His death had to happen sooner or later just wishing it had been later. Jerry was the one composer I think everyone wanted to meet. Not that he was greater than anybody else or more ingenious nor more melodic. He would totally agree. What he achieved with his song writing (words and music) was a seeming spontaneity of profound emotional expression oftentimes on just a few notes and chords. Hearing his songs is like being a ghost in a room witnessing the outpouring of all the unsung truths of someone's life. Such is the greatness and impact of his material you think he wrote twice as much for the stage than he actually did.
Popular memory thinks of Hello Dolly!'s Before the Parade Passes By as the big marching band number from the Barbara Streisand film. In fact it was a coming of older age soliloquy on stage for a woman who had lived and respected the memory of her dead husband all those years but realized finally that she had to move on in her life.
The Grand Tour starring Joel Grey closed after only 61 performances but Jerry never wrote a bad score or song: I'll Be Here Tomorrow. Dear World fared slightly better with 132 performances: another two of Broadway's most beautiful eloquent ballads, I Don't Want to Know and And I was Beautiful. Certainly a musical relevant for today's climate. Mack and Mabel closed after 66 shows and sports two of Broadway performers' most beloved songs. "My musicals are my children [so] I should never say I prefer this to that," he explained, but "I just have never tired of Mack and Mabel.”
The music and lyrics of Mr Jerry Herman are an everlasting light and spirit. All songwriters will have their 'game' upped knowing that Jerry's ghost may well be peeping in on them from high above.
As a post-script having read all the obits etc:
“What I really want,” he told the New York Times in 1998, “is to be an entertainer, to entertain masses of people.” And Jerry Herman did exactly that in spades, re-iterated by everyone in the last 24 hours. What fascinated me (and continues to do so) is just how heeling are all of Jerry's sad ballads; something so psychologically profound through their utter simplicity. If artist Paul Klee took a line for a walk then Jerry Herman took a note for a stroll of words from darkness into light.
I defy even the most miserable 'mutt' in the world to come away from watching Mame not feeling blessed with being themselves, enjoying who they really are and proud of ignoring social conventional wisdom.
I hope everyone doesn't get frustrated with me for adding to this post through the day. But I just did some grocery shopping and heard a very known song ?pop? on the loudspeakers. Doesn't matter which song it was but I thought of Jerry's melancholy about his music perhaps being out of date and out of time. So not so. Hence my rather (certainly raw) outre version of I Won't Send Roses.
There are only so many notes. And what jazz musicians let alone Gustav Mahler do with them is forever amazing. So here's the thing: I see the notes as being akin to the human skeleton. All are different but there is a basic structure to make the mechanism (which it is) work. Words are the tissues/organs etc etc that makes us creatures ultimately function as humans.
Marvin Hamlisch was so talented a composer/musician yet one could play the theme to The Way We Were in C-major instead of A major and still have the skeleton function. Not quite as robust maybe as in A major but nonetheless not a disappointment. Great great lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman wrote the words for that now world famous song.
Surely the functioning/feeling body was a better Model T Human product thanks to that collaboration:)?
What Jerry Herman did was create his wonderful, happy/sad/problematic but ultimately free spirited creature out of almost nothing. Can one separate the skeleton from the tissues? Well, not really. Let's start with bone marrow and…..Could it not be argued that Jerry Herman reduced us to a single cell organism feeling all the pain of a larger creature? The opening six notes of I'll Be Here Tomorrow: and? The skeleton and the tissue of words are propelling his organism forward. We hear this and we want to know: and what/where/how/why?
All this isn't a Jonathan Miller 'Beyond the Fringe' send up, though could easily be so :) The Beach Boys had amazing harmonies, The Beatles less so but, dare I say it, with more Jerry Herman. Yesterday is Jerry Herman's music and lyrics, only Jerry would just have written it without all the Lennon/McCartney 'fussing';)
What would Jerry had achieved if he had collaborated with a Carole Bayer Sager- just plucking a name out of the talent ether. Maybe it would genius, maybe disaster. What we are left with is someone whose tissue was full of music and whose skeleton full of simple vital words not just to get us through the day but to get us all up the next morning.
Then again, I think of Strauss' finale to Der Rosenkavalier or his song Morgen. Words are important but the music easily stands alone. As with Schumann's andante cantabile from his piano quartet op.47, or the andante from Shostakovich's 2nd Piano Concerto. Or the final theme from Wagner's Götterdämmerung. Just what springs to mind. Does the music send one into a blissful everlasting sleep or revitalize for….
I should stop now methinks before …tying myself into Houdini knots not even he could escape…..
maybe the music enables one to speak, and maybe the unspoken words enables one to write music. At the end of the day perhaps it is the monad, that thought/creativity/action whether singular or binary that propels us through to another day. After all: it is that research that will ultimately convince cancer to retreat.
so maybe not so 'hokey' after all.
When he gets to heaven he realizes he isn’t like the other angels. You see, he isn’t beautiful like they are, and none of the other little angels will play with him and he’s all alone. One day he decides to leave the angels and to go live with the animals in animal heaven instead. They don’t seem to mind that his wings are short or that his harp is made of brass…
