SONGBOOK SUMMIT Concludes With The Anderson Twins Tribute to Jimmy Van Heusen

The Anderson twins at SONGBOOK SUMMIT.

This year’s four weeks’ production of Songbook Summit at Symphony Space, featuring Peter and Will Anderson on saxophones, clarinet and flute, has come to a close with a tribute to the life and works of Jimmy Van Heusen, Frank Sinatra’s good friend and go-to songwriter.  In the first three weeks of the 2018 Songbook Summit production, the Anderson twins, supported by Tardo Hammer on piano, Clovis Nicolas on acoustic bass, Philip Stewart on drums, and Molly Ryan on vocals, played the songs of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and Hoagy Carmichael,. All of those programs featured musical arrangements by Peter and narratives by Will, together with a wide array of historical film clips and drawings from the Al Hirschfield archives and all three programs were enormously entertaining (see our recent posts on all three programs).

It is not at all surprising, then, that the final week’s program, devoted to Van Heusen and staged in a similar format, was equally entertaining.  The Van Heusen name (which the composer assumed after seeing an advertisement for the shirt company!) may not be as recognizable as that of Berlin, Kern or Carmicahael, but perhaps it should be.  Van Heusen was, after all, exceptionally prolific, having written 800 songs recorded by everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Bette Midler, from Miles Davis to John Coltrane, from Peggy Lee to Doris Day, and from Bing Crosby to Frank Sinatra (who alone recorded 85 of them).

Among the Van Heusen hits featured in this final Songbook Summit program were Love and Marriage, High Hopes, Like Someone in Love, It Could Happen to You, My Kind of Town, Here’s That Rainy Day, and, in a terrific finale, Come Fly With Me.  The film clips that accompanied the musical program were also remarkably enlightening, including shots of characters as disparate as Bob Hope and Bing Crosby; the members of the “Rat Pack” (Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop); Groucho Marx; Bette Midler; Willie Nelson; and Johnny Carson.

The 2018 Songbook Summit may be over but the Anderson twins are planning a similar program for next year devoted to four other renowned American composers (individual selections have not yet been made).  I, for one, am eagerly looking forward to it.