BLT III - clip from 1980 WEST SIDE STORY Revival — Page 2

wickedrentq--he was the most all-around brilliant person I will ever meet. His conversation would go from music to theater to religion to politics to literature to history to philosophy to linguistics to gossip--and on each topic he was well-read and articulate. He was equally excited by Mahler and Wagner and jazz and the Rolling Stones. He once told us that the only cure for writer's block was to read Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland-- out loud. Try it.

There are DVDs of the Young People's Concerts he did for the New York Philharmonic in the 50s and 60s--rent them and watch them. They're pure joy. Then, if you feel up to it, there are DVDs of the series of lectures he did at Harvard. They're a little dry, but worth a stretch.

One night after a performance of West Side Story in Miami, he took the music staff out to dinner at Joe's Stone Crab to thank them and invited me along. In the limo on the way to dinner he asked the musicians what was the name of the band singer who sang with Duke Ellington in 1929 and then again in the early 40s. He said he could hear her voice but couldn't remember her name.

"Lena Horne?" one of them offered. Bernstein just scowled and said, "Lena Horne was a baby in 1929. She couldn't have sung with Duke Ellington."

"Helen Forrest?" another suggested, which made him even madder. "Helen Forrest was a white girl. She sang like a black girl, but she was white. The one I'm thinking of sang 'Love Is Like a Cigarette.'"

I happened to know a little about jazz vocalists, mostly because I loved Ella Fitzgerald. "You don't mean Ivie Anderson, do you?" I asked.

Well, he did. He proceeded to quiz me about Ivie Anderson and Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan and Helen Humes, quickly determining just how much I knew and how much I didn't. Then he challenged me.

"Do you know Ella Fitzgerald's scat to 'Lady Be Good'?"

"Of course I do," I said. "That's famous."

"All right, then. Sing it!"

I only knew the first chorus or so and sang it pretty badly, but he knew the entire song, of course, with all Ella's embellishments and interpolations. He picked up where I stopped and sang the rest, with me joining in here and there when he hit some phrase I remembered, which delighted him each time.

By the time the limo pulled up at Joe's Stone Crab, the music staff hated me, but I knew I'd had the experience of a lifetime.

Updated On: 7/7/16 at 12:18 AM