Jazz
Hung up on the past
Martin Gayford
It is often observed that they don't write songs any more the way they used to, and I fear the observation is largely true. The classic American bong — which provides a good deal of the raw material for jazz was developed in the early part of the cen- tury, brought to perfection by the Gersh- wins, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter and co. between the wars, and has been in decline ever since. The rock/pop/hip- hop/disco/reggae ditty which has replaced is something different and, as far as I am concerned, far less interesting. But even today a few lone figures labour, often unre- garded, to blend literate words with memo- rable melodies. Among the most distinctive of these is the American jazz pianist, singer and songwriter Dave Frishberg, who is appearing at the Pizza on the Park, Knightsbridge, until 4 July.
Frishberg is a man out of his time in more than one way — and therefore, as far as I am concerned, doubly valuable. He is not only a songwriter of a disappearing breed, he is also a piano-player of a swing- ing, peppy kind now rare to the point of extinction. He served his apprenticeship in a glorious old school, working with the two tenor saxophonists Zoot Sims and Al Cohn, both benchmarks of perfection to other players, and as accompanist to the incomparable, spherical blues shouter, Lit- tle Jimmy Rushing (`Mr Five by Five, he's five feet tall and five feet wide').
Rushing's last major recording, 'The You And Me That Used To Be', was also one of Frishberg's first individual achievements, on which he recreated behind the aged singer the kind of breezy little band which used to play behind Billie Holiday in the 1930s. Frishberg's work under his own name was marked for a while by a similar antiquarianism, featuring brisk versions of charming, forgotten tunes — not so much standards, more old pop songs — like `Truckin' and 'Old Man Harlem'. But more and more he came to sing and play his own compositions, which include some of the funniest and most recondite pieces in the repertoire.
There is no set formula for a Frishberg piece. The best known are comic mono- logues in music, for example that trend- hound's paean of self-love, `I'm Hip', and `My Attorney Bernie', a client's hymn of thanks to a thoroughly crooked lawyer (`Bernie says we sue, we sue/Bernie says we sign, we sign').
In songs like these, and the hilarious `Blizzard of Lies', which consists almost entirely of a catalogue of disingenuous con- temporary clichés — 'We've got inflation licked/I'll get right back to you' — Frish- berg is the true musical chronicler of the post-Watergate era. Beneath the satire, however, there is a deep vein of melan- choly nostalgia. This comes out in his twin preoccupations with failure and superannu- ated sporting stars. The latter is displayed most clearly in what is by some way the oddest of his works, 'Van Lingle Mungo' the lyrics of which are made up entirely of the names of baseball players of yesteryear, intoned with wistful tenderness.
Such songs bring to mind a vanishing small-town America of probity and straight-hitting. Nowadays, as another song suggests, the only refuge of such virtues is the sports pages of the newspaper. Togeth- er with the great American song and gen- uine, life-enhancing hot jazz — Zoot Sims, Jimmy Rushing, Bix Beiderbecke, subject of 'Dear Bix' — they are on the way out. This perhaps accounts for the valedictory air Frishberg's music quite often has.
His voice, rough around the edges and woebegone, as if some Middle-Western bank manager had suddenly burst into song, is just perfect for what he does, and utterly ill-adapted for the performance of anything else. In this respect, Frishberg fits into a long tradition of jazz musicians with good-bad voices, going back to Armstrong and Fats Waller; but his stage presence, tousled, grey-flannel-suited and bespecta- cled, is very far from the bonhomie and razzamatazz one associates with figures such as these.
Like many of the best jazz musicians and the finest cabaret performers, Frishberg is unique. There is no one else like him, and no other songs like his. In introducing `The Dear Departed Past', he once remarked that the piece was about someone like him- self, `hung up on the past, pathologically, I guess'. Pathological or not, his obsession is wonderfully productive, and for those of us who share it, he is much to be treasured.
so long as they don't send us to Canary Wharf.'
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