7. Autumn In New York

Composed by Vernon Duke (né Vladimir Dukelsky) in 1934

This song’s counterpart – if not doppelganger – is Duke’s “April In Paris,” which appeared two years earlier in his musical, Walk A Little Faster, with lyrics by E.Y. “Yip” Harburg. In contrast, “Autumn In New York” is in Duke’s own words, and although it ended up in someone else’s show, I suspect he wrote it for reasons of his own. English was his second language and the strain shows – what, if anything, “spells the thrill of first-nighting”? – but the song articulates a strange beauty about New York more difficult to put across than Parisian spring. A lot of it has to do with how the fragmentary words sit on top of Duke’s music, which is like a teaspoon of gravy with ten pounds of flour suspended in it. A musician with élan can lay any number of long and intricate chord modulations into the transitions Duke leaves between verse and chorus and verse – modulations that the emotional shifts in the words and music make necessary. Beboppers created gravitational singularities with the tune – Bird, Powell, and Monk for starters. Duke knew it was redundant to “sigh for exotic lands” if this one makes you feel you are home, steel canyons and all.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day during Advent (approximately).