William Zinsser
Marilyn Keller
Ken Peplowski
Steve Stone
OFAM presents the music of some of history’s greatest songwriters from the
amazing eruption of popular song in the 1930s, which fueled the jazz
explosion of the next two decades and still radiates today.
The concert also features the John
Pizzarelli Trio. Son of the eminent jazz gui-
tarist (and Stephane Grappelli accompanist)
Bucky Pizzarelli, John has (like Harry
Connick Jr. and his idol Nat King Cole before
him) turned in a poppier direction than many
jazz critics can abide, but he’s a swinging
fret- (and front-) man and singer who was
born to this music. This opening gala is prob-
ably the best bet if you can make only one
concert in the festival’s first week.
OFAM next presents a series of concerts
at the Shedd devoted to the great American
songwriters and featuring some of Oregon’s
best musicians — Mike Denny, Alan
Tarpinian, Marilyn Keller — accompanying
Peplowski, Hyman and OFAM vet Ian
Whitcomb. On Friday afternoon, August 8,
the festival explores Richard Rodgers, who
has lately gotten his due in recent books and
TV documentaries as one of American
music’s great composers, lucky enough to
work with two of the finest lyricists.
Personally, I swing more toward the jazzier
and darker Lorenz Hart masterpieces such as
“My Funny Valentine” than Oscar
Hammerstein’s later songs from Oklahoma!,
The Sound of Music, and so many other film
and stage musicals, but either way, you can
hear some of the grandest music ever written
for stage or screen.
On Saturday, August 9, Hyman promises
to play 100 of the finest songs of the first half
of the 20th century, starting with a slew by the
master, Jerome Kern, whose music for
Showboat was the first great Broadway score,
and who continued to compose classics from
“Ol’ Man River,” and “Bill,” to “Smoke Gets
concert pays tribute to four of the greatest:
Eubie Blake, Fats Waller, Chuck Berry, and
America’s greatest musical hero, Duke
Ellington, who wrote standards (e.g. “Satin
Doll”) as lasting as any, and, of course, also pi-
oneered an orchestral jazz that has never been
equaled. Blake composed “I’m Just Wild
About Harry” among other classics, and lived
long enough to be lauded on Broadway with
the show named after him. Waller, not only a
songwriter with few peers, but a fabulous pi-
anist as well, composed “Ain’t Misbehavin’”
among dozens of other standards, but was said
to have sold the rights to many more that ap-
peared under others’ names — sometimes in
return for the hamburgers he was so fond of.
I’m not sure why Chuck Berry’s music is here,
except that it demonstrates that the bridge be-
tween the first great wave of popular music of
the 1930s and the second — rock and roll of
the 1950s — isn’t as long a stretch as it might
have seemed at the time.
Bill Charlap Trio
New Takes on Old Standards
In Your Eyes,” and many more. That evening,
the festival spotlights Cole Porter, America’s
wittiest chronicler of high society shenani-
gans, which tends to overshadow the depth he
was capable of reaching in classics like
“Love for Sale.” His songs’ lasting value is
evidenced by their fascination for great musi-
cians, including Miles Davis and Frank
Sinatra.
The illustrious white songwriters of this
era built their palaces on foundations laid by
African Americans, and OFAM’s August 13
Some years back, the pre-eminent New
York pianist/arranger/jazz historian Dick
Hyman got a phone call from a distant
cousin, a jazz singer named Sandy Stewart.
Her 16-year-old son, who’d taken up piano a
few years earlier, had blossomed into what
she thought was prodigious talent. Would
Hyman listen to him play? He did, and, suit-
ably impressed, arranged private lessons for
the teen with one of New York’s finest piano
teachers. Within a few years, Bill Charlap
was playing piano for legends like Gerry
Mulligan, Benny Carter, and Phil Woods, and
AUGUST 7, 2003 15