Music! Music! Music!

"Put another nickel in,
In the nickelodeon
All I want is havin' you
And Music! Music! Music!"

We didn't call it a nickelodeon but we listened to that song on a jukebox (same thing) in 1950 (I was 11) in the Stoplight Grill on West Main, catty cornered from the shotgun house that sat back from the street, the one I was born in. (Wonder years, those. Pee Wee Anderson and I pre-dated Harold and Kumar by eating as many sliders as we could afford from our paper routes and that we didn't spend on the pinball machine.) Teresa Brewer sang the hit; she was "hot" in 1950. She herself was only 19 then. She would become a jazz singer after many pop hits before she died in 2007 at the age of 76.

The tune of the "refrain," where she sings

"Closer, my dear come closer,
The nicest part of any melody
Is when you're dancin' close to me..."

is kind of lifted from a piano work by Franz Lizst, I can't say which but I recognize the melody when I hear it. It's OK to borrow the phrase, good composers flattered one another by borrowing here and there, besides Lizst has long been in the public domain. Perry Como's "Hot Diggety" was Chabrier's "Espana Rhapsody."

And in the 70's the lead-in to the tune "All By Myself" is even the same orchestral arrangement as that of Rachmaninoff in a piano concerto. And I confess I like the modern composer's resolution of that lead-in better than the original Rachmaninoff composition, which leaves me kind of frustrated. Rachmaninoff, though, is all in all one of my favorite composers. One of my favorite movie scenes is the fantasy seduction of Marilyn Monroe by Tom Ewell (he in his "smoking jacket") in "The Seven Year Itch" accompanied by a Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto.*

Listening to the finale of Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony. No TV tonight (although I will probably look in on The Daily Show, the best #@! news show on the air). And I'm still enjoying soundtracks -- catch "Ratatouille," a great feature-length cartoon. The music is by Michael Giacchino, one of the better Hollywood composers, I'd say, judging from this.

And "The Milagro Beanfield War" is on Turner tonight. I love its theme by Dave Grusin.

Music! Music! Music!

(*No. 2 -- in c minor, Op. 18, if you give a ...)