When I first got interested in the great standard songs as a teenager, I sort of assumed that they were all written by the big names - Cole Porter, Gershwin. It took a while to dawn that not everything from, say, the Thirties was concocted by a major writer for a famous Broadway sco...
Alec Wilder described the harmony as so unusual that, were he to be given the chords without the melody, he would have had difficulty creating a plausible tune for them. Yet Porter did. And in the mid-20th century a lot of jazzmen had no trouble riffing off Cole's chords - Tadd Dam...
But, if we don't know a lot about how the song was born, we do know something about the show. One day in 1936, Rodgers & Hart were strolling through Central Park when they were struck by the children playing games, devising the ground rules, inventing their own world. And they start...
quiet nights, quiet stars, quiet chords are all perfectly suited to a quiet tune that, aside from a couple of real intervals towards the end, just noodles around stepping up and down a tone. So Lees' conception for