© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Alec Wilder and His Octet
Jack, This Is My Husband, They Needed No Words, Footnote to a Summer Love, The Children Met the Train, Little White Samba, Little Girl Grows Up, Remember Me to Youth, The Amorous Poltergeist
Album Rating—
“This LP is an absolute must for anyone who likes music of any kind. If you have ever heard any of Alec's instrumental work before, you won't need the coaxing. If you haven't, don't waste time reading this review, go out and buy the records. These eight sides were originally issued a couple of years ago on International, a small label graced with some of the most horrible shellac pressings you have ever heard. In addition to Alec's usual puckish sense of humor with reference to titles, these include delightful melodies and countermelodies, wonderful scoring for woodwinds, delicate moving beats, and real taste and selection in the use of harmonic ideas.
These sides are so very, very good they always add up to the same argument: why hasn't a long work of major importance come from this very talented man? This argument we will go into at another point. In the meanwhile, glom onto these sides right away —you will not regret it. Like Ellington, Burns, and some others, Wilder is a name jazz can well be proud of. His stuff has that much lasting merit. (Mercury LP 25,-008.)”
- Clipping from Metronome Magazine review - undated
In the 1930's the three leading "jazz-fringe" composers were Reginald Foresythe, Raymond Scott and Alec Wilder, As far as I know no detailed discography has been published of Alec Wilder's octet recordings 1938-1940. They are not jazz, of course, but Jazz inspired may apply to them.
The instrumentation of the Octet was flute (doubling clarinet), oboe (doubling cor anglais), bass clarinet, bassoon, harpsichord, bass and drums. Wilder did not play in the octet, but wrote 25 of the 34 tunes (and arranged all of them) and conducted the group's recordings. They never were the same commercial success as the Raymond Scott discs, but became favourites among professional musicians. Frank Sinatra liked them so much that he conducted a set of six (other) Wilder pieces for Columbia in 1946.
The problem with Wilder's music, as the reviewer Edgar Jackson points out, is that it is not "serious" enough for the serious critics and not "jazzy" enough for the jazz critics.
Reclusive and elusive and not given to suffering fools gladly, Alec only wrote for the octet from about 1937-1941. In 1942, he did write some pieces for a larger orchestra which found favor with Frank Sinatra, who not only made sure that Columbia recorded them, he also conducted them!
Thereafter, Wilder’s focus shifted to vocal music and songwriting. He is also the author of the seminal American Popular Song: The Great Innovators which became an almost instant classic following its publishing in 1972.
Gene Lees, the Jazz author, critic and editor, had this to say about Alec and his music in the Foreword to Wilder’s seminal work on the subject.
“Alec's father was a successful banker who constructed the Wilder Building at a main downtown intersection of Rochester, N.Y. The family consisted of bankers, scholars, and bibliophiles. Alec was raised, as his friend and collaborator in this book, James T. Maher, put it, "in princely circumstances."
Rochester is the seat of the Eastman School of Music, where Alec studied composition and counterpoint with Herbert Inch and Edward Royce. He never matriculated. In New York City he became known as a composer and arranger.
Toward the end of the 1930s, Alec wrote and recorded some — for the time — revolutionary music with a group called the Alec Wilder Octet. This music was startling in the way it used elements of "classical" music and jazz. It wasn't either; and it certainly was not a vehicle for improvising soloists. But with enormous charm it suggested the way earlier composers might have written had they lived in the age of jazz.
Then in 1942 he wrote six pieces for a larger orchestra — four of them concertante — that Frank Sinatra heard in acetate copies of radio performances. Sinatra was entranced. And he was determined to see this music on record, if he had to conduct it himself. Which he did. And his name boosted the sale of those records, three twelve-inch singles in an "album." Again there was the distinctive "classical" writing infused with a feeling of jazz. That album made me aware of the name and instrumental music of Alec Wilder.
And I think Alec at that time had his chance at real fame, big fame. He never wanted it. I accused him once of hiding in the woodwork of the music business. He avoided its corrupting pressures, suspecting, I'm sure, that he didn't have whatever it takes to submerge one's identity in the act of pleasing executives and authorities who do not know what you do. Alec was incapable of handling the politics of show biz. He loved music; he hated the music business. And so he remained a specialized taste among the comparatively few people who knew about him.
When he was in Manhattan he lived at the Algonquin Hotel, that famed gathering place of urbane wits including Franklin P. Adams and Dorothy Parker. He liked to entertain his friends in the Blue Bar and Rose Room there; no one remembers his ever letting anyone else pick up a check.
After a while he would take up his frequently nomadic life again. Some of the time he lived in a hotel in his native Rochester whose telephone number was one of those I would call when seeking him. Or he would stay at the homes of various friends, writing his music for soloists he admired, such as Zoot Sims, John Barrow, and Harvey Phillips, and leaving a trail of read-and-abandoned books along the way, a sort of literary Johnny Appleseed. So impeccable was his literary taste that I never failed to read a book he recommended or gave me.”
Although reclusive and difficult to get to know outside his group of select friends, two books about Alec were published in the 1990s: [1] Alec Wilder: An Introduction to the Man and His Music, Featuring A Complete List of Works and Discography [Margun Music, 1991] and [2] Desmond Stone, Alec Wilder In Spite of Himself: A Life of A Composer [Oxford, 1996].
But you have to dig to find much of anything about him in the early Jazz literature, so I dug and did come up with this buried treasure -
SMART ALEC - The Essential Mr. Wilder Matches His Musical Skill with a Talent for Living That Shows He Isn’t So Odd After All. by Barry Ulanov, Metronome, May, 1947
"THERE ARE a lot of guys who tell me that when I was young I was quite an eccentric fellow. They say I used to do odd things." Alec Wilder laughed, his face wrinkling with the force of his laughter. He laughed a loud, proud laugh, full of the essential humor of the situation and his own self-confidences. Since 1935, when Alec first began to make himself known in the music business, the Wilder name has been a synonym for eccentricity. His music sounded different, his talk sounded different, and dressed differently, he acted differently. Different from anything in classical music or jazz. Different from classical or jazz musicians. Alec didn't try to make friends or influence people; he just wrote what he wanted to, said what he wanted to and the devil take recording supervisors, radio executives and bandleaders. Obviously, the man was an eccentric. And yet, obviously, he wasn't and he isn't.
"I'm not in the music business with the fanaticism of a Success Boy," Alec explains. "My ambition is to do as well as possible in terms of creative work and to keep my friends. Through the years I've eliminated as many of my possessions as possible. All I want is a place comfortable enough to sleep in and write in; I want decent food and my telephone calls taken and not to be bothered laie at night. And as a result, I've almost found myself passing out of the commercial end of the business." And, it should be added, he doesn't really care.
In commercial terms, such a creed is eccentric. By any large ethical standards it is most orthodox, most decent and quite wonderfully normal. When it is combined with remarkable talent, it is, to say the very least, startling. And, eccentric or not, one thing Alec Wilder has done with delightful regularity over the years is startle, startle his friends and startle those who are not. His friends have been startled into a fanatic lust for Alec's success. They have combed the coasts of America for possible work for him, they have praised hls manner, musical and moral and social, in the drawing rooms and waiting rooms, recording studios and bars and executive offices of New York's and Hollywood's music worlds. Wherever and whenever the opportunity arose, men like Mitchell Miller, this country's outstanding oboist, Morty Palitz, who occupies almost the same rank among recording supervisors, and Frank Sinatra have cried Alec's talents. From time to time, his talents have emerged, whether as a result of friends' efforts or not, emerged on a radio show, on records and in band libraries. They have emerged just often enough to make him a considerable reputation as a musician, a legend as a man, a formidable figure in a world of little men.
Alec first met inquiry in Rochester, New York, on February 1, 1907, and 'continued to meet it there for eleven years. He went to "miserable schools'' in Long Island, in New Jersey and New York City, deserting each in turn as the continued inquiry continued to fall beneath his standards and he beneath the standards of the inquirers. After the last of the schools in New York, Alec began to fool with music. A good friend had aroused the stirrings of interest by taking him to a concert. With typical originality, Alec's reaction was to pick up a banjo, learn his way around the frets and strings and find some club jobs in which to show off his new learning. He made $7 a night, from night to night and felt he had made real progress. Then the piano piqued his interest. He learned to read music and pick out chords and arpeggios on the piano by himself. That completed his early education in music. He turned elsewhere.
Alec had been interested in writing. An "interest” for him is not a "dilettante's delight” it was a determination to know. A Friend took him in hand
'"When you have written three feet of manuscript, then I'll know you know how to write." He meant literally three feet; he demonstrated. “So high,” he showed Alec with his hand.
For two years, Alec wrote until he had piled up three feet of manuscript. Sitting in his little Greenwich Village apartment, he pursued his second mused doggedly. To make sure he wrote enough each day, he had a friend strap him in a chair each morning, padlock the strap and take away the key, promising not to release him until nightfall. There was, as a result, something of an eating problem. But Alec solved that handily. When hunger hit him, he rose, chair on back, walked down the block to a stand-up lunch counter and sat down again to eat. He wasn't paid much attention; this was Greenwich Village in the 1920's. What if a man walked around with a chair
Strapped to his back But there was some notice taken.
"Some people got mad. Not because I walked around with the chair on my back. But because I had a chair! That I like." More laughter and face wrinkles.
Alec had the satisfaction of completing the requisite three feet of manuscript, but little else. He could write no more. He was written out. He had written about everything that he knew, everything that had come into his head. There was nothing else to write about. What to do? A twenty dollar bill he found on one of the smallest and most out-of-the-way streets in the Village. Gay Street decided for him. He’d never found any money before and hasn't since, and it's a cinch that nobody else has ever found a dime, much less twenty dollars on Gay Street. But here it was, $20. What to do? Why go to Rochester, of course, where he knew some nice people.
Once he got to Rochester, he looked about for some way to stay up there. Music. Music, that was it. Alec showed some of the sketchy attempts to compose he had made to Herman Inch, who taught composition at the Eastman School of music in Rochester. “He was very kind about what I had written, but insistent upon my studying a great deal more. With Inch, “a wonderful contrapuntalist,” with Edward Royce and Howard Hansen, Alec studied on and off from 1928-1935. After 1935, Alec managed to remain in New York, most of the time. Mitchell Miller was beginning to sing his praises, with or without the double-reed in his mouth. Morty Palitz at Brunswick and Columbia Records, "jeopardized his position to get me jobs." Alec wrote for Chick Bullock, Ella Logan, Carol Bruce, Mary Jane Walsh, finally for Mildred Bailey. "I almost managed to survive," he says with deadly accuracy.
There had been some money, inherited from his father, whom Alec never knew. The story of the money is part of the Wilder Legend: like his eccentricity it has been exaggerated. There was a lot, but not millions. And some of it, Alec lost through a sharper here, bad advice there and copious "loans" to friends.
"I went right through it. And I'm very glad I did. I don't know any better way to find out what cooks with the world than not having money. That way you find out that it's you against the world, and, incidentally, that people are not so bad.'* At this stage of the narration, Alec reached for his twentieth cigarette, with an unshaking, unstained hand.
"You just can't know about people unless you've starved with them. Sympathy with the poor isn't it. When you meet, someone who means well but doesn't really know what poverty is all about you can tell immediately
You’ve got to know it by direct experience. And it's the most important experience I know." I nodded my head in pleased agreement, intruding with some similar personal experience and observation.
For the last ten years, Alec has lived several varieties of day-to-day existence, sometimes living quasi-royally on royalties, sometimes crazily on none, occasionally down to his last nickel, and once without even the proverbial red cent. When his first octet records, using only woodwinds, harpsichord and rhythm, appeared on Brunswick his name began to attract attention and a couple of small checks came his way. The names of his delicate little pieces were as memorable as the music itself: Neurotic Goldfish, A Debutante's Diary, A Little Girl Grows Up, Walking Home Alone in Spring. The curious blend of jazz rhythms and Bachlike melodic construction, of some sounds suggestive of Debussy and more that elicited only Wilder's Impressionism, impressed a lot of musicians arid a few others who had sufficient taste to recognize the exquisite musicianship quietly displayed on the first Wilder Octet sides.
Then came a couple of dates for Mildred Bailey, with woodwinds again, trumpet, played once by Roy Eldridge, once by Red Solomon, piano played by Teddy Wilson, and rhythm. From these sessions date Mildred's magnificent Hold On, which Alec rescored from an older arrangement, All the Things You Are and Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen, in which a singer's impeccable taste and an arranger's talent of the same order were perfectly matched.
In 1941, Alec did an album with the Octet, an album which Columbia still carries in its catalogue but somehow doesn't find time to press, showing a cynical disregard for its- own product familiar enough in the music business but no less annoying for its familiarity. He also found some success with some tunes, most notably It’s So Peaceful in the Country, Who Can I Turn To and Soft As Spring, the first recorded by several bands, the second by Tommy Dorsey with the best singing that Jo Stafford has ever done (for me, at least), the last beautifully played by Benny Goodman.
There were other less successful commercially, but equally impressive musically, Give Me The Time, which Mildred did Moon and Sand, recorded by Cugart, and While We’re Young, which Fred Waring buried in an album. There were some radio shows. In 1936, the Friday night Ford show on CBS, for which Alec and Jimmy Carroll did all the arranging and hordes of great studio musicians played (Manny Klein, Charlie Spivak, Charles Margulies, Will Bradley, Toots Mondello, Mitch Miller), on which Alec and Jimmy did Ravel’s Pavane (several years before the Glenn Miller version of The Lamp is Low), and the Little Fugue in G Minor of Bach. Several years later, Alec wrote Mildred’s arrangements for the Camel Caravan commercials she did with Benny Goodman. In the course of it, Alec fought with Benny with more urbane detachment than anyone else has ever been able to the inevitable Goodman contretemps.
More recently, Alec’s productivity has increased to fabulous heights. He’s written children’s albums for Decca and Mercury, an oboe concerto for Mitch Miller, a French horn concerto for Johnny Barrows (the brilliant horn virtuoso who was assistant conductor of the official Army Air Forces band during the war), an orchestral piece “which CBS unfortunately calls a symphony - it’s simply in three movements. I never bothered to find out what a symphony is.” Then for the New Orleans Symphony under Emanuel Balaban, this Summer, Alec has written three short ballet movements. He’s set E.E. Cummings’ lovely Songs of Innocence for women’s voices, tenor soloist and voices; Robert Shaw may do it with his Collegiate Chorale (“I will be completely happy if he does. I’ve never been so satisfied with anything before; never felt in such a groove.”) All this and thirty art songs (outside the popular forms and idiom) besides, which Alec promises are “innocent things - no sex.”
The story goes on and on. There’s much more to it than any pair of articles could possibly do justice. There is the Sinatra incident, for example, when Alec brought Frank an old transcription of something of his taken off the air seven years ago.
He brought it along to Frank’s dressing room at the Paramount in New York, thinking it might amuse him. At one the next morning, Frank tried to get him. No luck. At ten A.M. he reached Alec.
“This fractures me. I don't know what to do about it, Come right over here," Frank insisted.
Alec looked up at him in the dressing room. "Let’s see,” Frank conjectured as he paced the floor. "I’ve got it!" , He screamed. "I’ll conduct it."
"What?" Alec screamed in turn. "You're out of your mind.", Frank paid him no attention. He called Manie Sacks, Columbia's record boss. He told Manie. Manie was stunned; “You can’t conduct," Manie said quietly, from the floor.
Frank turned to the musicians-at the record date. The string men looked particularly unbelieving, traditional skeptics as fiddlers, violists, cellists and bassists are. "Look, fellows," Frank said, "I don't know anything about music. I can't read music. I love this music! Will you help me?" The looks of disbelief disappeared, and the help was quickly and enthusiastically forthcoming. Frank looked down at his score, which had no notes but simply noted the entry of soloists and sections, and the Sinatra-Wilder album "was off to a great start.
Later, when Frank received the "first proofs of the album cover he spotted the 100% billing he was " given in contrast to Alec's 25%. He called Columbia immediately.
"What the hell goes?" Frank asked. “Alec wrote that music. His name has got to be at least as big as mine, if not bigger." Columbia raised the Wilder billing, but not much, in spite of the Sinatra pressure, but let it be absolutely clear here, Frank made the album to present Alec's music and for no other reason. Such inadequacies as the billing and a few rough spots were unfortunate, accidents out of his control. As a matter of fact, Sinatra's tempos and solo cues were so well felt and communicated that musicians on the date who have since played the music with seasoned conductors have complained of their inferiority to The Voice, who explained so humbly that “he didn’t know music, couldn’t read it, but loved Wilder’s pieces.”
Alec has done well keeping his friends. Rolling about the American countryside on spontaneous railroad trips to nowhere in particular, indulging in newly discovered taste and talent for cooking, reading several books a day, the penchant for making and keeping friends has remained foremost among his eccentricities.
He likes to talk about his friends. About Mitch and Morty and Frank. About Eddie Finckel and his wife, with whom Alec writes and improvises little plays and songs, which they later record at odd hours in the early morning at New York’s Nola Studios. He talks about his musical taste, about Bach (“if I could write one half measure as good as Bach…”), Mozart, Scarlatti, Ravel, Gluck, Purcell, Peter Warlock, Vaughan Williams, Moussorgsky, Prokoviev, Bartok, his favorites. About David Diamond, a good friend, a distinguished American composer, “who’s going to be great, if he isn’t great already.” About Jazz, which “should go back to small bands … the Woody Herman Band which was to 1946 what Benny [Goodman] was to 1936 … dance bands must start for a new objective, from new sources … mustn’t be so overstuffed.”
About detective stories, “which are so satisfying; you know when you’re through; a problem is set, all the loose ends are picked up and the problem is completely solved; unlike life; so satisfying.” About dynamics in music, “necessary of course, but not half so interesting to me as intensities. Anybody can write a double forte - but climaxes of intensity, they’re much harder. I would like to be a master of intensity, that’s a real ambition. The biggest climaxes of my life have been a silence, somebody walking out of the room, a whispered goodbye.”
Alec is dedicated, as few men, to his work, to writing music he feels as he feels it. A successful four-year bout with a psychoanalyst finally came to its climax of intensity just a few weeks ago, two years after the cessation of analytical activities. One day he was talking about a potential collaborator for an album. In the past, he would have yielded any percentage of profits to the man, forgetting his problems for the other man’s. This day, he said no. “No,” Alec said, “I’m doing most of the work. I think I deserve fifty percent.” He turned, in the resultant silence, thinking about the curious self-confidence he felt, the confidence in people doubled in his music. He walked out of the room, just whispering “Goodbye.”
They say he used to do odd things. They say Alec Wilder was eccentric. It would be better to say he wrote, and writes, beautifully odd music, and lives a beautifully odd life.”