Do You Miss New York?

DAVE FRISHBERG: DO YOU MISS NEW YORK?
LIVE AT JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER

Notes by Daniel Okrent

I once expressed astonishment that Dave Frishberg could make logical, and rhyming, use of the words “counterfeit debentures” in a song lyric, but that was before I really knew his work (and long before I came across a rhyme for “frightening,” in the third cut of this disc, that you must hear to believe). Once you immerse yourself in Frishbergiana, the constant astonishment can tire you out if you’re not careful. This is how to be careful with Frishberg: don’t listen to one of his discs more than once a day, even though you’re inclined at times to listen to nothing but.

For me, this inclination arises from the array of opportunities he provides. I can listen to Frishberg the lyricist, who dazzles with wordplay, runs jokes through his songs like a Tonight Show monologist (although Frishberg’s are much funnier), and then in the next moment veers into an aching tenderness that takes your breath away. Frishberg the composer can float a sorrowful ballad or unreel a leaping, up-tempo swinger. As a vocalist, he has that inexplicable, even illogical gift that occasionally pops up in jazz but in no other art: an unbeautiful voice of limited range that nonetheless produces singing that’s as delightful as it is surprising. And as for Frishberg the piano player, he’s every bit as capable as you might imagine from examining the roster of musicians in whose groups he played early in his career. Ben Webster, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Gene Krupa, and Carmen McRae all had a pretty wide range of pianists to pick from, and all of them picked Frishberg. If this were another era, he’d be celebrated as a genuinely great pianist.

That would be the era when, in Gene Lees’s wonderful phrase, good music was popular and popular music was good. It was also the era that kept popping into my mind watching and listening to Frishberg in December, 2002, when this disc was recorded during his engagement at the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse at Lincoln Center in New York.

Part of it may have had to do with the setting – the Kaplan is a large, high-ceilinged, glassed-in room that looks out over the Hudson River, almost giving you the feeling that you’re on some great ocean liner. Frishberg was wearing his usual sober gray suit, white shirt, and respectable tie – a uniform that makes him look more like a banker than a musician. The crowd applauded the way crowds used to applaud before television, rock concerts, and other cultural depredations introduced the sort of hooting and yelping that now passes for the expression of enthusiasm. We were in a grown-up place, where a grown-up musician was about to play music for an audience of grown-up listeners.

I don’t mean to suggest that Frishberg is a throwback, or that his audience is a collection of aged mossbacks. This isn’t about age; it’s about taste. Looking around at the Kaplan, you could see plenty of people in their 20s and 30s, all of them, like the rest of us, escaping the barking clamor of bad music and illiterate, soul-depleting lyrics to find the high ground of wit, craft, and musical imagination that Frishberg exemplifies, and that he displays so generously on this disc.

For me, several cuts stand out (this does not suggest disapproval of those I don’t mention here – I’m picking diamonds from a fistful of gems). His classic Do You Miss New York? may be the outstanding example of Frishberg’s often-demonstrated ability to marry genuine sentiment with sharp humor, both in the loving lyric (festooned with a couple of satiric feints) and the lovely tune (punctuated with surprising jolts of urban clamor). Only Frishberg could write a number like The Difficult Season, a Christmas song that eschews roasting chestnuts, jingling bells, and smiling Santas and instead indulges ruefully in counting “the days ’til it’s over and done.” His medley of hard-swung light classics is a two-handed tour de force that engagingly reveals Frishberg’s musical roots, which were planted nowhere near a conservatory: he came to Rubinstein’s Melody in F through the version played by the great Jimmy Rowles; Ebony Rhapsody, a hot version of Franz Liszt via Sam Coslow and Arthur Johnston, was first brought to life for Frishberg by Ivie Anderson and the Duke Ellington Orchestra; and he pulled Martha (Ah! So Pure!) not from the 1848 operetta by the lavishly named Friedrich Ferdinand Adolf von Flotow, but from a version recorded by Connee Boswell and Bob Crosby.

Then there’s The Hopi Way. This is a song that simply cannot be described, or can only be described by someone who is willing to endure a lot of suspicious squints and doubting glances. That it concludes with Frishberg hooting unintelligibly and beating out a tom-tom rhythm on the end of what appears to be a Pringle’s potato chip tube is only part of the reason why I won’t even try to describe it.

But The Hopi Way is still pure Frishberg – just like another song on the disc that couldn’t be more different, except in the audacity of its conception, the artfulness of its execution, and the effectiveness of its presentation. When this disc was recorded, the drums of the inevitable war with Iraq were growing louder and louder. But Frishberg silenced them, at least for a moment, with a cogently updated version of a song called My Country Used to Be, a meditation on the state of America that invokes a gentler past, and pierces the present with three words that the most brilliant of editorialists could not have conjured. “Weapons of mass distraction” isn’t your everyday pop lyric.

Of course, Dave Frishberg isn’t your everyday anything. He’s the one-and-only, and we’re lucky to have him.

– Daniel Okrent, April 2003

(Daniel Okrent is a writer and editor who has written about jazz for Esquire, Time, Fortune and other publications. He was for several years a senior editorial executive at Time Inc., is the author of three books (including Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefelkr Center, to be published in October 2003), and was a consultant on Ken Burns’s PBS series, Jazz. But the pinnacle of his career, Okrent says, was his performance in the role of jazz historian A.J. Pickman in the Woody Allen film, Sweet and Lowdown.)