Shaun Tirrell vs. Mike Manhattan; Sorry, Mike, but you lose

Mike Manhattan, newsman for Savannah's number one TV station, is by all accounts a fine person. He is to be greatly admired for his thus far successful personal battle with cancer, and his voice is of the quality that make women swoon and make men wish for a little additional testicular fortitude. But as a sales pitchman, Mike Manhattan could have partnered with the island of Manhattan and still have been decimated this past Saturday by a fast talking and faster playing piano man who claimed to be a poor salesman.

Mr. Manhattan was emcee for the Savannah Philharmonic's "The American Spirit" September 11th show at the eternally gorgeous, if slightly toasty warm, Lucas Theater. Part of Mike's job was to ask people to support the organization built from scratch by conductor and music director Peter Shannon in ways other than buying tickets to shows; the good old membership drive well known to fans of public radio and TV. In fact, Mr. Manhattan's appearances began to resemble those infamous pledge breaks - his third trip out elicited a whisper of "Lord! Him again?" from a patron seated behind me and my wife.

Mike's intentions were, nonetheless, noble, and there was nothing incorrect about what he said. If we don't support this orchestra, Savannah won't have the music Mike very accurately described as beautiful, exquisite, effervescent, pulchritudinous (okay, he didn't use that one, but dang, with his voice, that would have sounded marvelous). Mr. Manhattan made the requisite request to check out the table in the lobby during intermission or after the concert to inquire about becoming a member and all the benefits of membership, though unlike public TV, membership doesn't get you Dr. Wayne Dyer's latest book "How Bald Gurus Make A Killing Off This Shtick."

Then, during the second half of the show, a man whom some Savannah Philharmonic fans saw at a show last year appeared on stage. Concert pianist Shaun Tirrell, having waived his usual fee to perform, played the bejesus out of the third movement of the Concerto In F, one of George Gershwin's least appreciated compositions among the general public. Tirrell, with a multitude of awards and honors that only the serious music fan knows or cares about, was amazing, not to mention Maestro Shannon and the accompanying orchestra. Almost as stunning was the brief speech and, as it turned out, sales pitch Mr. Tirrell made afterward.

With an 'aw, shucks' attitude more in tune with Johnny Mercer's Savannah than Mr. Tirrell's home of Gaithersburg, Maryland, he made a pitch to support the Savannah Philharmonic that was by far the most effective of the evening. Well, as if Mr. Tirrell's playing wasn't an effective enough pitch, Shaun told us that Peter Shannon was the finest conductor he had played for. Not "a pretty good conductor", not "one of the finest", not "a bloody good musician and a fine consumer of the fruit of the vine", THE finest conductor. You don't have to be a calculus expert to know how many conductors Mr. Tirrell has probably played for.

Even more telling was that Mr. Tirrell missed his son's birthday, which was the day before the show, for the chance to play with the Savannah Philharmonic. That made me want to immediately whip out the check book and join the Philharmonic's "Conductor's Circle", which gets you great tickets to the shows, your name in the concert programs, and car washes for life from the percussion section (I think). Since that check would have been more rubberized than a Goodyear plant, I didn't.

Still, I'd like to think that an endorsement from the likes of Shaun Tirrell would make folks realize that we don't have to wait for the Savannah Music Festival every year to see world class musicians. We already have them here, and helping them put on several shows in a season doesn't really cost you as much as tickets to one Music Festival show.

Mr. Tirrell ended his pitch by talking about his grandfather and how he had introduced him to the music he loved. His 'Pop' was a salesman by trade, Shaun said, an excellent one despite his eighth-grade education, and Mr. Tirrell claimed he could never sell anything as well. Mr. Tirrell was wrong. In my book, he outsold not only his Pop but also Mike Manhattan, who was there in part to specifically sell the Savannah Philharmonic. No offense, Mr. Manhattan, but Mr. Tirrell had me with the first note he played. Let's hope he had most everyone else there by the time he left the stage.

How a Skylark And a (Mr.) B Broke Down a Barrier

When Bix Beiderbecke, who made more beautiful sounds emanate from brass instruments than perhaps any other human, died at 28 from an overdose of degenerate behavior, no one would have guessed that his passing would eventually help tear down a wall of musical racial separation. Even more unlikely was that help in bringing down that wall came from a guy from segregated Savannah, Georgia and a guy from Indiana, home of the modern Ku Klux Klan, or that the voice which blasted the wall away had bi-racial grandparents native to the bigoted nation's capitol.

Bix, self-taught cornet king back when most everyone could distinguish the mellow cornet from louder cousin trumpet, was the idol of many musicians in the 1920's. One idol who got the chance to play alongside Bix was young Hoagy Carmichael, recent graduate of his hometown Indiana University law school. No matter how badly Bix treated himself - the human body was not designed to consume even half of the notoriously nasty Prohibition bootleg gin Bix supposedly ingested - Hoagy was naturally enthralled by the chance to play alongside God. He was so hooked that two of Mr. Carmichael's prized possessions had some Bix in them; Hoagy's first child, a son (luckily) named Hoagy Bix, and a cornet mouthpiece that once belonged to the king himself. The mouthpiece was a mainstay of Hoagy's suit pocket until Mr. Carmichael passed it on to a lyricist, a younger fan of Bix with whom Hoagy occasionally worked - John Herndon Mercer.

Between the first time he worked with Johnny in 1933 and when they would come together again around 1940, Mr. Carmichael wrote some melodies based on Bix's solos - or perhaps they were actual Bix solos as eminent jazz biographer Gene Lees once suggested - in hopes of making a Broadway musical about Bix. When it didn't happen, Hoagy gave one of the melodies to Mr. Mercer to write a lyric for it. It only took John almost a year. Mr. Mercer, sometimes ready with a lyric in as little as half-an-hour, struggled with the melody so much that Hoagy later claimed he had forgotten about it when, one day out of the blue, Mercer presented him with "Skylark."

It was kind of a big deal, big enough to be on the Billboard pop charts four times under four different artists....in 1942 alone, with three of those in one month! Glenn Miller (with Ray Eberle on vocals), Harry James (w/Helen Forrest), and Dinah Shore were all on the same Billboard chart with the exact same song in May of '42. Bing Crosby (of course) would have a hit with it two months later. But before fans bought copies of those records, something happened with "Skylark" that perhaps had never before occurred; it's inaugural to the white entertainment world over the radio was given by black artists, among them Billy Eckstine.

Mr. B., he of the mixed-race background, began singing with the man many consider the first modern jazz pianist, Earl "Fatha" Hines, in 1939. By then, Hines and his orchestra were household names among white and black audiences thanks to an eleven-year run as "the most broadcast band in America" from their home base, the Grand Terrace Ballroom of the Al Capone-controlled Sunset Cafe in Chicago. It was no longer the Grand Terrace Orchestra after 1940; Hines thought he was underpaid and could say so aloud without fear of bullets now that Capone was long gone. Still, the Hines band could easily get a radio gig, and during one particular gig on the air in '42, they appear to have been the first band to play the latest Carmichael/Mercer tune into the ether, likely the first time a black singer and band debuted a mainstream (meaning white) pop song on the radio.

It isn't known whether a recording of that radio performance exists, but the Hines band's studio recording of "Skylark" was just as "sweet" and had just as much of a pop feel as the Glenn Miller version. As Mr. Eckstine crooned the lyric, he was even accompanied by an apparent "skylark", a very un-Hines-like flute for crying out loud, half a decade before flute tweets helped carry Nat King Cole through "Nature Boy." The mellow sax solo during the bridge wasn't as jazzy as Harry James's treatment of the "Skylark" melody with his muted trumpet. In other words, it wasn't exactly the best version of the song. But it was solid, and it helped cement Mr. B. as the "Sepia Sinatra", a ridiculous racial moniker common to the era no doubt. There is also no doubt that a lot of women began swooning to Billy Eckstine during the war.

Hines and Eckstine's recording of "Skylark" didn't sell as well as those of their white contemporaries - their big hit song of '42 was their own composition "Stormy Monday Blues", number one on Billboard's new Harlem Hit Parade, the non-P.C. precursor to the R&B chart. But Fatha and Mr. B. proved to Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Carmichael, and other songwriters that you didn't need Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman, or other performers of pallor premiere your song on the radio to grab an audience's attention. Nat Cole is remembered by most as the first black pop singer with mass appeal among white and black fans. Record sales numbers these days may reflect that, but I think Nat himself would remind us that Billy Eckstine beat him by a few years, with some help from Mr. Mercer and Mr. Carmichael and Mr. Bix.