[Some computers might ask you to allow the music to play on this page]
All The Things You Are Gerry Mulligan Quartet |
For this item you need to be able to stop for ten minutes.
We are often moving on to the next job, the next meeting, scrolling down social media, taking the next call ......'Time Out Ten' asks you to stop for ten minutes and listen to a particular piece of jazz; to find a time when you won't be interrupted, when you can put in/on your headphones and chill out. Ten minutes isn't long.
This month we feature Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, Wendell Marshall and Connie Kay playing Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein Jr's All The Things You Are.
Take ten and listen to All The Things You Are.
All The Things You Are was written for the 1939 musical Very Warm for May in which Long Island society girl May Graham flees threatening gangsters and hides out with an avant-garde summer stock troupe in Connecticut. The first version of the show received rave reviews and played to sold-out houses. Producer Max Gordon had been away when the show opened out of town and when he saw it, he hated the gangster subplot and had it removed. However, New Yorkers didn't seem to be as crazy about the summer stock story, having just seen Babes in Arms the year before. 'Very Warm for May is a quintessential "lost musical from the 1930s" because of its enduring score by two Broadway legends and its surprisingly quick disappearance from the theatre scene.'
'The song All The Things You Are was "Introduced on Broadway in Very Warm for May by a quartet. Two singers sing as the characters themselves and two singers represent their hearts. Over the years, the song has been sung almost exclusively as a solo and the show lyrics, which have a verse constructed for the quartet, is replaced in the sheet music lyrics by the verse so familiar to subsequent listeners, beginning "Time and again I've longed for adventure / Something to make my heart beat the faster."
The lyrics are inevitably interpreted as a love song, but perhaps they could also be read as relating to other dreams we have:
You are the promised kiss of springtime
That makes the lonely winter seem long
You are the breathless hush of evening
That trembles on the brink of a lovely song
You are the angel glow that lights a star
The dearest things I know are what you are
Someday my happy arms will hold you
And someday I'll know that moment divine
When all the things you are, are mine
You are the angel glow that lights a star
The dearest things I know are what you are
Someday my happy arms will hold you
And someday I'll know that moment divine
When all the things you are, are mine
Other Profiles / Articles that might be of interest
lick HERE to join our mailing list
© Sandy Brown Jazz 2021
