Bix can stake a claim to being the first great fatality of jazz - dying young years before it became a cliché of the industry. According to his most recent biographer Richard Sudhalter, Carmichael had in fact been working on the tune much earlier, and, as the melody suggests, with the intention of capturing the essence of a Bix Beiderbecke cornet solo. Well, as I said, that's the official version. "The notes sounded good," said Hoagy, "and I played till I was tossed out, protesting, still groping for the full content of my music." So he hastened over to a joint called the Book Nook that had a piano. Which, even in his moony, lovelorn state, he recognized as pretty good. And, seeing the happy couples and pining for Dorothy, he looked up at the starry sky and started whistling a tune. The official version of the creation of "Stardust" is that young Hoagland was in love with a girl called Dorothy Kelly, and one night, strolling across the campus of Indiana University, he came to the so-called "spooning wall". So in 1927 Carmichael quit his law practice in Florida and went back home to Bloomington, Indiana. But the songwriting, writing music, made him." He would have done very well as an attorney because he was a very gifted person and very intelligent. Something gets into your blood - like lyric writing in mine, popular songs. "Hoagy studied law," Parish told me many years later, "and he was practicing in Florida when they had that real estate boom in the Twenties. You don't have to have legal training to write "Stardust" but it helps: the song's lyricist Mitchell Parish was himself a law clerk at this time. Hoagy Carmichael had written a couple of songs - "Washboard Blues" and "Riverboat Shuffle" - but he wasn't an actor or a singer or a composer. (Sinatra himself cuts an oddly Hoagy-esque figure as a down-at-heel musician in the film Young At Heart - especially playing barroom piano on "Night And Day".) And, according to Ian Fleming in the very first 007 novel, Hoagy Carmichael - rather than Sean Connery or Daniel Craig - is what James Bond is meant to look like.īut in 1927 all that lay ahead. But they were big stars: Bogie and Bacall in To Have And Have Not, Myrna Loy and Fredric March in The Best Years Of Our Lives. He's the thin fellow with the hat pushed back on his head tinkling the piano in the bar scene of any number of films, usually playing a character with a singular name - Cricket, Happy, Jingles - and contributing some terse late-night philosophical solace for whatever's on the stars' minds. Many people with no interest in the songwriting credits on album sleeves know Carmichael's name: He was a singer-songwriter long before anyone had ever heard the term, enjoying hit records with his own compositions. The composer was Hoagy Carmichael and back around 1926-27 that's what he was dreaming of - not a starry, romantic ballad, but the hot licks of his pal, corrnetist Bix Beiderbecke. "The verse," noticed Mel Tormé, "rambles up the scale and down, resembling nothing so much as an improvisational cornet solo." It's one of those songs about a song, "dreaming of a (presumably entirely different) song", but it was written as an instrumental with dreams of a very particular instrumentalist. It's not "the easiest song to sing" - which is why, 76 years ago, it was played far more often than it was sung. Frank gave us the key and the piano and rhythm section began, and we just tried to get some background to hold it all together. Frank, do you think we can scare something up for you to sing?' Sinatra called out 'Stardust', which is not the easiest song to sing. He said, 'Ladies and Gentlemen, this is our new vocalist, and we don't have any arrangements for him as yet. I'll never forget how Harry introduced him to the audience. He formally joined the orchestra at a gig in New Haven, Connecticut, as Jack Palmer, a featured trumpeter with the James band, recalled: In fact, it was the very first song he sang after signing a two-year contract with Harry James in June of 1939. But "Stardust" was part of Frank Sinatra's story from his earliest days as a professional singer. "Stardust" isn't thought of as a Sinatra song - Nat "King" Cole's is probably the voice that first springs to mind in association with the ballad, and Artie Shaw's clarinet when it comes to instrumental recordings. They have a new singer - a 23-year old boy vocalist who signed with the band a few days earlier - and he steps to the microphone to sing: It's July 8th 1939 and the Harry James orchestra is on stage at the Roseland Ballroom in New York.
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