment even for those who didn’t experience it directly.