jlh | Monday Music: Midnight Sun

I'm starting this project with "Midnight Sun" by Ella Fitzgerald. But I'm not going to talk too awfully much about Ella, or even the composers, but instead about the arranger, Nelson Riddle—because it's the arrangement that put this record on my list.

Nelson Riddle came to fame as the arranger of the records that rebuilt Frank Sinatra's career in the early 50s, like Songs for Swingin' Lovers and In the Wee Small Hours. When in 1983 Linda Ronstadt led the way in reviving American standards from the elevator music ghetto they'd fallen into in the 70s, she went straight to Nelson Riddle. And he did piles of television work in the 60s and 70s as well.

When Ella came to the jazz label Verve in the mid-50s, she started a project of recording albums that focussed on just one songwriter, all of them architects of American standards; in fact, this project is one of the reasons we now tend to refer to this body of work as "the American Songbook." They started with Cole Porter and moved through the Gershwins, Ellington, Berlin, Arlen, Rodgers and Hart, and Kern. The final songbook, unlike the others, was devoted to a lyricist, Johnny Mercer, and it is from Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Johnny Mercer Songbook that we get "Midnight Sun," released in 1964.

It is no surprise that one of Mercer's co-writers on the song was the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, as its his vibes that start off the song over Riddle's signature smooth-as-silk woodwinds, trombones coming in for emphasis on the off beat. (If you've heard Sinatra's "I've Got You Under My Skin"—not the one with Bono, let's forget that one, thanks—you've heard this woodwind/brass combination.) And in fact, the song was an instrumental hit for Hampton and his cowriter Sonny Burke back in 1947; Mercer added the lyrics in 1954. He also added lyrics to the songs "Laura" and "Skylark" after they became hits, but unlike "Skylark", "Midnight Sun" is easily singable, the melody opening and closing like bellows.

And so Ella comes in, warm and perfect, with that percussive pop moving over to the trumpets, brightness to her deep voice rather than the depth that the trombones added to Hampton's vibes. And those lyrics:

Your lips were like a red and ruby chalice, warmer than the summer night
The clouds were like an alabaster palace rising to a snowy height.
Each star its own aurora borealis, suddenly you held me tight
I could see the Midnight Sun.

Benny Green's liner notes on The Johnny Mercer Songbook talk about this triple rhyme, chalice-palice-borealis. Chalice-palice we've heard, in the mnemonic from Danny Kaye's 1955 movie The Court Jester: "The chalice with the palace has the brew that is true." But borealis, as Green notes, is unexpected. And it's no gimmick; after all, one sees the aurora borealis in the same place as the midnight sun. The verse also plays with winter/summer imagery—warm red chalices, snowy alabaster palaces—that underscore the idea of the midnight sun, a phenomenon of summer in the arctic.

Hampton comes in to fill between verses, and when Ella comes back, the arrangement subtly shifts as the flutes and clarinets come in, and the little pop at the end of each line moves into the saxophones:

I can't explain the silver rain that found me, or was that a moonlit veil?
The music of the universe around me, or was that a nightingale?
And then your arms miraculously found me, suddenly the sky turned pale,
I could see the Midnight Sun.

The second verse is more about the sort of magical reality of the midnight sun, putting real against unreal, and the high woodwinds add a little magic that contrasts with the saxophones. The repetition of "suddenly" pulls together the magical physical phenomenon with this magical moment of connection. That leads us into the bridge:

Was there such a night? It's a thrill I still don't quite believe
But after you were gone there was still some stardust on my sleeve.

The saxophones and the brass build here as Ella crescendos, but all pulls back almost to a whisper for the third verse:

The flame of it may dwindle to an ember, and the stars forget to shine,
And we may see the meadow in December, icy white and crystalline,
But oh my darling always I'll remember when your lips were close to mine,
And we saw the Midnight Sun.

So even when the winter returns, etc, etc. We've left the magic behind, or at least, we know that magic is bound to be left behind eventually; summer turns to fall, the midnight sun doesn't last. But it doesn't matter; the flame doesn't go out, mind you, because of that memory of magic. Musically, we fall back so far that we can hear a piano in the background.

Hampton comes back after that fairly melancholy end to remind us of what was magical about that midnight sun in the first place. I recommend just closing your eyes and listening to that bit, and letting it carry you along.

The arrangement swells again, and Ella comes back to repeat the third verse, but she's not whispering, not acquiescing to magic lost. In her modulation of the melody is defiance—all these things may happen indeed, and who cares? It's as if now the winter has an added beauty precisely because the magical summer was here.

On top of all this, the song just sounds good, which is what all these songs will have in common, if nothing else. Can't you imagine putting on your best crinoline or your neatly pressed suit and going to the local hall, and having a magical slow dance to this song? Like so many of Riddle's arrangements, it speaks of mint-green Cadillacs, men in hats and ladies in pearls, America at mid-century.

Ella Fitzgerald: Midnight Sun
Buy the song at iTunes
Buy the CD at Amazon