CY COLEMAN?
Gone?
No way!
Alas, we lost the brilliant Cy … a week or so after we had developed a plan to do an interview for the next edition …
But we will always hear him, whenever someone sits down to play “I’ve Got Your Number” or “Hey, Look Me Over” or “Witchcraft.” These were the wonderful songs he did with the brilliant Caroline Leigh.
And that’s far from it all!
Whenever Barbara Carroll sits down to her piano and waves to her good friend Tony Bennett, who joins her at the keyboard, and then the two of them do another wonderful Coleman/Leigh piece like “It Amazes Me.”
Once you hear that, you will join me in never forgetting those two great talents. And then there are the songs which Dorothy Fields did with Cy like “Hey Big Spender,” “There’s Gotta Be Something Better than This,” “Real, Live Girl,” “Where am I Going?” and then that wonderful song, one that should be on all our walls where all of us who are aging can remember it daily, “It’s Not Where You Start but Where You Finish!” It is these talented song writers who proved the song was absolutely right.
Betty Comden and Adolph Green? Jule Styne? Farewell to them, old friends. Where are they? “Making Someone Happy.” Even though their song says to us “The Party’s Over” we don’t have to believe it if we don’t want to. We can always sing it “Just in Time!”
Somewhere tonight, it’s a safe bet you will hear some talented lady who loves Vernon Duke start singing “I Can’t Get Started With You,” but it’s not the truth lady, you certainly can. So she will switch to “Taking a Chance on Love,” which makes much more sense, right?
And what about those two wonderful songwriters in California? Jay Livingston? Ray Evans? And all those years they spent writing hit after hit out there? Listen to Doris Day when she sings “Que Sera, Sera” or Bob Hope doing “Buttons and Bows.” How about Nat King Cole? He didn’t want to do “Mona Lisa” at first but when he did that song, it quickly became his biggest smash hit!
That’s just a taste of their enormous output. Any time a producer needed a hit song to go with a movie, he called Jay and Ray, who could even supply a song to go with (are you ready?) “The Mole People.”
And when Christmas rolls around, stop to listen to their lovely “Jingle Bells.” “Every Christmas the door opens and an enormous pile of checks appears” the two of them reported to me—“six figures worth of Santa’s cash!”
Trust me, it will never be “arrivaderci” to these tremendous talents, so many of whom have left us lately. Fortunately for all of us, their great songs will always be available. Today we have Bucky Pizzarelli and his son John to sit down and play these songs for us, and for John’s lovely wife to sing them to us … and the brilliant Bill Charlap and his wife Rene Rosness to play them on two pianos … and oh yes, we can also hand these songs over to Ken Peplowski, who will rehearse his large orchestra over them for an hour or so, and then have the lovely Ivy Austin join him in singing all these songs —how does that sound?
Wouldn’t that make Jule Styne, Cy Coleman, Burton Lane, Frank Loesser, Betty Comden and all the rest of these greats happy?
Trust me, we’re all in this together, because they are playing our songs.
Now you name which song you want to hear first … a-one, a-two … and here it goes…..!
—WESTPORT, CONNECTICUT