A few things the OSL production
team learned, remembered, or didn’t have time to mention relative to Wednesday’s On Second Listen.
September, one more time
We opened with Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” but here’s the connection I wish we’d lingered over: Gilbert Bécaud’s “C’est en septembre” and Neil Diamond’s “September Morn” aren’t merely French and English versions that happened to cross paths. Bécaud and Diamond actually collaborated on the song—and it wasn’t a one-off. They went on to write several songs together for Diamond’s The Jazz Singer, including the No. 2 hit “Love on the Rocks.”
And perhaps one more September footnote. In “Silver Seas,” an early version of Billy Joel’s “Nocturne,” Joel sings of someone who “died in September.” Coming not long after Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” it’s another tiny example of how often September in popular music seems to become a month of memory and loss. I’m not sure that constitutes a musical tradition. But once you start listening for these things, they have a way of turning up.
Songs that acquired words
Our second half-hour began with Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five”—or, more precisely, Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.” Desmond wrote the composition and played that unmistakable alto saxophone solo; Joe Morello was on drums, Eugene Wright on bass and Brubeck, of course, on piano. I was privileged to attend a master class given by Morello in the 1980s, as a member of New Jersey’s All-State High School Jazz Band. He does amazing work on that recording and so many others.
If the television themes amused you, there are more rabbit holes available. The vocal demo of Neal Hefti’s Odd Couple theme really does carry a songwriting credit for the great Sammy Cahn—the lyricist behind, among many others, “Come Fly with Me” and “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”
And OSL listener Cameron from Allentown reminds us that there’s another Jeannie worth letting out of the bottle. “Jeannie’s Diner,” created by Mark Jonathan Davis, combines the I Dream of Jeannie theme with Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner.” Better still, it appears on Vega’s 1991 Tom’s Album—an entire collection built around different reinterpretations of “Tom’s Diner.” Now that’s an album made for On Second Listen.
Bach, Bach-ish, and not Bach at all
Our third segment began with Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” whose musical ancestry goes back much farther than Simon—or Bach. The melody was originally a secular song by Hans Leo Hassler, later became the chorale usually known as “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” and was used repeatedly by Bach in the St. Matthew Passion before Simon gave it another life in 1973.
And a personal postscript to all those Bach chorales. I own a piano book by Cory Hall called Sight-Reading & Harmony, which takes Bach’s four-part chorales and progressively reorganizes them as sight-reading exercises. So apparently pulling apart Bach harmonies has both entertainment—and instructional—value! Hall’s method works through them in progressively more difficult levels, all the way to advanced sight-reading and harmony.
When one song becomes two
We finished with songs that come in pairs, beginning with Journey’s “Feeling That Way” and “Anytime.” One thing that’s easy to miss if Steve Perry is the voice you associate with Journey: “Anytime” features Gregg Rolie on vocals and keyboards alongside Perry.
Thanks, as always, for listening—and for the kind words I heard after Wednesday’s show. No listener corrections this week, which either means we got everything right or that everyone was being very polite.
On Second Listen returns Wednesday from 10 to noon on WMUH 91.7 FM.