Columns I should have written

Every writer is familiar with the file, an odd assortment of notes, clippings and random ideas that might one day become a story, an article or a column. Some make it to the press. Most never do because something more current, more interesting or most of all juicier came up. So these items stay in the files, become relegated to non-priority status until the news dies with the passage of time or until you decide to take out the clutter and they land in the trash can. Here are some of what I’ve been keeping these past months. I thought of getting rid of them but changed my mind because while they never made the local headlines, they are to the music lover, also important.

Stephen Sondheim, once the enfant terrible of musicals turned 80 last March 22. Sondheim wrote lyrics for West Side Story, Gypsy and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum and I remember a time when he was Broadway’s rebel child. Sondheim bucked the rules and wrote songs that did not quite please the charts. He even had the gall to do a musical about a throat-slashing barber, Sweeney Todd, and an entire musical where the song numbers had no titles, Passion.

I grew up with Rodgers and Hammerstein, developed my own preferences with Lerner and Loewe and thought Andrew Lloyd Webber was the greatest until Love Never Dies, so I always thought of Sondheim’s music as an acquired taste, meant only for intellectuals. But times changed and maybe I changed too because I now have among my favorite listens a lot of Sondheim’s music. These are songs that are not always ear friendly. His notes go where you think they should not, and his themes are never of moonlight and roses, they are mostly about aging or being lonely. But I have come to realize that these are some of the most beautiful heartfelt tunes ever written and ones you can dissect forever while peeling off the layers that Sondheim methodically placed one atop the other.

Not While I’m Around from Sweeney Todd, Not A Day Goes By from Merrily We Roll Along, Losing My Mind from Follies, Being Alone from Company, So Little To Be Sure Of from Anyone Can Whistle and his only Top 40 hit, Send In The Clowns from A Little Night Music. I still like Rodgers and Hammerstein once in a while but Sondheim is the one I look up to for the jolts and surprises.

In love with Chopin

This year marks the 400th birth anniversary of Frederick Chopin.

Born in Poland he truly embodied the romantic figure in what was a romantic age. He languished in heartbreak throughout his life with a series of liaisons that never ended happily.

His longest, most famous and also most turbulent was with the cross-named and also cross-dressing French novelist George Sand, who was female.

Then he died of tuberculosis in 1849 when he was only 39. What could be more romantic than that?

Chopin was a great composer and virtuoso pianist but I like to think of him as the father of the modern ballad.

His nocturnes and etudes, short studies for piano solo established the form that songwriters over the ensuing years used as a pattern for their works. Several of these became hit songs in modern times.

Nocturne in E flat major is To Love Again. Fantasy impromptu is I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.

A Polonaise became Till The End Of Time. And that Minute Waltz that Barbra Streisand recorded so wonderfully was originally a Chopin piece for the piano.

Sex Pistols creator passes away

Performer, producer and talent manager Malcolm McLaren died last April 9 at age 64. His name might not ring a bell but he was quite a trendsetter in mod London. You think Versace made safety pins a fashion statement? You are very wrong. It was McLaren. I became fascinated by the guy after I found out that he managed and in a way created the Sex Pistols way back in the early ’70s. Rockers know the band which included Johnny Rotten who later became avant garde musician John Lydon and Sid Vicious who after recording Sinatra’s My Way punk rock style was said to have killed his girlfriend and then OD’d on drugs.

Now whoever had a hand in breaking the Sex Pistols also created punk rock and punk rock was the daddy of New Wave, grunge, trash and other extreme forms of rock and roll. Truth to tell, I think of many of today’s recordings as a combination of various rock styles, a lot of them predominantly punk. Just think, if McLaren never happened, then we might still be trapped in the good time rock and roll of Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley.