Dave Frishberg Songbook

Liner Notes

Dear Frlsh:

Heard a guy in a bar the other night singing your Sweet Kentucky; Ham, and found myself in a remarkable state of mind. There I sat, staring into what for all the world could have been a bowl of navy bean (it wasn’t —  it was a pretty diabolical onion soup, but what tbe hell), and realizing all of a sudden tubal I felt like crying. The loneliness of the song, the desolation of someone cut off from all be knew and loved, had gotten to me-even after having heard the lyric a bloused times, known you for years.

All the more, maybe, because of it.

Songwriting’s a perilous craft, a kind of poetry, but in several ways more circumscribed, self limiting. Form to a great degree, dictates content; as in Haiku, you move the elements around, refine them edit and condense, until they fit. The sentiment, too, always seems to straddle a thin line between profundity and abject banality. The great masters understood that, made it work for them in communicating a thought or idea.

But we’re living in impoverished times. Who was it who said that the death agony of great songwriting when the composers, so-called, started printing their lyrics on the inner sleeves of record albums? The final cry of a dry imagination, indeed. Imagine Noel Coward having to do that, or Johnny Mercer, for fear the public wouldn’t be able to make out most of what some rock genius was bawling about.

But once in a while, contrary to the Zeitgeist, contrary to prevailing fad, fashion and sundry imbecilities , an individual happens along who communicates naturally and easily, without benefit of a printed inner sleeve. Someone who understands feeling because be himself feels. Who understands the musical process because he makes music. Understands excellence because he embodies it.

Which is about, I guess, where Dave Frisbberg fits in. I’m not sure, never will be, how the chemistry works: how a guy born and raised in St. Paul trained as a journalist, and in his maturity a discerning, rewarding jazz pianist somehow also developed the power to reach, move and, ultimately, win the hearts of strangers, simply by fitting words to a melody. Do you perhaps tap some universal emotional pipeline, through which feeling flows all the time like oil from a far-off desert site just over the horizon? Is there a mysterious formula for penetrating all the rituals and defenses with which we protect ourselves from vulnerability?

It’s been written of you that you’re a romantic, who “identifies strongly” with the past. I’m not completely sure what the writer meant by that, but here’s what I’d mean by it: At some time, all of us seem to glance backward with longing. We speak of golden ages, lost youths, better and simpler lives; greater, now-dead creators and martyred promise; legend, dreams and memories.

Easy enough to write all that off as nostalgia, superficial escapism, even idealization of a time and place that never existed. Isn’t it more honest, though to read it as indication that we are all constantly in search of ourselves?

We’ve been so coerced by technology, by tbe ready-made and pre-cooked and depersonalized, manufactured demand and mediocre supply, that we ‘re always eager to go hunting for something we can recognize, treasure. Even love.

I think you perceive your life, perhaps existence in general in terms of that search, and the sense of continuity it implies. The impulses which led people half a century ago to express longing and hope, conflict and despair, pain and elation, weren’t recognizably different from what Ibey are now. Fashions in expression or emotional posture change, but the need to discover and express marches on.

In other words, when the guy in the hotel room of Sweet Kentucky Ham turns on the TV, clutches at his magazine, lifts the phone in a forlorn attempt to fill the awful emptiness of being an outsider in yet another strange town, he’s expressing a dilemma that we’ve all encountered somewhere. You don’t have to be a jazz musician on the road to have felt it-though that life, as we know, has more than its share of empty evenings and lonesome moments

You’ve been what you are for quite awhile now: that is, a music-maker who feels there’s more to making music than just comping and playing solos in somebody’s rhythm section. Let’s note here that you are also a stunning solo pianist, who has spun Hines, Stacy, Jelly, and a bunch of others with your own threads into a stylistic fabric strong and vivid. But that’s not the subject for this moment: we’re dealing here with the Frishberg who has maintained all along that he can reach people as a sort of late 20th century troubadour, singing to them of lives and feelings they recognize. Leaving them a little different for the experience –a little better.

One magic night, on the stage of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, you sat at a piano-a godawful electric grand, too– and played and sang all by yourself for a house bulging with happy listeners. You were speaking to them about their own feelings and secret aspirations. By letting them into the world you and your songs inhabit, you were giving them the most precious gift imaginable: themselves.

And they adored you for it.

Now, at last, there’s a Dave Frishberg record which does what that night at the Mark Taper did. It offers a small, neatly-defined bounty: you at the keyboard, doing ten of your own songs. Steve Gilmore and Bill Goodum are there on some tracks, but they never draw undue attention to themselves. They simply support-which is, after all, why they happened lo be there in the first place.

This wasn’t meant to be an official biography, or a scholarly evaluation of you and your oeuvre. Or even, honest, a piece of outer record sleeve “He’s the greatest, folks “-style hype. Instead, Dave ol’ friend, old chum, old elf, it’s to tell you what you doubtless at some level already know, since you wrote it once in a lyric about a guy we both admire:

. . . So do what you got to do,
And may the years be good to you,
Cause you’re one of the favored few…

. . . dear David, you are indeed one of a kind
-and I am very, very grateful.

Affectionately,
Richard M. Sudhaler

Dave’s Notes

I’M HIP-I brought this lyric without a melody to Bob Dorough, who I felt sure would supply the most telling musical setting. As usual, Dorough came through.

VAN LINGLE MUNGO-St. Paul, Minnesota, was a minor league baseball town when I was growing up there. To me, major league ballplayers were pictures in a magazine, names in a box score.

SARATOGA HUNCH-I composed this as an instrumental piece for AI Cohn and Zoot Sims during the old Half Note days in New York. The title commemorates a weird experience the band had in Saratoga Springs. I liked the title and added the lyric later.

D0 YOU MISS NEW YORK?-Though California living is a piece of cake compared to everyday life in The Apple, I did invest fourteen years in New York City, and like most other transplanted New Yorkers, I sometimes think about moving back.

MY SWAN SONG-Each time I finish a song, I’m afraid it’s the last one. There will be no more ideas, no more melodies. I’m usually right.

SLAPPIN` THE CAKES ON ME – The expression ‘slappin’ the cakes’ was coined by Cynthia “Sam” Wagman and the Gorman sisters during their high school days in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, In later years, Sam became my wife – obviously cake-slappin’ of the highest order.

LISTEN HERE-This song was written for Mary Tyler Moore, who sang it beautifully in the closing moments of her TV special “How to Survive The Seventies”.

A LITTLE TASTE-I was always attracted to this Johnny Hodges riff, recorded in the 1950s. I kept the title, expanded the music, and added the lyric.

SWEET KENTUCKY HAM-I finished my first draft of this song in a bleak motel in Modesto, California. It was two in the morning, I was hopelessly in love, and there were no restaurants open.

Z’s-As a kid, I once watched Stan Ken(on’s band packing up after a college date, I overheard one of the musicians use this expression. It was the hippest thing I had ever heard.