Cy Coleman, RIP

Cy Coleman, RIP

Just about the last of the great Broadway tunesmiths has left us. John Kander is still around, as are Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, but over the past couple of decades we've witnessed the passing of Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, Arthur Schwartz, Ira Gershwin, Fred Ebb, Adolph Green, Leonard Bernstein, Jimmy van Heusen, Irving Berlin, and dozens of other great craftsmen of song. Truly the end of an era is unfolding. These guys wrote songs for others to sing, and they were exacting in their execution, harshly self-critical to the point of neurotic perfectionism.

The singer-songwriters who emerged in the sixties (beginning with Dylan and The Beatles) were entertainers first who understood not only that they wanted to tell their own stories, but who also grasped the compelling economics of owning and controlling your own publishing catalog. As performers, it was all too easy for them to make do with less than perfect rhyming, meter, and scanning. If you could squeeze another word into a chorus and it helped to get your point across, why not do it? And while sophisticated harmonies might not have been beyond their musical reach--the later Beatles (and the early Doors!) produced some significant music that you have to listen to more than once to really hear---there is a 1-4-5 sameness that pervades a great deal of folk and rock 'n roll. The production values in the studio and on the tour stage often counted for as much as the basic material. That's why he's Sir George Martin.

The Broadway guys were different. If a lyric didn't fit a melody, they went back to the drawing board (Oscar Hammerstein lamented for the rest of his life settling for the word "divine" in the penultimate phrase of "All The Things You Are", and it is jarring, but he only had two syllables to work with and Jerome Kern was quite happy with the melody exactly the way he'd written it, thank you). The Broadway composers often provided harmonies that surprised the audiences of their day, and many of their tunes sound just as fresh today as they did when they were composed. They wrote songs that, by and large, were meant for delivery by a lone performer with a single accompanying piano. Try doing that with "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" or "Get Off Of My Cloud". (No flames, please; I've got big ears and a very large Stones and Beatles collection).

Sinatra's greatness is only partially explained by his rich baritone, flawless phrasing, and unequalled stage appeal. He also brought to the party an unmatched ear for the great song. Many of the tunes we know as "standards" today might have disappeared but for having been hand-picked for eternal preservation by The Chairman. Cy Coleman gave him two of his greatest hits: "Witchcraft" and "The Best Is Yet To Come", neither of which was originally a show tune.

Coleman also composed the scores for Wildcat (including "Hey Look Me Over"),Sweet Charity ("Hey Big Spender" and "If My Friends Could See Me Now"). More recently, he wrote the songs for the 1990 hit show City Of Angels, which gets my vote as easily the best original Broadway score of the past 20 years or so. And for the red states, Coleman wrote The Will Rogers Follies with lyricists Comden and Green. If you get a chance, listen to the musical setting he provides for "Never Met A Man I Didn't Like", an American anthem if I ever heard one, sappy lyrical flourishes and all.

The remaining great craftsmen (which group includes one of the greatest of them all, the still prolific Stephen Sondheim) can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They continue bravely to soldier on against the cultural onslaught of short attention spans, Andrew Lloyd Webber, musical illiteracy, and MTV. Cy Coleman will be sorely missed.