So what do we know about the man who wrote April in Paris? That he was born Vladimir Alexandrovitch Dukelsky at a railway station near Minsk. That he was a child prodigy who studied composition with Gliere. That he was forced into exile by the Bolshevik Revolution (this is not a biography, this is Tolstoy). That he fled to Constantinople where he earned his keep pounding the keyboard at a local cafe. That one day someone requested a hot new American song – Swanee. That it was only a matter of time before he would meet the man who wrote it.
George Gershwin befriended ‘Dukie’ within a few years of his arriving in ‘the land of the free’ (as inevitably he would). It was he who came up with his Anglicized moniker ‘Vernon Duke’, he who kept him employed preparing piano parts of Gershwin hit tunes, he who set him up with a budding lyricist pal of his brother Ira’s, Yip Harburg. Together they wrote April in Paris, I Like the Likes of You and Water Under the Bridge – three of the featured numbers on this splendid album. But the Vernon Duke story was longer and more complex than this. Vernon Duke the ‘serious’ composer grappled with Diaghilev at the Ballets Russes. He secured a ballet commission, Zephyr et Flore, at the age of 21. Four years later his First Symphony was introduced by his mentor Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony. So what happened? Why the neglect? Why the obscurity? Who was the real Vernon Duke alias Vladimir Dukelsky and why did he never find his true identity?
Or was it that the man and the music enjoyed being elusive? We’re told that you were just as likely to find Duke ensconced with the Prokofievs as with the Gershwins, and Duke’s melodies suggest the nearness of both and the allegiance of neither. They are wont to be indecisive, questing, quite magically open-ended. He called them his ‘out of this world’ tunes (‘not heavenly, just plain uncommercial’), and that they are. Constantly modulating harmonies pull them in and out of phase. For chromatic read sinuous. They are sexy, slightly subversive melodies – curvaceous, physical. You can touch them. But then they’re gone and you can’t. The way the melody works in a song like Remember or Forget embraces both states of consciousness: memory and forgetfulness. Round About (lyric: Ogden Nash) is possessed of a Kurt Weillian quality of regret: each time the melody is set fit to soar, it’s drawn back into the haunting refrain (‘you go round about and round about’); memorable, but going nowhere. It’s the story of Duke’s life. He too was merry-go-rounded. Round About was only published in a condensed form. The discursive ‘middle-eight’ has been restored here for the first time since 1946.
Which, of course, is typical of Nonesuch’s painstaking preparation. Discover a handful of great ballads here – Born Too Late, The Love I Long For, Words Without Music (with its ecstatic refrain – once heard, forever smitten) – but discover them in brand new orchestrations or, in the case of The Love I Long For, just the relaxed, ‘small-hours’ keyboard ruminations of Fred Hersch. It’s a beautifully textured album. I Like the Likes of You, with its guitar, piano, bass and drums combo treatment, slips in so easily after Danny Troob’s shining orchestration of April in Paris. And to close, there’s that beautiful song Ages Ago (I ask you, where else could that go?), orchestration and solo pianist: Richard Rodney Bennett. Is this a class act or what?
But I’ve left the lady herself until last, because the way she sings, the way she appreciates a line of lyric, a phrase of melody, the way that both elements conspire to tell us more about the song and not more about her, is typical of her work. ‘Dawn Upshaw sings Vernon Duke’. Not too many other people do – and that’s what this album is about.ES