the simplest of our composers. A good way to estimate his capacity is to play the more sentimental songs (I'm Gonna Pin My Medal on the Girl I Left Behind; Someone Else May Be There While I'm Gone; All by Myself) in slow time and then in fast. The amazing way they hold together in each tempo, the way in which the sentiment, the flow of the melody, disengages itself in the slow, and then the rhythm, the beat, takes first place in the fast time, is exceptional. You cannot do the same with his own Some Sunny Day, nor with Chicago, or Carolina in the Morning. Berlin's work is musically interesting, and that means it has a chance to survive. I have no such confidence in Dardanella or Chicago. The famous unmelodic four notes occur in the latter as in Pack Up Your Sins (the source is the same, but we need not go into that); the working out is vastly inferior. Fred Fisher's work is sledge-hammer in comparison with Berlin's, and lacks Berlin's humour. Of that quality Walter Donaldson has some, and Gershwin much. Donaldson wrote Al Jolson's Mammy (I can't remember it, but I'm afraid I didn't like it) and a song I count heavily on: Carolina in the Morning. This song is, incidentally, a startling example of how jazz is improving the lyrics, for the majority of jazz songs are not meant primarily for singing, so the balladists take liberties, and not being held to definite end-rhyme give us "strolling with your girlie when the dew is pearly early in the morning."[1] The music is clean, rapid, and audacious. It carries the introduction (of the chorus) almost to the point of exhaustion, suspending the resolution of its phrases until the last possible moment, and then lets go, with a vast relief on the long, somewhat yodelly note. Confrey has done the same thing in Kitten on the Keys where one bar is repeated five times with successive tightening of interest.
Two composers are possible as successors to Berlin if he ever chooses to stop. I am sure of Gershwin and would be more sure of Cole Porter if his astonishing lyrics did not so dazzle me as to make me distrust my estimate of his music. Gershwin is in Berlin's tradition, he has almost all the older man’s qualities as a composer (not as a lyric writer; nor has he Berlin's sense of a song on the stage).
- ↑ Internal, off-beat rhyme occurred as long ago as Waiting for the Robert E. Lee. Bud de Sylva has used it intelligently, but not expertly enough in Where is the Man of My Dreams? and Brian Hooker and William Le Baron make it a great factor in their highly sophisticated lyrics. So also Cole Porter and Anne Caldwell.
