52

Lush Life

music and words by Billy Strayhorn

‘AH YES, I WAS WRONG!’ That’s the hinge on which this structurally surprising song turns. It consists, you might say, of a verse and a chorus, but these might as well be a recitative and an aria.

‘Lush Life’ isn’t unique in having this form. Rodgers and Hart’s ‘My Funny Valentine’ is similarly brief and to the point. But that song had a dramatic rationale: in the 1937 musical comedy Babes in Arms, a woman named Billie sings it to a man named Valentine, telling this ‘slightly dopey gent’ with the ‘laughable’ looks that, in spite of his IQ and appearance, she likes him the way he is. In contrast, ‘Lush Life’ has no dramatic rationale but its own, and that is every bit as remarkable as the song’s structure.

‘My Funny Valentine’ is often sung without its verse (and changes its meaning in the process), but ‘Lush Life’ depends on the set-up in its verse to justify the high-flown language of its more musically conventional chorus. Given the convoluted melodic line and unusually chromatic harmonies of both parts of the song, it might be wiser to think of ‘Lush Life’ as a continuum. On the famous 1963 recording of the song by Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane, there really is nothing useful Coltrane can contribute until Hartman has sung the entire song. You sense Coltrane’s impatience in the first few notes of his solo, which arrives more than three minutes into the track.

Billy Strayhorn (1915–1967) was Duke Ellington’s arranger and in-house composer, and the bandleader liked to give him his due. The Duke Ellington Orchestra would seldom play its signature tune without Duke himself introducing it as ‘Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the A Train”’. But ‘Lush Life’ was written before Strayhorn and Ellington met, for the song is the work of a teenager. And here’s the first surprise.

‘I used to visit all the very gay places / Those come-what-may places / Where one relaxes on the axis / Of the wheel of life’. The lyrics are wonderfully, wittily rhymed. The internal rhyme of ‘relaxes on the axis’ is brilliant enough, but the axis belongs to the ‘wheel of life’ where one gets ‘the feel of life / From jazz and cocktails’. And we’re not done, because the next stanza describes girls with ‘sad and sullen grey faces / With distingué traces’, all that remains after a life of daytime drinking: ‘Twelve o’clock tales’ (to rhyme with cocktails).

This is virtuoso rhyming from the teenage Strayhorn. It’s worthy of Cole Porter or Noël Coward, and so is the fulsome sophistication. Distingué, indeed! It would be another twenty years before Billie Holiday released Songs for Distingué Lovers, and most English speakers, then as now, would struggle to explain the meaning of the word (it means a distinguished manner). But if this sophistication – self-conscious or not – is hard to credit in a high-school boy, it’s worth remembering that 1933, the year Strayhorn started work on the song he initially called ‘Life Is Lonely’, was also the year he first heard Ellington’s orchestra. Perhaps some of the Duke’s own sophistication wore off.

The song was written and first published in the key of D flat and in spite of chromatic excursions and lots of added sixths, sevenths and ninths, remains anchored by that chord for the first two stanzas as the singer remembers his dissolute past. Suddenly we modulate.

‘Then you came along, / With your siren song, / To tempt me to madness.’ This ‘siren song’, in F major, actually tempts us to further chromaticism – all the way to a C flat ninth chord, a tritone away, before the singer realises his mistake: ‘Ah yes, I was wrong / Again, I was wrong.’

And now we’re back in D flat and the chorus, if we want to call it that. At any rate, we’re finally in the present tense: ‘Life is lonely again’, the song tells us, and nothing can help; ‘A trough full of hearts could only be a bore’. And while ‘A week in Paris will ease the bite of it’ (this is a Pittsburgh schoolboy, remember!), he’s resigned to living ‘a lush life / In some small dive’, and to rot there with ‘those whose lives are lonely too’.

The music of the chorus is authentically chromatic, the chords that underpin the melody often descend stepwise. For example, at the words ‘A trough full of hearts’, which melodically pits the B flat of the key signature against B natural and the tritone E natural, the harmony oscillates between the tonic D flat and D7. The song ends with the melody creeping up the chromatic scale from C flat to F natural, sounding all the notes in between.

This is a hard song to pull off. As Blossom Dearie, introducing a live performance on her album Needlepoint Magic, says, ‘Lush Life’ is ‘very difficult to play and even harder to sing; and on top of that it’s sad’. She admits it took her eleven years to learn. The hardest thing about singing it is the chromaticism. Even Strayhorn himself, who, it must be said, wasn’t much of a singer, has trouble keeping it in tune, especially the final chromatic ascent. It’s remarkable how many singers come unstuck with the lyrics.

The most common mistake is to sing ‘distant gay traces’ instead of ‘distingué traces’, though in some cases it might be mispronunciation. Strayhorn himself got it right, as you would expect, and so did Kay Davis at an Ellington concert at Carnegie Hall in 1948, introducing the song to an audience for the first time with Strayhorn at the piano (fifteen years after he began work on it). But Hartman sang ‘distant gay’, so did Nat King Cole, so did Blossom Dearie (who often sang in French, so had no excuse), and so did Rickie Lee Jones in an extraordinary live performance on Girl at Her Volcano where she seems to be method-acting her way through the song. Hartman also turned ‘trough full of hearts’ into ‘thoughtful of hearts’ (what did he think this meant?), while Cole, apparently unaware what a ‘siren song’ was, sang ‘you came along with your siren of song’. He also sang ‘strifling’ for ‘stifling’ and ‘those who lives are lonely’ instead of ‘whose lives’. These last two might have been slips of the tongue, but no one seems to have thought they were worth fixing.

‘Lush Life’ is a bear trap of a song, but is it, as Dearie suggested, sad? It’s worth listening to Strayhorn’s own live recording from 1964. He might have difficulty holding the tune, but his diction is clear and bright, and the performance doesn’t linger. By turns breezy and amused – perhaps by the thought of his teenage self – he despatches the song in record time. Let’s not take ourselves too seriously, seems to be his attitude.