Otherwise Known as the Human Condition—Selected Essays and Reviews by Geoff Dyer (Graywolf Press, 2011).
This 421-page collection of his essays shows Geoff Dyer to be a critic of varied tastes and exceptional range. (He’s equally renowned as a novelist.) The theater doesn’t seem to be one of his areas of expertise, however. Judging by the following blithe statement in an essay titled “My Favorite Things,” he may not realize what a blasphemy he’s spouting to Rodgers & Hammerstein fanatics and to showtune fiends in general.
He begins by arguing that while “some songs…come alive fully only when they are played by their composer,” sometimes “a song can end up being so firmly identified with a particular performer that it changes hands, becomes his, not the composer’s.” For example: “’My Favorite Things,’ well, that’s been a Coltrane song for over thirty years.
The essay, originally published in Lives of the Great Songs (edited by Tim De Lisle and published by the London –based Pavilion press in 1994), then goes on to dismissively view the original composition as “manufactured by the indomitable songwriting factory of Richard Rodgers… This ignorable piece of harmless entertainment then went on to blight the lives of children the world over when, in 1965, it was made into a multi-Oscar-winning film starring Julie Andrews…
“Now the musical, as we all know, is the most worthless film form imaginable,m and of all the irritating moments from this inherently repulsive genre none is more nauseating than when Julie Andrews, reassuring the Trapp children in the midst of a thunderstorm, burst into a list of her favorite things.”
In a few brief paragraphs, Dyer explains how jazz genius John Coltrane was “drawn to these catchy tunes” and made a recording of “My Favorite Things” in October, 1960, several years before the Sound of Music movie was made. He documents how “Trane never tired of playing ‘My Favorite Things’; it almost became his signature tune.” Then there’s two pages of arcane Contrane-iana before Dyer sums up with a note on the tune’s “inexhaustibility” and how “people still play it.”
Dyer does a bit of a self-deprecating summation when he quotes a couplet from eclectic son-of-a-bandleader Elvis Costello’s 1994 tune “This is Hell” (from the Brutal Youth album): “’My Favorite Things are playing again and again/But it’s by Julie Andrews and not by John Coltrane.’
It would be sad to think that jazz musicians only come to “My Favorite Things” because Coltrane did it, just as it would if they only knew “Mack the Knife” from Louis Armstrong or Bobby Darin. One also hopes that musicians are less disparaging of specific musical genres than is Geoff Dyer. Coltrane may have done miraculous things, but for him to take a breezy melody from a Broadway show and turn it into a foundation for jazz improvisation doesn’t mark him as a genius, it marks him as normal. In any case, the number of musical theater composers who were welcomed into both the Broadway and jazz communities of New York are legion, from the pioneering George Gershwin through Cy Coleman to Harry Connick Jr. and George Caldwell (longtime music director of the acclaimed play-with-music Ella). Dyer’s disdain makes for a fun read, but flies in the face of common wisdom. Jazz trims the excesses of Broadway the way punk does for rock, transcending one form by stripping away what was previously perceived as essential (lyrics, narrative character, sometimes even melody) and replacing it with interpretive insights which come from a whole other vantage point. Broadway and jazz have always been tight; favorite things of each other.