Birthdays: Tony Bennett (the BIG one!) | Louis Armstrong | Kay Starr

THE CHEVY SHOW: “SWINGIN’ AT THE SUMMIT” (NBC January 29, 1961)
Host: Kay Starr
Guests: Tony Bennett, Louis Armstrong, George Shearing, Harpo Marx
Restoration (in b&w and color) from multiple sources by STEVE KRAMER

Tony Bennett was never shy about giving props to his heroes and inspirations: Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Louis Prima, Ella Fitzgerald, but also Miles Davis and Erroll Garner, as well as Judy Garland and Jimmy Durante. Sometimes, however, I think he reserved his greatest reverence for Louis Armstrong. Louis was absolutely a god to Tony: a brilliant role model that shone brighter than any other, a veritable North Star, a guidepost for all others to be measured against.

Tony had his favorite stories about Pops: like the time he painted Armstrong’s portrait and then presented it to him at his house in Corona. Pops’s comment was, “You out-Remembrandt-ed Rembrandt!” He hung it in his den there in Queens, where it remains to this day. When visitors would ask who the artist was—Tony signed it with his birth name, “Benedetto”—Pops would say, “A boy from the neighborhood.” Tony, who did in fact grow up in Astoria, Queens, not too far from Corona, got a very big kick out of that.

Tony had the immense thrill of meeting Armstrong and hearing him perform live on several occasions, but had the opportunity to actually work with him only once. The occasion was the weekly variety series, The Chevy Show, on NBC in January 1961. Famously, the regular host was Miss Dinah Shore, but she occasionally took off (as she did for most of the summer) and let someone else preside. In this case, it was another female popular singer who was also a veteran of the big band era and a major hitmaker in her own right.

Normally the guest stars on The Chevy Show included comedians and actors as well as singers and musicians—Art Carney and Carl Reiner were both semi-regulars—but with Kay Starr at the center, the producers decided to make it an all-music lineup. They came up with the conceit of presenting the program as a musical equivalent of the summit meetings between the major powers of the world at the United Nations. Starr, as the host, would be the chairperson of the “swingin’ summit,” and the other guests would be delegates. The writers also borrowed the general concept of Louis Armstrong as a musical good-will ambassador for the United States, which indeed he was, and took the visual language from the iconic cover to Armstrong’s 1956 album Ambassador Satch, in which the veteran trumpeter-singer bandleader is togged out like a diplomat in a very formal, old-school tailcoat.

The four guests were, to say the least, a diverse and eclectic group: Tony Bennett, Louis Armstrong, George Shearing, and, in one of his final appearances, Harpo Marx, then 71. Of the four, only Tony had previously appeared on an episode of The Chevy Show and worked with Dinah Shore, but they all qualify as extravagant entertainers whose stock-in-trade was music.

In some ways, the episode was an outgrowth of an earlier television musical titled The Lord Don’t Play Favorites, which aired on the NBC series Producer’s Showcase on September 17, 1956, roughly a year after the Frank Sinatra / Paul Newman / Eva Marie Saint production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, by far the most famous production of that series. Both Starr and Armstrong (along with Buster Keaton) were on The Lord Don’t Play Favorites; their big trio-plus-choir number on The Chevy Show is “The Good Book,” which was written by Hal Stanley, a successful songwriter who was also Kay Starr’s personal manager, and which was reprised from the 1956 telecast.

Tony’s clearest memories were of being on the set and rehearsals with Armstrong. In particular, he remembered that when Armstrong was doing one of his solo numbers, somehow a fly had found its way into the rehearsal space. In the 1990s, Tony remembered vividly that this random visitor somehow inspired one of Armstrong’s most entertaining improvisations: he sang to the fly, he sang around the fly, in effect he made the fly into a partner, transforming the solo into a duet. As Tony put it, “He treated that fly as if it was Bing Crosby!” The sad part was that this was only during the rehearsal; when the time came to actually shoot the program—by the 1960-1961 season, most major variety shows, apart from The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS, were pretaped rather than live—the spontaneous bit with the perky insect did not get captured on videotape.

LIke Armstrong, Kay Starr (1922-2016) was another of Tony’s favorites: he had endless admiration and enthusiasm for the generation of big band-incubated popular singers who were slightly older than he, such as Ella Fitzgerald (of course), Doris Day, Peggy Lee, Jo Stafford, and Starr. He told me that in the early ‘50s, he would have loved to have been on the roster at Capitol Records, where many of these ladies, as well as Nat King Cole and, soon enough, Sinatra, had leeway to make creative repertoire choices and also, if they wished, to make pop albums; this was something that his own producer (and, essentially “boss”) at Columbia Records, Mitch Miller did not encourage; as Miller himself acknowledged to me years later.

Postscript: Around 2000, I received a call from Danny Bennett, Tony’s manager (and first-born son). His dad was planning an album that would eventually be released as Playin’ with My Friends: Bennett Sings the Blues (2001). This was both his only album of blues-oriented material, though not every song is a traditional 12-bar blues, and the first of a half dozen or so subsequent albums of duets. Tony’s first thought—along with Ray Charles—was to get Kay Starr to join him for a duet; he knew what a great blues singer she was. The issue they had was that Tony hadn’t heard Kay sing in decades, even though she was still active, there was no way to know what she was sounding like. (Four years older than Tony, at that time she was pushing 80.) That was what Danny needed to know: did Kay Starr still have it? I told Danny that I had heard her sing recently (true) and yes! She still sounded great (also true).

So yes yes! She wound up dueting with Tony on “Blue and Sentimental,” based on Herschel Evans’s iconic feature with the original Count Basie band, with lyrics added by Mack David and Jerry Livingston. (The melody itself was inspired by an older song by Victor Young called “Can’t We Talk It Over.”) And yes, she sounded amazing and their duet was one of the highlights of an excellent album.

Here’s a breakdown of the 1961 Chevy Show:

Opening: Kay Starr & company: “Music Makers” (Harry James & Don Raye)
The program opens with the “summit meeting” in progress, with Madame Chairman Kay Starr singing special lyrics to Harry James’s longtime theme, “Music Makers.”

Kay Starr: “When You’re Smiling” (Mark Fisher, Joe Goodwin, & Larry Shay)
Kay performs a short but memorable chorus of the 1928 jazz standard by Chicago bandleader Mark Fisher. (Who, as far as I know, was not related to Fred Fisher, the Chicago songwriter who wrote the most famous song about Chicago, or his illustrious family.) The tempo slows down for the bridge (“when you’re crying, you bring on the rain…”) and Harpo’s extreme reaction is one of the comedic highlights of the entire hour.

Kay Starr introduces Tony Bennett (“our ambassador of love”)
“I’ve Got The World on a String” (Harold Arlen & Ted Koehler)
“Takin’ a Chance on Love” (Vernon Duke, John La Touche, & Ted Fetter)
Tony was on about a zillion variety shows in the years immediately before and after his blockbuster hit, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” and this is one of his absolute greatest segments. Tony is obviously jazzed and inspired by the immediate presence of so many of his all-time favorite artists, not only Louis and Kay but Harpo and Shearing.

Kay Starr intro’s Louis Armstrong
“Mack the Knife” (color) (Marc Blitzstein, Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht)
“Blueberry Hill” ( Al Lewis, Vincent Rose, & Larry Stock)
I can’t wait to read what Ricky Riccardi will say about this segment in his forthcoming, updated edition of What a Wonderful World, his already definitive study of Armstrong’s later career. As far as I can tell, these big band arrangements are unique in his discography, and this full-color, hard-swinging treatment of “Mack” is particularly amazing. (Armstrong’s segment is followed by an especially nutso Chevrolet commercial.)

Kay Starr & Harpo Marx introduce George Shearing:
“Honeysuckle Rose” (Fats Waller & Andy Razaf)
Harpo’s brief bit, introducing George Shearing charades style, is a reminder what a potent force he was on early television. (For obvious reasons, this Marx Brother had much less of a career on the radio.) Shearing does not disappoint with an exciting, highly baroque chorus of the all-time jazz standard, which shows what he had in common with both Erroll Garner and Dave Brubeck.

Harpo at the piano
More comedy from Harpo, this time at the keyboard. I can never get enough of his wacky pantomime antics.

Louis Armstrong introduces Kay Starr
“Happy Days and Lonely Nights” (Billy Rose & Fred Fisher)
“I Only Want a Buddy Not a Sweetheart” (Eddie Jones)
Two vintage songs (from 1928 and 1932, respectively) from Starr’s amazing second period at Capitol Records (1959-1962) in which she made no less than six classic albums. These two songs capture her at her best, and I would like to know who the hot soul-jazz organ player behind her is, particularly on the second. “I Only Want a Buddy” starts slowly and soulfully before revving into swingtime, at which point she is joined by a doo-woppy male choir.

Kay Starr, Louis Armstrong, Tony Bennett: “The Good Book” (Hal Stanley & Irving Taylor)
On one hand, I am grateful (and I know that Tony was) that he got to sing one number with his hero, Pops, as well as Kay Starr. And this is a fun, rolling spiritual that Kay’s manager, Hal Stanley, wrote for the 1956 TV musical, The Lord Don’t Play Favorites. Still, if we could pick one song for Tony and Pops to do together, I doubt it would be this one. Anyhow, there’s no denying that it’s fun, in an Old Testament kind of a way.

Start of international segment
Kay, Pops, Tony, and Harpo have fun with balloons and early television chroma-key effects. (underscore: “Around the World” by Victor Young)

Tony Bennett: “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” (Harold Arlen & Johnny Mercer)
Little known fact: this 1943 “saloon song” was even more of a career perennial for Tony than it was for Sinatra. Tony sang it many, many times, fast and slow and every tempo in between—but I would be willing to bet a bottle of chianti classico that this is the only occasion when he ever sang it in Italian. (Rob Waldman points out that the bartender is played by the great character actor Stanley Adams.)

Louis Armstrong’s French lesson “C’est Ci Bon” (Jerry Seelen, André Hornez & Henri Betti)
Eartha Kitt introduced the English version of this bouncy and agreeable French chanson, and everybody sang it, from Dean Martin to Stan Freberg. Still, my favorite version is Armstrong’s, and this 1960 TV chart is even more fun than his Decca single.

Harpo Marx: “Last Rose of Summer” (Thomas Moore)
Tony goes Italian, Pops goes French, Kay gets all kosher on our ass, and one of the great Jewish comedian-musicians goes Scotch-Irish. As in the Marx Brothers movies, the only time Harpo stops being hysterically funny is when he plays one of his harp solos; obviously, he took his music very seriously, and this is one of his more moving pieces.

Kay Starr in Israel: “Eli, Eli” (in Hebrew)
There already was a tradition of gentile pop and jazz stars rendering this most traditional of Jewish prayers: Patti Page, Perry Como, even Lionel Hampton. All of Kay’s other numbers on this program were at least partially swinging: this is her only “serious” number and it’s very moving. As far as I know this is the only time she ever sang it—or anything else in Hebrew. (Her number is followed by another Chevy spot.)

Finale: “The Man Upstairs” (Hal Stanley, Henry Manners, & Russ Morgan)
Another Kay Starr pop-Gospel number provides a fitting conclusion for an amazing hour. (and Kay promotes next week’s Chevy Show, which will be another international and jazz-centric program, in which Dinah travels to Copenhagen and plays hostess to the Swe-Danes, with Alice Babs and Svend Asmussen.)

Above: Kay Starr and Buster Keaton in The Lord Don’t Play Favorites (NBC Producer’s Showcase, 1956) and below, Kay’s original RCA single of “The Good Book.” Below that, here original Capitol single of “The Man Upstairs.”

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Coming Next: Summer Time is Comedy Time
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