• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Thursday Evening, January 21, 2016, at 8:30 Is That All There Is? Remembering Peggy Lee Written and hosted by James Gavin Featuring Spencer Day, Barb Jungr, Nellie McKay, Jane Monheit, and Rebecca Parris The The Program Mike Renzi, Piano Bob Cranshaw, Bass Craig Holiday Haynes, Drums This evening’s program is approximately 90 minutes long and will be performed without intermission. Please make certain all your electronic devices are switched off. Major support for Lincoln Center’s American Songbook is provided by Amy & Joseph Perella. Endowment support provided by Bank of America This performance is made possible in part by the Josie Robertson Fund for Lincoln Center. Steinway Piano The Appel Room Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall American Songbook Additional support for Lincoln Center’s American Songbook is provided by The DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund, The Shubert Foundation, Jill and Irwin B. Cohen, The G & A Foundation, Inc., Great Performers Circle, Chairman’s Council, and Friends of Lincoln Center. Public support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts. Artist catering provided by Zabar’s and zabars.com MetLife is the National Sponsor of Lincoln Center UPCOMING AMERICAN SONGBOOK EVENTS IN THE APPEL ROOM: Friday Evening, January 22, at 8:30 Loudon Wainwright III Saturday Evening, January 23, at 8:30 Rita Moreno Wednesday Evening, February 3, at 8:30 Craig Finn Thursday Evening, February 4, at 8:30 The Songs of Todd Almond with special guests Courtney Love and Sherie Rene Scott Friday Evening, February 5, at 8:30 Janis Ian S aturday Evening, February 6, at 8:30 Jerry Dixon & Mario Cantone Wednesday Evening, February 17, at 8:30 Foreigner: The Hits Unplugged Thursday Evening, February 18, at 8:30 A Coffin in Egypt: An Opera-in-Concert featuring Frederica von Stade The Appel Room is located in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall. For tickets, call (212) 721-6500 or visit AmericanSongbook.org. Call the Lincoln Center Info Request Line at (212) 875-5766 or visit AmericanSongbook.org for complete program infor- mation. Join the conversation: #LCSongbook We would like to remind you that the sound of coughing and rustling paper might distract the performers and your fellow audience members. In consideration of the performing artists and members of the audience, those who must leave before the end of the performance are asked to do so between pieces. Flash photography and the use of recording equipment are not allowed in the building. American Songbook I Note on the Program Beneath the Veneer of Cool, a Frail Humanity By James Gavin Peggy Lee cast a spell when she sang. She hypnotized, even on television. Lee epitomized cool, but her signature song “Fever,” covered by Beyoncé and Madonna, sizzles with sexual heat. She never had to shout to make her point; in Lee’s musical language, silence spoke as loudly as sound. Hers was a sweet, husky bed- room voice that beckoned you closer. “When I get very quiet and very intense,” Lee explained, “the power goes right through.” Her jazz sense and swing feel dazzled Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong. Grady Tate, her longtime drum- mer, placed Lee on the pedestal occupied by her idol, Billie Holiday. “Peggy had that nasty, laid-back, demented, sultry, incredibly funky sound that Lady Day had,” Tate said. “But it was Lady with another Lady on top of it.” Recent generations may love her best for her Grammy-winning 1969 classic “Is That All There Is?,” an anthem of existential angst Note on the Program the on Note by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Lee’s recording was arranged, at her insistence, by a then-unknown Randy Newman. But her talents went far beyond singing. In 1955 she earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in Pete Kelly’s Blues, in w hich she played an alcoholic torch singer who goes insane. That same year, Walt Disney released its animated classic Lady and the Tramp, to which Lee contributed four character voices and a half-dozen lyrics—a crowning achievement for an artist who was a singer-songwriter before the term existed. Peggy Lee was born in 1920 as Norma Deloris Egstrom, a name as flat as the Jamestown, North Dakota, landscape from which she sprang. “I was a weird little child with a tremendous imagina- tion,” she recalled. Her best childhood friend, Artis Conitz, added: “She came up out of nowhere. She made a lot out of nothing.” By 1941, Lee was singing with the King of Swing, Benny Goodman. From the late ’40s onward she reigned at the country’s top supper clubs, including Ciro’s, Basin Street East, and the Empire Room fo the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Audiences saw a blonde seductress with a mermaid’s figure, a vixen’s smile, and the ability to control the stage like a puppeteer. Characters materialized with each song. In “Big Spender,” she became a barroom vamp on the make. “I’m a Woman” cast her as an indomitable, sexy house- wife. “What Is a Woman?,” “An Empty Glass,” and the Carpenters hit “Superstar” found her evoki ng faded women whose last chances at love had fled. American Songbook I Note on the Program With time, Lee grew ever stranger and more contradictory. Onstage she epito- mized cool control, but inner turmoil wracked her. She spun a romantic nirvana in her songs, yet couldn’t sustain one in reality. Late in life, a woman plagued by illness and frailty won a two-and-a-half-year battle against Disney in a landmark case over unpaid royalties. By now she look ed like a bizarre fallen angel: a shapeless blur of ghostly, gleaming white, from her snowy Cleopatra wig to her feathered silk robe. Lee claimed a special line to God and declared she would never die. She finally did in 2002. For all her crises and self-destructiveness, Lee is no downtrodden Billie Holiday to the public. Instead she seems tough, sexy, and victorious. The fascination with her has only grown. Lee’s voice keeps turning up like a tenacious ghost in movies, commercials, and television shows. “Is That All There Is?” was featured last spring in the final season of Mad Men. Nearly all of her 50-plus original albums have been reissued. In 2007 record producer Mark Vidler made a mashup of “Fever” and Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger.” Lee’s breakthrough single, “Why Don’t You Do Right?,” recorded in 1942 with Benny Goodman, was sampled in the 2010 No. 1 UK dance hit “Why Don’t You?” by Serbian DJ Gramophonedzie. Vocally, Lee left her mark on many singers. “I love everything about her,” said Diana Krall. “She is one of the greatest influences in what I do as an artist.” Petula Clark, Joni Mitchell, k.d. lang, Jane Monheit, and Marilyn Horne have all acknowledged her influence. “I knew I could never sound like her, but I wanted to,” said Dusty Springfield. Today, when commercial pop is overrun by a fleet of Auto-Tuned robots, lip- syncing onstage to their own vocal tracks and lost onstage without smoke and mirrors, the achievement of Peggy Lee—who sang unaided by anything but musicians, lighting, and a microphone, and who exposed her heart at every show—seems even grander in its humanity. In to night’s show, five singers, all distinct from one another and from Peggy Lee, will conjure up the many sides of an uncategorizable, eternally haunting American original. James Gavin is author of Is That All There Is?: The Strange Life of Peggy Lee, now in paperback from Atria Books/Simon & Schuster. —Copyright © 2016 by James Gavin American Songbook I Meet the Artists © MICHAEL CHILDERS James Gavin Meet the Artists the Meet James Gavin is the author of four books and dozens of New York Times features; he is also a worldwide public speaker, a Grammy nominee, and a two-time recipient of ASCAP’s Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for excellence in music journalism. His most recent book, Is That All There Is?: The Strange Life of Peggy Lee (Atria Books/Simon & Schuster), drew crit- ical praise, as did his previous ones: Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret, Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker, and Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne. The city that made Horne famous, Los Angeles, honored Mr. Gavin with a proclamation in 2010. Born in Manhattan and a graduate of Fordham University, Mr. Gavin is a much-published freelance journalist; his work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Time Out New York, the Daily Beast, and TV Guide, as well as the Times. His subjects have included Annie Lennox, Elizabeth Taylor, Nina Simone, John Legend, John F. Kennedy Jr., Miriam Makeba, Marilyn Monroe, Mae West, Ned Rorem, Edith Piaf, Karen Carpenter, and Jacques Brel. He has contributed liner notes to over 400 CDs; his Grammy nomination came for an essay in the Ella Fitzgerald box set Ella: The Legendary Decca Recordings, released on GRP. Mr. Gavin has appeared in several documentaries, including the E! True Hollywood Story on Doris Day and Anita O’Day: The Life and Times of a Jazz Singer. He has made hundreds of radio appearances, including multi- ple interviews on NPR, the BBC, and Australia’s ABC Network, and has been seen on the Today show, Good Morning America, and PBS NewsHour. Mr. Gavin is currently touring as narrato r, host, and author of Stormy Weather: The Life and Music of Lena Horne, a show that stars for- mer Supreme Mary Wilson.

Load more

  16

Copy Link