IRVING BERLIN'S SHOW BUSINESS news and reviews

PRESS

• Berlin Article in NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/23/arts/music/23berl.html?ex=1142744400&en=9e9b470ad7ea5a5d&ei=5070

REVIEWS OF BOOK
• Gene Shallit review of book on the Today show
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10525177/from/RSS/
• On Turner Classic Movie website
http://turnerclassicmovies.com/movienews/index/?cid=113164

I have appeared on a number of radio programs
• On KPFA in California I walked audiences through Berlin's life and music in a special two part presentation (2 1/2 hours). The November 23rd and 30th broadcasts can be found at
http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?show=57&page=&type=
• Closer to home, I appeared on Irwin Chusid's lively show on WFMU. the hourlong November 30th show can be found at
http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/IC
• On 12/19/05 I was on one of Philadelphia's premier radio program, Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane on 90.9 FM WHYY from 11 - 12, talking about Irving Berlin and playing his music for one hour. Her programs are archived at http://www.whyy.org

I participated in a unique "conversation" about the book and Berlin on the Well, one of the most intelligent online communities out there. One can read the discussion and even contribute to it at:
http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/

MORE BOOK REVIEWS
The Associated Press listed it as one of their top holiday books, as did the Boston Globe, the NY Post, and many others.
• From the Boston Globe 12/4/05
The most famous commercial Christmas song of all is Irving Berlin's ''White Christmas," and it naturally turns up in David Leopold's ''Irving Berlin's Show Business" (Abrams, $50). Written for the 1942 film ''Holiday Inn," and introduced on the radio by Bing Crosby before the release of the film, the song became, Leopold amusingly writes, ''the most popular song and the most widely recorded song of all time, and it would finally win an Oscar for the songwriter." Berlin himself believed that the timing was a factor in the song's success. ''[It] seems to have a quality that can be applied to the world situation as it exists today. . . . While it isn't a war song, it can be easily associated with it." The book is full of wonderful pictures and lore.

• San Francisco Chronicle 11/21/05
"Tracing Irving Berlin's footsteps in American music, theater and film, author David Leopold does more than shine a spotlight on one of our country's most prolific and beloved artists (his active career lasted from 1907 to 1966, and he wrote more than 1,200 songs, including "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "Blue Skies," "White Christmas" and "God Bless America," before he died at 101 in 1989). Leopold offers a cultural history of the 20th century, as the Russian immigrant's work both influenced and reflected pop cultural trends, from ragtime to jazz, from vaudeville to Broadway musicals, from writing for blackface to standing up for black performers' rights.

"Leopold explains in his introduction that he wanted "to show Berlin's career as he and his audiences saw it," so he includes illustrated sheet music covers, set and costume designs, playbills, photos and descriptions of productions for which there is no other record; they didn't have cast albums in 1915. Leopold makes long-forgotten shows come alive with the help of abundant artifacts culled from private and public collections."

• From LA times
This songwriter blessed America
A new book reveals much about the huge talent — and big heart — of Irving Berlin.
By Lynne Heffley, Times Staff Writer

KATE SMITH turned "God Bless America" into such a clarion call for love of country in 1938 that efforts arose to have it replace "The Star-Spangled Banner" as the national anthem.

But composer Irving Berlin, renowned for his patriotism, wouldn't have it. Instead he donated the song's copyright, a gesture that has contributed more than $10 million to the Boy and Girl Scouts of America.

"It really tells you about Berlin," says David Leopold, who relates the incident in his new book, "Irving Berlin's Show Business," a comprehensive history of the musical icon's work. "He was a sincere patriot, not a fellow who was using patriotism to further his career."

Yet the song's status as informal anthem endures: On Sept. 11, 2001, members of Congress were moved to sing "God Bless America," impromptu, on the Capitol steps.

Leopold packs his book with anecdotes, timelines, photographs — many rarely or never published — and other Berlin memorabilia.

One of the "most remarkable" things in the book, Leopold said by telephone from Pennsylvania, is a Diego Rivera painting commissioned for a sheet music cover that was never used because it depicted interracial couples.

A yellowed newspaper clipping rails against the "insanity" of ragtime and calls Berlin's 1911 hit, "Alexander's Ragtime Band," a public menace.

Sheet music covers and show posters depict the chronology and visual iconography of the long career of former singing waiter Izzy Baline, the Russian immigrant who became a giant in Broadway and film.

Leopold details the history behind such evergreens as "Always," "There's No Business Like Show Business" and "White Christmas," among more than 800 published Berlin songs.

Berlin's "Blue Skies" helped usher in the talkies when Al Jolson sang it on film in 1927's "The Jazz Singer." His musicals "Annie Get Your Gun," "Top Hat" and "Easter Parade" are enduring stage and film classics.

As Jerome Kern said: "Irving Berlin has no place in American music. Irving Berlin is American music."

"The fact is," Leopold says, "the whole history of the Broadway musical and the film musical, it's Berlin's story." Whether they involve Tin Pan Alley, the Ziegfeld Follies, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland or Ethel Merman, "there are all these signature moments that we can summon up. And all of a sudden, you realize that their shared connection is … Irving Berlin songs."

• Associated Press
Celebration of Berlin at Lincoln Center
By MICHAEL KUCHWARA , 02.15.2006, 12:26 PM

Irving Berlin started writing for the theater in 1909 - his first full Broadway score was in 1914 for the musical "Watch Your Step." His last show, "Mr. President," arrived in 1962.

That's more than a half-century of musical theater, and it is being celebrated in a new exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Admission is free.

Called "Show Business!: Irving Berlin's Broadway," the show currently is on view through May 26 at the library's Lincoln Center location, 40 Lincoln Center Plaza. Among the items to peruse and/or listen to: rare photographs and posters, set and costume designs and cast recordings of Berlin's shows.

The musicals include such early works as "Stop! Look! Listen!" (1915), four editions of Berlin's famous Music Box revues of the 1920s, and later shows such as "Face the Music" (1932), "As Thousands Cheer" (1933) and "Louisiana Purchase" (1940), and his successes for Ethel Merman, "Annie Get Your Gun (1946) and "Call Me Madam" (1950).

The Lincoln Center exhibit coincides with the release of a lavish book, "Irving Berlin's Show Business," written by David Leopold, curator of the exhibition. For information on the exhibit, call 212-870-1630.

• From the NY Sun
The Man Who Made Them All Dance
BY WILL FRIEDWALD
February 14, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/27510

Once I asked the great lyricist Sammy Cahn about his song "Come Dance With Me," which he wrote at the request of Frank Sinatra. The challenge, he told me, was trying to come up with a song about music or dancing that Irving Berlin hadn't already written. "He has written all the great songs about dancing, has he not?" Sammy said. "He covered all the bases!" Then Sammy began reeling off the titles of some of the most famous songs Berlin had written for Fred Astaire: "Cheek to Cheek," "Let Yourself Go," "You're Easy To Dance With."

The Berlin-Astaire connection was strong. They collaborated on six films together, more projects than Astaire did with any other composer or Berlin with any other star. Yet Berlin didn't write songs about dancing because he worked with Astaire - it was the other way around. Astaire wanted to work with Berlin (who was nearing 50 when they began their collaboration) because he had captured the magic of dancing in the words and music of so many of his songs. Indeed, a majority of Berlin's songs were about the sheer joy of music: making it, dancing to it, participating in it.

No one understood the power of music better than Berlin: It transformed him from a homeless, penniless immigrant on the streets of the Lower East Side to one of the richest, most famous, and widely respected figures in American culture. All this is wonderfully evident in the new picture book "Irving Berlin's Show Business" (Harry N. Abrams, 250 pages, $40), compiled by David Leopold, who also curated the New York Public Library's new exhibition "Show Business!: Irving Berlin's Broadway," which opens today.

From the beginning, Berlin wrote comedy songs and ethnic songs. Long before he mastered the heartfelt, romantic ballad, he practically invented a genre all his own: the party song, the clarion call to have a good time. "Dance of the Grizzly Bear" and "Everybody's Doin' It" were Berlin's first notable songs about dancing. He soon was writing numerous songs about having a ball - in the literal sense - from "The Million Dollar Ball" to "Belle of the Barber's Ball," and even "The Old Maid's Ball." Thirty years later, during World War II, he paraded his support for Franklin Roosevelt with "The President's Birthday Ball."

Berlin made his first attempt at a lyric in 1907, when still a singing waiter in Chinatown. In the next few years, he honed his art of writing music (even though he could barely play it) and words, and his songs, notably "That Beautiful Rag" and "Ragtime Violin," were increasingly successful. But it was "Alexander's Ragtime Band," penned in 1911, that put him on the map.

A comic strip from that year (reprinted in Mr. Leopold's book) illustrates the song's popularity: A hapless character wakes to find his alarm clock ringing to "Alexander's" syncopated, bugle-call melody; both the fruit-seller on the street and the local ragman hawk their wares to its rhythm; even his parrot demands a cracker to its tempo. As singer-scholar Ian Whitcomb once noted, "Alexander's Ragtime Band" was the "Rock Around the Clock" of its era.

For decades, purists attacked Berlin with the charge that "Alexander's Ragtime Band" wasn't real ragtime. It wasn't - no more than his 1920 "Home Again Blues" was a real 12-bar blues or his 1917 "Mr. Jazz Himself" authentic New Orleans jazz. "Alexander" was a song about ragtime: Berlin was the first to capture the energy and spirit of the new music in a popular song. And, even though Scott Joplin and his ilk had been around for nearly 20 years, "Alexander" was the song that officially announced the emergence of the new American popular music born of ragtime, blues, and, soon enough, jazz.

Ragtime and "animal dances" like Berlin's grizzly bear were, eventually, denounced by the Vatican. But even before that happened, Berlin satirized his critics by playfully embracing the Satanic side of the music in "At the Devil's Ball" and "Pack Up Your Sins (And Go to the Devil)." In "Play a Simple Melody," Berlin composed two distinct sets of words and music, both using the same chord changes and encouraging a ragtime band to get hot. He then superimposed the two strains on top of each other contrapuntally.

When the finished song was performed in Berlin's first Broadway show, "Watch Your Step," the crowds practically rioted. The words to the second strain could be a netherworld prayer from a 1970s metal band: "Musical demon [...] won't you play me some rag?" In 1913's "The International Rag," Berlin writes prophetically of how American pop music will conquer the world: "Italian opera singers / Have learned to snap their fingers!"

Some of Berlin's joy was leavened in 1912 with the tragic death of his first wife. For the first time, he put his heart in a song with the classic waltz "When I Lost You"; he would later help establish the waltz as the time signature for nostalgic reminiscence. Throughout the teens and the 1920s, Berlin's love songs grew more sentimental. By the time of his second marriage in 1926, his songs about music had taken a surprisingly melancholy turn.

Fifteen years earlier, Berlin had used the genre as a harbinger of the new, of everything tony and fashionable. But in his 30s and 40s, music became a Proustian trigger to remembrance. In 1919, Berlin established that "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody"; just a few years later, turned that same conceit around with the beautiful "The Song Is Ended (But the Melody Lingers On)." In the first, the memory of the girl haunts you in a pleasant way; in the second, a painful one.

Berlin would continue to find variations on the idea, such as the 1928 waltz "Where Is the Song of Songs for Me?"; the romantic "Say It With Music"; the 1946 ballad "You Keep Coming Back Like a Song"; and the lovely, autobiographical "I Poured My Heart Into a Song" of 1939. But the most compelling of Berlin's "serious" songs about music is his breathtakingly moving "Russian Lullaby" of 1927.

This brief but brilliant 16-bar melody, with its minor-key, quasi-modal harmonies, is also highly autobiographical - Berlin looking back on his family in Siberia in a way that's poignant and bittersweet. Clearly a song about a song, it tells of how the Russian mother sings her little bubbelas to sleep. Like all of Berlin's song-songs, it has an air of mystery - Berlin never tells us exactly what the Russian lullaby says or means. But the family is obviously looking forward, both toward the future and the West, as they dream of "a land that's free for you and me."