Autumn Serenades
Five additions to my semi-regular series on music for the fall season
Regular readers here likely know about some of the topics I return to over and over again. There’s Laura Nyro and Elvis Presley. There’s overlooked albums and classic jazz. There’s also autumn which is in full swing where I live.
Ensuring I have the right soundtrack for the season has been a preoccupation of mine for at least 25 years now and I have accumulated a long list of recordings that I feel enhance this time of year. Twice before I have written about my kind of autumn music and below is a supplement to those essays. I hope you enjoy it and that you’ll also share what some of your favourites are for fall.
Until next time, may good listening be with you all!
Autumn Nocturnes
By: Robert C. Gilbert
October is my favourite month. It signals that summer—enjoyable for about a moment and then just a slog—is in the rearview mirror and that the holiday season—full of endlessly enjoyable rituals—is coming up ahead.
What’s directly in front is crisper weather, chunkier clothing and the fantasia of crimson and golden autumn leaves. As I’ve written here twice before (read here and here), I feel drawn to particular types of music during this season to help heighten its delightful wonder. Music that employs space or a sweeping string line or resonant harmonies or a pensive, interior quality. In my previous essays on my type of autumn music, I’ve shared many of my favourites and inspired by recent pieces by wordsworthesq and Abby Schleifer on this topic, I thought I would share just a few more.
It was the fall of 1996 that I first heard John Coltrane’s meeting on record with Johnny Hartman. I was just beginning my immersion into jazz, starting off by exploring, often over and over again, albums by Miles Davis and Coltrane. Many of them thrilled me by expanding my definition of music, taking me well beyond the confines of the three-minute pop song.
Coltrane’s summit session with Hartman was comparatively compact—six performances totaling 31 minutes. But while the music was fairly accessible, it was Hartman’s singing of six adult ballads, all deeply romantic and the lyrics precisely enunciated by the singer, that shook me. It was an invitation to envision the grown-up world of love, opening up to the possibility where even I could one day sing to a lady, “if I’m faithful to you / it’s not through a sense of duty” as on ‘You Are Too Beautiful.’
The crown jewel of the recording is Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Lush Life.’ Hartman smoothly navigates the tricky verse, drawing out the ending, taking several pauses to underline the pain behind the bravado as he proclaims, “ah yes / I was wrong / again / I was wrong,” stretching the last “was” and dipping deep for the final “wrong.” He is equally vitrousic on the primary section of the composition—hear, for one example, how Hartman glides along as he sings, “a week in Paris will ease the bite of it / all I care is to smile in spite of it.” Coltrane’s solo gets deep into the torment of being lonely, and he is pushed and pulled by Elvin Jones on brushes. It’s the kind of recording that is so divinely inspired that no other interpretation of ‘Lush Life’ can measure up or is truly needed.
The connection to fall is explicitly made with the concluding ‘Autumn Serenade,’ a lesser-known pop song written by Sonny Gallop and Peter DeRose, played as a rhumba. One can almost see leaves falling from a tree in time.
Music that is rich in sound and full of colour pairs well with this time of year. One album that comes to mind has one of the most lengthily mundane titles for a record. The cover states “Recorded December 1961” and underneath it, notes “Johnny Hodges, Soloist” and underneath that adds “Billy Strayhorn and the Orchestra.” The music is anything but. Essentially a Duke Ellington recording without Ellington—it’s the sublime Jimmy Jones in the piano chair—but with close to the full Ellington band present, the album is a collection of well-worn Hodges features like ‘I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),’ ‘Jeep’s Blues’ and ‘Day Dream’ plus two unfussy lines by the alto saxophonist and a closing feature for trombonist Lawrence Brown on Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust.’
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Even though Hodges and band had played some of these compositions a thousand times and likely a whole lot more, that intimate familiarity doesn’t come at the cost of what was put down on tape. The album is warm and radiant. Strayhorn’s arrangements are harmonically sumptuous. Hodges plays with the full sweep of his gifts. The glissandos land with true majesty. The band of mostly Ellingtonians plays with precision as on the crescendo of ‘Gal from Joe’s.’ By the time ‘I’m Just a Lucky So-and-So’ rolls around, it’s hard not to swoon once Hodges gets to the bridge, lushly cushioned by the trumpet section of Cat Anderson, Bill Berry, a moonlighting Howard McGhee and Eddie Mullens.
If Hodges and Strayhorn’s collaboration paints the fall of daytime—golden and picturesque—Joe Zawinul’s solo release from 1971, titled simply Zawinul, is the fall of nighttime—cold, mysterious and calling out be explored.
It’s an album that was quickly eclipsed by Weather Report, the group that Zawinul formed with Wayne Shorter and Miroslav Vitous—both appear on Zawinul—in 1970. The album is an exploration of the extended and dense works that the pianist had written and recorded with Cannonball Adderley as well as during his time as part of the ensemble of musicians recording with Miles Davis. Here, thirteen players are employed in various combinations, an all-star assemblage of the cutting edge of jazz-rock.
The pastoral ‘His Last Journey,’ written by Zawinul to commemorate the funeral of his grandfather in Austria on a winter’s day, is the highlight of the album. It begins almost imperceptibly and then becomes a feature for Jimmy Owens on flugelhorn over a melodica part played by Jack DeJohnette and a delicate piano phrase played at key points by Zawinul. It reminds me of how a brightly lit building at night on a fall evening, the leaves on any tree around it illuminated, can be a powerful tabelux, an expression of desolate beauty.
‘His Last Journey’ morphs into ‘Double Image,’ explosive and murky and built around an arco-bass solo by Vitous followed by Zawinul and Herbie Hancock duelling on electric pianos with multiple drummers: Joe Chambers, Billy Hart and DeJohnette, keeping the pulse unsettled. I equate it with the winds of autumn. They can be cool, refreshing and restorative yet also a reminder that the winds of winter won’t often offer such a balm to the soul.
Two more notable things about Zawinul is that it includes the complete melody of his immortal ‘In a Silent Way’ and in so doing, perhaps justifies Davis’ pairing it down when he recorded it in 1969, and Woody Shaw’s brash solo on the opening ‘Doctor Honoris Causa,’ in tribute to Hancock.
Autumn is also the time to dig into the canon of singer-songwriters from the late sixties and seventies. Acoustic sounds, full of woody resonance that mimic the closeness of the season and how it implores taking notice of how the leaves are changing, and bending an ear to hear the crunch of those that have fallen as one walks over them. Joni Mitchell is the artist from this era that I most closely associate with fall, especially her debut, Song to a Seagull, almost entirely consisting of just her voice and her guitar. It’s a masterwork of acid-folk.
Another album that has a similar close quality is Parallelograms, recorded by Linda Perhacs in 1970. Her day job was as a dental hygienist and one of the patients at the clinic she worked at was composer Leonard Rosenman who discovered she wrote and sang songs on the side. He got her a record deal at Kapp and provided the atmospheric, sparse arrangements for the album, which vanished without a trace but was since been discovered and championed as a classic.
Although Perhacs had range as a singer—check out the soprano-like runs on ‘Moon and Cattails’ and the quavering high vibrato on the closing ‘Delicious’—it’s the intimacy of her singing on Parallelograms that is most hypnotic paired with Rosenman’s motifs that burrow into the brain as on the three-song cycle of ‘Dolphin’ to ‘Call of the River’ to ‘Sandy Toes.’ Her music has a pristine quality inducing what can be best described as a breathtaking euphoria, the same reaction as when walking in a park with the ground covered in fallen leaves.
Another singer-songwriter I closely associate with fall is Laura Nyro. Long-time readers here know how much I love her music as well as that of the finest popularizers of it, the 5th Dimension. They began to interpret her songs in 1968 with two from her second album, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession: ‘Sweet Blindness’ and ‘Stoned Soul Picnic.’ The latter was the title of their third album, quite possibly their best and another recording fit for this season.
It’s not so much, to be honest, because of the Nyro covers but what surrounds them. The jazzy harmonies of the uplifting ‘It’s a Good Life’ and ‘The Eleventh Song (What a Groovy Day!)’ Powerful features for Billy Davis, Jr. on ‘I’ll Never Be the Same Again’ and ‘Broken Wing Bird’ as well as the lilting voice of Ron Townson on the introspective ‘The Sailboat Song.’
Fall also compels one to move with the expectation no longer that it will lead to perspiration so a choice cut like ‘California Soul,’ a textbook example of the 5th Dimenson’s brand of symphonic soul, can be part of the soundtrack to do just that.
There’s so much more music for fall that I can go on about—this year’s version of my annual autumn playlist is over 60 hours now. I’ll try to savour it all as I will also try to savour autumn coming around once again.
Some autumnal popular songs which occurred to me would have occurred to me apart from your excellent article, but I am grateful for the prompting. In order only of my ability to remember them, they are:
When October Goes
Autumn Leaves
Lullaby of the Leaves ( much too little known )
Autumn Nocturne ( same )
September Song ( does popular songwriting get greater than this? )
Yesterdays ( Kern, not to be confused with McCartney's Yesterday )
Early Autumn
Autumn Serenade ( I'm disgusted that this song isn't better known. It goes back to the early 1950s. I haven't looked at its chord progression, but somehow, it's wild to me that Peter DeRose, the composer, also wrote Deep Purple. )
Rain ( also by Peter DeRose, and too little known. DeRose belongs to the honorable category of journeymen who contributed two or three memorable songs to The Great American Songbook. Still, Autumn Serenade is his genius moment. )
The September of My Years is one of Frank Sinatra's four or five masterpieces. The whole album is autumnal, the title song, in particular. Sammy Cahn had a genius moment when he thought of the line, "Children, when you shoot at bad men, shoot at me."
The Summer Wind
I'll Remember April
Violets for Your Furs ( late autumn, maybe )
September in the Rain
Whistling Away the Dark ( an almost unknown song by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer. It has an obscurity which is so undeserved, it's shocking. The song never mentions autumn, but autumn is somehow present. The critic, Gene Lees, wrote that Mercer had "a talent for darkness." )
I'm struck by how many of these songs Johnny Mercer had something to do with.
Two Beatles' songs should be on the list:
Things We Said Today
Michelle
I'd never heard Linda Perhacs - lovely. Or The Sailboat Song. Really get the autumnal quality from these.
I've just written a post about Laura Nyro today without looking at what anyone else on substack has written. I will have to look at your posts on her, Robert, as I always value your takes on artists and songs.