JazzWax

David, Frank and Natalia

In The Wall Street Journal last week, I interviewed actor-comedian David Alan Grier for my "House Call" column in the Mansion section (go here). David appeared in the 1984 film version of A Solder's Story and the 2020 Broadway revival of A Soldier's Play. He also starred on TV's In Living Color in the early 1990s and currently co-stars in the Netflix sitcom Dad Stop Embarrassing Me! His father was William H. Grier, co-author of the 1968 bestseller Black Rage: Two Black Psychiatrists Reveal the Full Dimensions of the Inner Conflicts and the Desperation of Black Life in the United States (go here). [Photo above of David Alan Grier, left, and Jamie Foxx, courtesy of Netflix]

Up for two awards. Nominees for the annual awards handed out by the Jazz Journalists Association were announced this week. I'm among the six writers nominated for this year's Lifetime Achievement Award, the winner to be announced in May. JazzWax also is a nominee for the JJA's Blog of the Year. I'm honored and humbled. For more information, go here.

SiriusXM. This Wednesday, April 21, I'll be on Feedback (Channel 106) with Nik and Lori to talk about Al Stewart's 1976 hit Year of the Cat. Be there at 9 a.m. (ET). Don't miss it. The show will be fun as I break down this yacht-rock classic and spin my Hot 10 related songs.

Ronnie Scott. Soon after my post on the documentary, Ronnie's, last week, it was pulled down. I reached out to the director-writer Oliver Murray, thinking he had uploaded the film on YouTube. In fact, he hadn't, and his representative in the U.S. had pulled it down. My apologies to Oliver and JazzWax readers. Here's what he said regarding the documentary:

Hi Marc, That’s OK. We have someone stateside watching for uploads because a distributor bought the rights to a cinema release and is waiting for theaters to open. Currently, it's available to stream on the BBC and also through Hotdocs in Canada. U.S. fans will have to wait a few months for Greenwich Entertainment to announce a date. I’ll make sure they alert you to their plans. If you're in Canada, go here.

Bob Porter, a record producer whose name appears on a long list of superb soul-jazz albums in the 1960s and '70s and who went on to become a leading blues and R&B DJ on WBGO starting in 1981, died on April 10. He was 80. [Photo above of Bob Porter by Jim Eigo]

Bob was a great friend of JazzWax, emailing often to commend, amend or debate positions in my posts. He produced many great albums on the Prestige label, including those by Charles Earland, Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Jimmy McGriff, Pat Martino, Hank Crawford, Johnny "Hammond" Smith, Leon Spencer Jr. and dozens of others. Many developed the 1970s soul-jazz feel with organ trio and horns. In fact, among my first jazz albums at the dawn of the '70s—Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons's You Talk That Talk and Leon Spencer Jr.'s Louisiana Slim—were produced by Bob. My posts on Bob are here and here. Bob will always be in my thoughts. I'll miss those "Portergrams."

Dance Along With Basie. Last week, following my post on Count Basie's Dance Along With Basie (1959), I received an email from Hans Doerrscheidt, who pointed out that while Thad Jones arranged much of the album, Frank Foster was responsible for Secret Love, Misty and Back to the Apple. I've fixed the original post. Thanks, Hans! [Photo above of Frank Foster, left, with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis in 1957 by Chuck Stewart]

Bill Evans in Rochester, N.Y. In the wake of my post on the Bill Evans Trio's performance at the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, N.Y. on April 12, 1977, I received the following from Brett Gold...

Marc, a belated thanks for your Bill Evans post. I was a student at the University of Rochester at the time and regularly went to jazz concerts at the Eastman Theatre. I'm surprised I didn't remember the concert, but apparently I had a conflict that night, an orchestra rehearsal, so couldn’t make it. The title of the TV show "At the Top" refers to an occasional PBS show that was taped at a high-end restaurant near Eastman called Top of the Plaza, which regularly featured jazz groups. I went to a couple of shows there during my time in Rochester. I think I saw Maynard Ferguson’s band and Bill Watrous’s Manhattan Wildlife Refuge. Top of the Plaza was located on the top floor of Midtown Plaza (photo above), which apparently was the second indoor mall in the U.S. and the first in a downtown area. It has since been partially torn down and repurposed as condos. For more information on Midtown Plaza and Top of the Plaza, go here, here and here.

And here’s a PBS show from 1973 that was actually taped at Top of the Plaza, featuring the Buddy Rich big band. The only non-Rich band member I recognize is the second alto, a very young Ray Ricker, who was a long-time saxophone professor at Eastman and is now retired...

Baden Powell. Last week, Paris photographer Gilles D'Elia sent along the following video of Brazilian guitarist-singer and songwriter Baden Powell...

CD you should know about:

David Thompson—Waiting (DBT). You may recognize Dave's name from the Soundcloud clips I include in my weekend posts from time to time featuring Dave playing piano in the style of Bill Evans. Dave's new solo album features 14 tracks—three originals and many songs that Evans recorded, including the original ballad Laurie that Evans wrote for his romantic companion, Laurie Verchomin. As Dave writes in his liner notes: "Bill Evans's music continues to be a great source of inspiration to me, and a singular source of remarkable beauty in my life unlike any other." To listen to audio clips and buy, go here.

Antonio Carlos Jobim. Jazz saxophonist, arranger, composer and New School educator Bill Kirchner (above) has been busy. Now into his third semester of online teaching via Zoom, Bill and his jazz ensemble recorded Jobim's If You Never Come to Me. Bill says it was accomplished by layering a track at a time through a software program called Soundtrap. The quartet was truly global—the trombonist was in Israel; the guitarist in Seattle; the bassist in Austin, Texas; and the drummer in New York. The musicians: Dor Asaf (tb), Ravi Sharma (g), Daniel Foose (b) and Zan Babar (d).

To listen to the audio track, go here.

Benny Golson radio. On Sunday, April 18, from 2 to 7 p.m. (ET), "Symphony Sid" Gribetz on WKCR-FM in New York will present a five-hour radio broadcast celebrating the career of composer and tenor saxophonist Benny Golson on “Jazz Profiles.” To listen from anywhere in the world, go here. [Photo above of Benny Golson courtesy of Benny Golson]

And congrats to Sid. He has been nominated for the JJA's Marian McPartland-Willis Conover Award for Career Excellence in Broadcasting. Fingers crossed.

Charles Mingus radio. The bass player's birthday broadcast will be held on WKCR-FM on Thursday, April 22, when Mingus's recorded music will be played on the air for 24 hours. To listen from anywhere in the world, go here.

Natalia Lafourcade. Take a seat. You're about to fall in love with a voice. Natalia is a Mexican pop-rock and folk singer and songwriter who, since her debut in 2002, has been one of the most successful singers in Latin America. Here are three examples of the 37-year-old's stunning vocals and passion singing romantic boleros [Photo above of Natalia Lafourcade courtesy of LA Phil]:

Here's Natalia with the legendary Cuban singer-dancer Omara Portuondo...

Here's Natalia singing Soledad y El Mar...

And here's Natalia singing Alma Mía, in what I assume is an independent living facility in Mexico...

Ella Fitzgerald in Holland, 1974

If Martians turned up at my front door and asked for a single example of jazz that would make them understand and feel what all the fuss was about, I'd invite the green visitors from the red planet to sit in front of my iMac. Then I'd show them this 50-minute video from 1974 in the Netherlands:

New Video: David Oquendo

Today you're about to take a trip, and you're in for a treat. Cuba's filin movement began in the late 1940s and lasted into the 1960s. It was a particular way of singing a ballad so that it sounded extra romantic and passionate, what we'd call crooning. Filin (pronounced FEEL-in) came out of the steamy bolero and canción and the 19th century trova, short for trovadors or troubadours—traveling artists who sang ballads and accompanied themselves on guitar. Today, David Oquendo is one of the finest singers of Cuban bolero filin. Once you hear him, you'll fall in love with this music genre as I did in the late 1990s, when my friend Ivan Acosta took me to New Jersey to meet David and hear him perform. [Photo above of David Oquendo singing and playing]

A native of Havana, Cuba, David is an astonishing interpreter of many diverse styles of Cuban music. In Cuba, he emerged as a guitarist and singer with Elena Bourke and Compay Segundo. He moved from the island to New Jersey in 1991 and began appearing at La Esquina Habanera in Union City. Since then, David has won a Grammy for Tropicana’s Nights with Paquito D’Rivera and received Grammy nominations for Bebop Timba with Raphael Cruz and three Latin Grammy nominations for Raices Habaneras, 50 Years of Mambo and Paquito D’Rivera Presenta Las Hermanas Marquez.

Now that you have David's background and a brief history of the singular Cuban ballad style, here's a newly posted, hour-long video of David singing and playing bolero filin with a fine percussionist and bassist whose names aren't cited... 

Follow David on Facebook here. Want more David Oquendo? Here's David with trombonist Roswell Rudd...

Here's David in 2014...

Here's David and Paquito D'Rivera...

And here's David playing a tribute to Benny Moré...

Dance Along With Basie, 1959

You won't find one of my favorite Thad Jones albums listed under his name. It's Dance Along With Basie, recorded for Roulette at the tail end of the 1950s. Cut over four sessions during the December holiday season in 1959, the album features mostly Jones's swinging arrangements of mid-tempo standards. They're all strikes, and perfect for a mental twirl around the dance floor. [Photo above of Thad Jones near Times Square by Francis Wolf (c)Mosaic Images]

Despite the updated swing of Basie's New Testament band in the 1950s, the band had always been a dance band, first and foremost. His first Kansas City band, in 1936 (after leading Benny Moten's ghost band), was the nine-piece Barons of Rhythm. Basie then formed a big band and moved to Chicago in the fall of that year for an extended engagement at the Grand Terrace Ballroom and to record for John Hammond at Columbia. The magic of early Basie was the rhythm section and the band's driving swing. For the next five decades, Basie's bands were all primarily dance bands, featuring call-and-response sectional arrangements and soloists with distinct instrumental personalities. [Photo above of Count Basie]

Dance Along With Basie was largely arranged by Thad Jones (Back to the Apple, Secret Love and Misty were by Frank Foster). At the time of release the album was aimed at buyers looking for music to dance to in the living room. I'm sure it also was designed to show off the newly emerging stereo format, with Harry "Sweets" Edison and the horns coming through the right speaker and the reeds and rhythm section sailing away in the left. Above all, a dance feel was always the primary mission of the Basie band, no matter who was arranging—Neal Hefti, Ernie Wilkins, Thad Jones, Quincy Jones or Frank Foster. Even if you didn't dance at home, Basie made you feel you could if you wanted to.

The band on the album is the classic '50s lineup: Joe Newman, John Anderson, Snooky Young and Thad Jones; Al Grey, Benny Powell and Henry Coker (tb), Marshall Royal (as); Billy Mitchell and Frank Foster (ts); Frank Wess (ts,fl); Charlie Fowlkes (bs); Count Basie (p), Freddie Green (g); Ed Jones (b); and Sonny Payne (dr). [Photo above of Count Basie]

Standout arrangements by Jones are Give Me the Simple Life, It's a Pity to Say Goodnight, It Had to Be You, Fools Rush In, Makin' Whoopee, Easy Living, Can't We Be Friends and How Am I to Know? Foster's charts are fabulous, too. Misty features Frank Wess and Charlie Fowlkes soloing on flute and baritone saxophone. Jones's arrangements may not be as adventurous as his pen work in the 1960s and '70s but they breathe well, have perfect pacing and come with that special twinkle.

Thad Jones died in 1986, Frank Foster died in 2011.

JazzWax tracks: You'll find Dance Along With Basie (Roulette) here.

JazzWax clips: Here's the entire album in tracks...

JazzWax note: If you love this period of Basie's band as much as I do, treat yourself to the out-of-print Mosaic box of The Complete Roulette Live Recordings of Count Basie and His Orchestra (1959-1962). Copies here. Mosaic's out-of-print Roulette studio recordings box is here. Highly satisfying. Think what you will of Teddy Reig's reputation. That cat could produce an album.

New Video: Bill Evans in Belgium, 1972

In June 1972, Bill Evans and Eddie Gomez were at Club Thalamus in the Schaerbeek section of Brussels, Belgium. On drums for the tour, Evans hired Tony Oxley, an English avant-garde player and co-founder of Incus Records. The gig was taped by Belgian TV. Evans and Gomez's European tour came just weeks after Evans recorded Living Time with George Russell, his last album for Columbia. Commentary in Dutch was by Belgian composer François Glorieux. Here's the video that went up about three weeks ago...

A special thanks to Dave Thompson.

Documentary: Ronnie Scott and His Club

You may not have played Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club as a musician or had the pleasure of hearing jazz artists perform there. And even if you have, who knows when you'll be back given the pandemic in Europe. For now, here's a solid documentary, Ronnie Scott and His World Famous Jazz Club, written and directed by Oliver Murray, about the tenor saxophonist and the nightclub he opened in London in 1959...

Elizabeth, Al and Lucy

Last week in The Wall Street Journal, my "Anatomy of a Song" column was on Al Stewart's Year of the Cat, a mystifying soft-rock hit in 1976 with nine influences (go here). Al and I talked about the roles that the following played in the song's creation: Bob Dylan (two influences), the films Casablanca and Last Tango in Paris, English comedian Tony Hancock, a piano riff played during sound checks, a book on Vietnamese astrology, novelist W. Somerset Maugham and Queen Anne's horse. Here's the hit, but I warn you, Year of the Cat is a ferocious earworm...

Also in the WSJ, I interviewed actress Elizabeth Perkins for my "House Call" column in the Mansion section (go here). Elizabeth is precious and as fine a dramatic actress as she is a comedian. You probably remember her in Big (1988), as Tom Hanks's girlfriend. She's currently in The Moodys, a Fox TV comedy. Much of her childhood was spent isolated, which worked wonders on her imagination. First her parents divorced, then her mother remarried and they moved to a remote Vermont farm 4 1/2 miles from the main road and 2 miles from the nearest neighbor. Then her two older sisters left for boarding school. She was left at home with her youngest stepbrother to deal with alcoholic parents. She coped by compartmentalizing. [Photo above of Elizabeth Perkins courtesy of Elizabeth Perkins]

Here's Elizabeth in Big. She a master of facial expressions and gets to use a lot of them in this film...

Here she is in Curb Your Enthusiasm at the head of the table, bringing just the right level of tension and controlled disgust...

And here's the trailer for The Moodys...

Bill Evans. Following my post on Bill Evans at the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, N.Y. in April 1977, I heard from writer Tonino Vantaggiato in Italy. Tonino writes on Evans and pointed out that there weren't two concerts, just one, on April 12. He reminded me that Evans's mother, Mary Soroka Evans, died on April 5, 1977. As a result, the April 8 concert and the classroom time the trio planned to spend with Eastman professor Bill Dobbins had to be cancelled and rescheduled. While bassist Eddie Gomez fully expected to make the April 8 concert date, he was already obligated to record with Jack De Johnette on April 11 and 12 in Berkeley, Calif., on McCoy Tyner's album Supertrios. So Bill asked if Chuck Israels could make it. He could. 

On April 12, the concert was videotaped for At the Top, a series of jazz concerts produced for Rochester's WXXI, a PBS TV station. In addition to the video being broadcast on TV on Thursday, July 21, 1977. Tonino notes, the music also aired on WXXI-FM. In addition, he said there were two sets at the concert separated by an intermission. The video is likely the first set. I've updated the post to incorporate all of this new information. Thank you Tonino. Stay safe!

Lucy Yeghiazaryan. If you weren't able to catch Emmet's Place on Monday night, with the Emmet Cohen Trio and vocalist Lucy Yeghiazaryan and tenor saxophonist Grant Stewart, you missed one swinging scene. The gig was so hot it lasted nearly two hours and was sensational. As close to going out to hear music as it gets. But you're in luck. Here it is in full on YouTube (remember, Emmet's Place can be viewed every Monday, worldwide, starting at 7:30 p.m. (ET) or on YouTube days after...

Buddy Deppenscmidt died on March 20. He was 85. Deppenschmidt was the drummer on Jazz Samba, the first Grammy-winning bossa nova session in 1962 featuring Stan Getz (ts), Charlie Byrd (g), Gene Byrd (g,b), Keter Betts (b) and Deppenschmidt on drums. Matt Schudel of the Washington Post wrote a beautiful obit. To read, go here.

Virginia MacDonald. Cruising through Facebook before signing off last week, I came across clarinetist Virginia MacDonald playing along with Charlie Parker and his reinterpretation of Embraceable You. Here she is...

Tina Brooks radio. On Sunday, April 11, from 2 to 7 p.m. (ET), Sid Gribetz will be spinning Tina Brooks and talking about the tenor saxophonist for five full hours. Listen from anywhere in the world by going here. 

Dreaming of an album? A boxed set of CDs? Jim Eigo's Original Vinyl Records in Warwick, N.Y., likely has it. He has a ton of mint jazz plus rock, pop, soul, you name it. Email him to see if he has what you want at [email protected]. Or call him at 917-755-8960.

WNEW. Each spring I play this seasonal jingle from the '70s for the now-defunct WNEW-AM. Even if you're not from New York, you'll feel like you are after you listen to it...

Here's a compilation of jingles used by WNEW...

And if you want to know the story behind the WNEW jingles, read my two-part interview with Larry and Toni Greene here and here.

New York and Paris in the Spring

The miracle of spring has arrived in New York and Paris. In New York, during my walk this morning through Central Park, I snapped a few photos on my iPhone 12 Pro Max that caught the explosive season unaware...

Over in Paris, my dear friend, photographer Gilles D'Elia, also has been busy snapping images of spring. Here is a wonderful series by Gilles, who has such a poetic eye...

New Videos: Dave Pell Octet

Between 1943 and 1947, tenor saxophonist Dave Pell started out recording with big bands led by Bobby Sherwood, Tony Pastor and Bob Crosby. Then in late '47, he joined the Les Brown Orchestra, where he remained until 1955. In '53, Dave began recording with an octet he formed made up of Brown bandmates. In '55, he left Brown to lead the octet. With the 10-inch album jumping to 12 inches that year and opportunities popping up on college campuses in California and the region, Dave turned his octet into a sensation on albums and at college dances and proms. [Photo above of Dave Pell]

Here's what Dave told me about the formation of the octet when I interviewed him in 2009:

JazzWax: What caused the shift to smaller jazz groups? New labels?
Dave Pell: I think that was part of it. Smaller groups meant fewer odds of re-takes on recording sessions, and a lot of arrangers wrote swell stuff for six to eight guys. But overall, smaller groups just sounded great and everyone got to solo. A lot of us, including [bassist] Harry Babasin, hung around at Drum City in L.A. All were great players. We were learning a whole new way of playing from each other. On the arranging side, Shorty Rogers and Bill Holman led the way. So much was being recorded out there in the early 1950s, both in the studio and at clubs when tape became popular. Before he died in 2003, Roy [Harte], the co-owner of Drum City and co-founder of Nocturne and Pacific Jazz Records, started to realize he had a ton of stuff recorded still in the can. A lot of it has still not been released.

JW: How did the idea for your octet come about?
DP: I was playing in Les Brown's orchestra in the early 1950s. I just put together eight musicians from the big band. We originally had Don Fagerquist on trumpet; Ray Sims, Zoot's brother, on trombone; I was on tenor; Ronnie Lang was on baritone, Geoffrey Clarkson was on piano; Tony Rizzi was on guitar; Rollie Bundock was on bass, and Jack Sperling was on drums.

JW: How about the tight arrangements?
DP: That was Shorty Rogers’s idea to borrow ideas from Les’s big band arrangements written by Frank Comstock and Skippy Martin. Actually, we didn’t steal anything or anyone. This is why Les was so beloved by so many musicians. I went to Les and told him what I wanted to do. He was all for it. When Albert Marx started Trend Records, he came to one of the octet's rehearsals and flipped when he heard us. We began recording for Trend soon afterward.

JW: What did Shorty do?
DP: When we were just getting together, Shorty was very excited. He said he’d write charts with the guitar on the bottom and Don Fagerquist on top, with the rest of us voiced in between. He said, “We’ll do hipper stuff than the big band.” Two weeks later, Shorty finished the charts. The big idea was to take the new West Coast linear jazz sound and apply it in a more compact, commercial format.

JW: How so?
DP: We kept the formula tight. We'd play a song's intro and then each horn would take a short solo. I didn't want 17 choruses. Just one solo each. It was very different for the time.

In short order, the Dave Pell Octet became wildly popular and the gold standard for small West Coast groups seeking a sound with harmony and counterpoint. Videos of the Dave Pell Octet are rare. Which is why I'm grateful to a friend who reached out over the weekend with links to two videos from 1958. The octet at that point featured Jack Sheldon (tp), Bob Enevoldsen (v-tb), Dave Pell (ts), Ronnie Lang (bs), Marty Paich (p), Tommy Tedesco (g), Buddy Clark (b) and Frankie Capp (d). Bobby Troup with the host of Los Angeles TV's Stars of Jazz.

Here's My Heart Belongs to Daddy from the TV broadcast on April 28, 1958...

And here's Mountain Greenery...

Interview: Who Was Fran Landesman?

Last week, I posted on Stormy Emotions, the sterling new album by vocalist Sarah Moule and pianist-songwriter Simon Wallace. The husband-and-wife team not only have worked together since the early 1990s but they also were intimates of lyricist Fran Landesman and her husband, Jay, from the 1990s right up until the Landesmans' deaths in 2011. Simon wrote songs with Landesman, and Sarah sang songs with Fran's lyrics, including ones for which Simon wrote the music. [Photo above of songwriters Tommy Wolf and Fran Landesman in the 1950s]

You should know that Stormy Emotions will be released digitally on May 3. To mark the release, Sarah and Simon will be releasing a clutch of new videos. A Stormy Emotions Songbook also will be available on that date. Watch this space for more information. In addition, Sarah and Simon have been livestreaming weekly for a half hour on Sundays at their Facebook page here, or watch them on YouTube. [Photo above of Sarah Moule and Simon Wallace by Tom Oldham]

Long curious about Fran Landesman, I asked Sarah and Simon last week about the lyricist, why Fran and her husband Jay Landesman moved to London and how they managed to sustain an open marriage:

JazzWax: Sarah, when did you first meet Fran Landesman?
Sarah Moule: I must have met Fran in London at some point, since she was already living there since 1964, but I can’t recall. I do remember the first time I hung out with her. It was in New York in 1995 at the “Polish Tea Room,” as she called the cafe in the Edison Hotel on West 47 Street. By then, I had already met Simon—two years earlier—and we married in 2000.

JW: Why were you and Simon in New York with Landesman?
SM: We were there for Rocco Landesman’s production of The Decline of The Middle West at The Supper Club. The show celebrated Fran’s lyrics and included several songs by Simon and Fran. Rocco is a long-time Broadway theater producer, of course, and the nephew of Jay Landesman, Fran’s husband. At The Supper Club, I was seated at a table with the hip poet and playwright Arnold Weinstein and rock record producer John Simon. We all hung out later at the Edison. [Photo above, from left, of Fran Landesman, Jay Landesman and singer Jackie Cain]

JW: What was your impression of Fran?
SM: Fran and her coterie were a completely new milieu for me. I was just finding my way as a singer, unsure of where I might fit in with this group of worldly wise, outspoken Americans who had stories going back decades. She struck me as a spiky, fast thinker who didn’t suffer fools and liked to laugh.

JW: Simon—Fran and her husband, Jay, were from St. Louis. How did they wind up living in London?
Simon Wallace: Jay was an incorrigible nihilist, so when his St Louis nightclub business started to go downhill in the early 1960s, he declared America to be a cultural wasteland. He decided that rather than return to New York, the Landesman family should relocate to a Greek island. Fran intervened, saying she would move to an island only if everybody there spoke English and she could pursue her songwriting career. [Photo above, from left, of Fran, Miles, Jay and Cosmo Landesman in the 1950s]

JW: What happened?
SW: A compromise was reached. In 1964, Jay and Fran and their two children moved to London just as the swinging ‘60s were taking off. After a few years, London became her home. Although Fran was born and raised in New York and loved the city, she never thought of moving back permanently. One of the last poems she wrote was what she used to call a ‘Jewish Haiku’—17 syllables, more or less: “Two rivers run through my life / Hudson and Thames / An ocean in-between.”

JW: Sarah, what was the extent of your professional relationship with Fran?
SM: In 1999, we were all in New York again. Simon was musical director for actress-singer Imelda Staunton’s one-woman show at The Firebird Café on West 46th Street. Fran, Jay and I came along to New York for fun. That’s when I first met bop signers Jackie Cain and Roy Kral and TV director Jim Harelson, who Fran later told me was one of the “sad young men” she had written about in the song, The Ballad of the Sad Young Men. The title was inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald's All the Sad Young Men, his third collection of short stories. In Fran's lyrics, the sad young men were a group of guys who couldn’t quite grow up and move into adult life. After 1999, the three of us did gigs at theaters and jazz clubs around the U.K. Fran would recite her poems and Simon and I would perform Fran and Simon's songs. Fran was a big part of our lives.

JW: Did you sense what made Fran special as a lyricist?
SM: I first fell in love with Simon.Then I fell for Fran’s songs as soon as Simon played them for me. They were exactly what I was looking for—contemporary, smart, attitudinal with a focus on modern life written in the jazz idiom. It was Simon's music that got me. [Photo above of Fran Landesman]

JW: How so?
SM: The music allowed Fran's lyrics to shine. As a singer, it's the tune that always grabs me first and the harmonic twists that press my emotional buttons. Fran used modern language, vernacular wielded with craftsmanship, internal rhymes and honesty about myriad subjects: time, love, opportunities grasped and missed, regret, compassion, music, the creative process, bad behavior and the list goes on. After the music had hooked me, the words reeled me in. She was unafraid to reveal all sides of a situation or emotion. She could be pretty dark, but usually with a slice of humor to go with it. She lived the life she wrote about, so the lyrics still ring true.

JW: What was Fran Landesman like as a person?
SM: She was funny, generous, difficult, cranky and extreme. She was a great host and party-giver and was never boring. To me, as someone who sang her words, she was unstintingly supportive. It was nerve-wracking to sing Simon and Fran’s songs when she was there. This was true of her ‘list songs" in particular. They could be really tricky to get right. A "list song" lists things that support the title—like Cole Porter's Let's Do It or Ian Dury's What a Waste. Fran told me that though she used to be hard on singers who fluffed her lyrics, once she started performing her own poetry in public, she realized how hard it could be to remember all the words in the right order. She used to say, “The most erotic sound in the world is hearing my words in someone else’s mouth.” [Photo above of Fran Landesman]

JW: Simon?
SW: Fran was definitely a force to be reckoned with. She had a razor-sharp wit and could have a harsh tongue. But above all, she was great fun to be around. The Landesmans were terrific hosts. Fran would cook dinner every night for whoever happened to be visiting. Even into her late 70s, there were regular, not-to-be-missed house parties. Over the years at Duncan Terrace in the Islington section of London, we got to hang out with some truly extraordinary people: Ken Kesey, Bob Dorough, Annie Ross and Larry Adler, to name a few. [Photo above of Fran Lendesman]

JW: What inspired her as a lyricist?
SW: When Fran was a girl, she had a book of English librettist W.S. Gilbert’s libretti, which she came to love without ever hearing Sullivan’s music. This led her to read Charles Dickens and then Shakespeare, who were both major influences on her writing. She grew up in New York on Central Park West in the 1930s. Her family was well off, and her mother would take her to see the latest Broadway shows. She was especially fond of Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. In later years, she was a fan of both Bob Dylan and Stephen Sondheim, with whom she corresponded. When it came to poetry, she had great admiration for Philip Larkin and Emily Dickinson.

JW: How did she work?
SW: She wrote every day in a variety of notebooks and spent hours editing and honing a lyric or poem before copying it into a series of ledgers, which I now have. Her first songwriting partner, Tommy Wolf, described her as “writing with incredible speed in curious flashes of intense concentration, as a stenographer taking sudden, urgent dictation from a personal omnipotent muse.”

JW: How did you work together?
SW: With her collaborators, Fran tended to work lyric first. We would work on ideas separately and then get together every week to finalize a song we both liked. The motivation was always to entertain each other.

JW: Sarah, did Fran tell you how she wrote Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most?
SM: The title came from the first line of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land: “April is the cruelest month…” In the early '50s, Fran translated the line into hip jazz speak and went from there. At the time, the Landesmans were living in St. Louis across the street from T.S. Eliot’s birthplace. Jay, of course, ran the Crystal Palace nightclub there. Fran often used an event or a line of poetry as a starting point before going off on her own creative journey with words.

JW: Fran wrote you a new verse to Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most, didn't she?
SM: In 2005, I was due to sing Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most for a broadcast with the BBC Concert Orchestra. Weeks before the concert, I discussed the song with her. We agreed that some lines might have dated slightly. A few days later, she gave me a new verse to sing. I used it in the broadcast. Simon and I will finally record the song with that new verse this spring. [Photo above of Fran Landesman]

JW: Simon, who called her the “poet laureate of lovers and losers?”
SW: I don’t know who first said that, but when she asked Dudley Moore for a quote to put on one of her poetry books, he wrote back: “Say whatever you like and put my name to it.” So perhaps it was him.

JW: Sarah, did she have any regrets?
SM: Perhaps that she might have been overly optimistic at times. Fran was a great believer in defensive pessimism and thought that disasters such as nuclear war could only be averted by her worrying about them.

JW: Simon, did she think she should have been better known beyond the hip set?
SW: As her son, Cosmo, brutally pointed out in his memoir, Starstruck: Fame, Failure, My Family and Me, Fran did occasionally harbor unrealistic expectations of her media visibility, but at the same time she would never compromise her work or filter her opinions to help enable this. In her regular appearances on BBC radio, she was always trenchant and often controversial. In 1996, her choice of a luxury on the esteemed BBC show Desert Island Discs was a bag of cannabis seeds.

JW: Fran and Jay had an open marriage. How did they both decide that such a relationship was best?
SW: Fran and Jay’s open marriage did not go undocumented. In the end, she grew tired of talking about it. Suffice to say, the arrangement was always to their mutual benefit. Fran was keen to stress that the appeal of extramarital liaisons often extended beyond the bedroom and into the exploration of bookshelves and record collections.

JW: Sarah?
SM: I was always secretly relieved that Simon met Fran after she had assumed the persona of Granny Franny, having eschewed make up, amphetamines and affairs on the birth of her first grandchild. Fran and Jay remained very happily married right until the end in 2011. In their London home, Fran had a bedroom upstairs while Jay inhabited the basement, so they were always pleased to see each other. Every morning, they went out for breakfast together and every evening Fran cooked him dinner. She used to say, “I married you for better or worse but not for lunch.” [Photo above of Fran Landesman and Sarah Moule]

JazzWax clips: To listen to Fran's appearance on the BBC's Desert Island Discs, go here.

Here's Sarah and Simon's most recent installment of their Live on Sunday...