The Starlit Hour

Liner Notes

REBECCA KILGORE AND DAVE FRISHBERG:
THE STARLIT HOUR

Notes by Francis Davis

During a recent chat with Rebecca Kilgore – “Becky” to friends – I asked her a question inevitably posed of singers with a knack for rescuing unjustly forgotten songs (among the examples on The Starlit Hour are I Go for That, Not Mine, I Hear the Music Now, and the title tune). Which attracts her to a song, I wondered – the melody or the lyrics? (Probably the only question she hears more often is how she goes about finding such songs. But I decided to leave that one for later).

“I guess I have to like both,” she said, then answered a follow-up question about the sorts of lyrics she deliberately avoids. “You won’t hear me singing about how when I fall in love, it will be forev-er,” she explained. I’m too pragmatic for that, and so are most people now. And I’m not going to sing about the man that got away, or about my man, how I love him so, he beats me coo and all of that. I prefer to do songs that aren’t maudlin or whining or melodramatic – poor-me, he-done-me-wrong songs. I tend to do pretty upbeat material.”

All of this seems in keeping with Becky’s own taste in singers: her favorites include Ella Fitzgerald, Maxine Sullivan, Doris Day, and Lucy Ann Polk – buoyant personalities with sunny voices. Yet The Starlit Hour – recorded in 1997, on the final night of Becky’s longstanding gig with Dave Frishberg at the Heathman Hotel, in Portland, Oregon, her adopted hometown – includes quite a few numbers whose words are lovelorn. Several, beginning with It’s the Talk of the Town, the second number, qualify as full-blown torch songs.

“Oh, then I guess I’m contradicting myself as I speak,” Becky said with a startled little laugh when I pointed this out to her. “But even when the message of the lyrics is an unhappy one, I find I sing them in a somewhat lighthearted way. I don’t go into persona and act out the lyrics and make them into some kind of big personal statement. I might identify with the sentiment expressed in a lyric, the sweet naivete. But I instinctively favor a lighter approach, because what I really hope to do is to have fun with the songs, and to swing.

She swings all right, without noticeable effort, which is what swing is all about – think not just of Ella Fitzgerald and Maxine Sullivan, but of instrumentalists such as Johnny Hodges, Bobby Hackett, and Zoot Sims. Her pitch is so sure that you never find yourself thinking about it; it never becomes an issue, the way it does with singers whose intonation is less certain. This is surely a natural gift, but it probably doesn’t hurt that she once played guitar in a Portland-based swing band that featured no piano. “l was the chords,” she says.

Along with her good time and good ear, though, Becky is wise to a secret about which most of today’s wannabe jazz singers, hip kitties though they may be, haven’t a clue. People once took themselves far less seriously than we do today. You can hear it in the popular songs written between the two world wars, and in a handful written as late as the 1950s. Fred Astaire hearing “you, you, you” in the beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom and Frank Sinatra telling a lover she’d gotten under his skin knew very well that Cole Porter wasn’t really drawing an equation between carnal desire and demonic possession. The best lyrics of those years were meant to be tossed-off, exaggeration sometimes being most effective means of understatement (a point lost on one of today’s most popular younger jazz singers, who recorded I’ve Got You Under My Skin as a dirge, as if in need of an exorcist – or maybe a wake-up call).

What changed everything, beginning in the late 1950s, was rock ‘n’ roll. On the plus side, rock made a shambles of genteel traditions, encouraging frank expression of the most basic emotions. Everything comes at a price, though, and in this case it was a greater literalism in writing and interpreting lyrics. Ten or fifteen years ago, it seemed as though the only younger singers keen on performing standard, were fading rock stars desperate for a way of aging gracefully. Today, we seem to be in the middle of a jazz-singing epidemic. One hears about a different, supposedly promising new young singer once or twice a month. Despite their good intentions, however, these are performers who grew up with rock ‘n’ roll and who have no more insight than Linda Ronstadt or Carly Simon did into the different mindset of vintage popular songs.

Becky Kilgore is the real thing. She recognizes the hint of self-mockery in the lyrics of such songs as Glad to Be Unhappy and Everything Happens to Me. She knows that these songs aren’t an invitation to wallow in self-pity, but an opportunity to transcend it. Best of all, she never gives the impression that a song is just her material; she lets you hear the melody, even as she embellishes it – think again of Johnny Hodges, Bobby Hackett, or Zoot Sims.

So what about it? How does Becky find songs? She says they find her. ” I’m like a magnet,” she told me. “Friends are always making cassettes for me or singers they think I might like and songs they think I should hear. Or I’ll rent a movie and hear a song I just have to do.” In this latter category was I Hear the Music Now, which was sung by Peggy Lee in the 1953 remake of The Jazz Singer, starring Danny Thomas (this explains why it sounds a bit like a hora). Becky fell in love with Not Mine – obscure Johnny Mercer, close to But Not for Me in melody and sentiment – after hearing it on a 1954 recording by the late Helen Carr, a fine, overlooked singer of that era whose entire output was reissued to glowing reviews earlier this year. The disarming Voce e Eu is from the repertoire of the French singer and guitarist Catarina Valente, who, like Becky, sang it in English, rather than its original Portuguese. Ella Fitzgerald, no less, introduced The Starlit Hour with Chick Webb’s band in 1940, and Thief in the Night and Evenin’ were trademark songs for Ethel Waters and Jimmy Rushing, respectively.

With the possible exceptions of Frank Loessor and Matty Malnecks’ I Go for That and Tommy Wolf and Harry Stone’s You Smell So Good – either of which is so witty and colloquial it could pass for a Dave Frishberg song – the other numbers here are more familiar, though hardly overdone. The most recent of them is Cry Me a River, which was a hit for Julie London in 1955 – Becky’s unofficial cut-off year. She told me, “My one foray into ‘contemporary material’ is the occasional Dave Frishberg song.”

Ah, yes, Frishberg. Best known now as a singer-songwriter, he appears here in his secret identity of accompanist and solo pianist. In various ways, Song of the Islands, How Long, How Long Blues, and Song of the Wanderer are all associated with Count Basie, and Frishberg’s economical interpretations amount to homage. His robust lines in support of Becky on Evenin’ are a reminder of why he was Jimmy Rushing’s favorite accompanist after Basie, but his finest moment as an accompanist on this disk might be on Ten Cents a Dance, where he lets you picture the bleary musicians yawning between (and sometimes during) numbers and the girls fending off advances as they drag the rubes across the floor. Becky readily admits that her treatment of the tune was inspired by Anita O’Day’s recording with Billy May, but her interpretation is more inno-cent – all hers.

The gig at the Heathman was a turning point for Becky in that it allowed her to quit her day job as a secretary for Reed College. Even so, a hotel bar isn’t an ideal venue for a singer. You’ll hear some chatter under these performances. Frishberg once told me that far from discouraging him, a talkative audience was occasionally just what he needed. “Geez, they’re listening too hard,” he told me he remembered once complaining to another musician during an intermission at a concert. “I wish they’d find something to talk about among themselves.”

It’s different for a singer, of course, a fact Frishberg would be the first to acknowledge. And the problem can be especially acute for someone like Becky, who has to overcome her shyness every time she faces an audience, and who never gave a thought to singing professionally until she was thirty.

“I was a closet singer and guitarist,” she told me, “happy just to sing and play music for my own enjoyment, until a friend who was quitting Wholly Cats talked me into taking her place. Going on stage and singing went against everything I was. Looking back, I would have to say it was the bravest thing I ever did in my life. But I loved the camaraderie of being in a band, and there was no turning back after that.

“Of all careers for me to choose! It’s so ironic. I love singing, but I’m constantly frustrated by it, too, because I have such high standards as a listener and I know I’m never going to sound as good to anybody else as Ella Fitzgerald sounds to me. So I just keep plugging away and hoping that I can at least convey the meaning of the songs I do and the love I have for them.”

She certainly does, and neither her shyness nor her self-doubt is apparent in her singing or her stage manner. I know this because – by sheer luck – I was there for Becky and Dave’s final night at the Heathman. Now, so were you.

“It can be devastating when you’ve got a crowd that’s talking and nobody seems to be listening,” Becky told me, remembering how noisy the Heathman could be. “But I would spot the people who were listening and sing almost as if directly to them.”

Thanks to The Starlit Hour, that’s me and you.

– Francis Davis, May,2001

(Francis Davis is a Contributing Editor of The Atlantic Monthly and a Senior Fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. The most recent of his books is Like Young (Da Capo Press).)