Oliver Soden on Noël Coward and jazz
Earlier this month Oliver Soden and Robert Hazle were at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland near Noël’s home in Les Avants, discussing the Master’s relationship with jazz.
Noël Coward and jazz. An interesting conundrum. On the one hand, Coward was the epitome of the Jazz Age, throwing out Victorian convention and showering the public with the slither and sleaze of all that was new in post-war music.
His revues were scored to saxophone quartets and featured jazz ballets; “Twentieth-Century Blues” – from his 1931 pageant Cavalcade – remains one of his most popular songs; everything about him was syncopated.
Meeting George Gershwin in New York he picked up by ear snatches of Rhapsody in Blue, iconic composition of the Jazz Age, and performed it when acting in his first hit play, The Vortex. The work had yet to be given its British premiere. Coward, it could be argued, introduced jazz to Britain.
Then again, as he created the new world of the twenties, he was awed and even frightened of it. Conservative and radical, modern and old-fashioned, he was equally interested in 19th-century operetta and Edwardian musical comedy.
Jazz was the musical equivalent of much that was terrifying about the laissez-faire world of the Bright Young Things in 1920s London, with its partygoers who tended to end up dead of drug overdoses or incarcerated in asylums after suffering nervous breakdowns. As in his songs “Poor Little Rich Girl” or “Dance, Little Lady”, his jazz music was often a warning, rather than a celebration, of the new world, the epitome of a curious insanity. “You’re weaving life into a mad jazz pattern…”.
In 1959, fleeing the high taxes of post-war England, Coward became domiciled in Geneva, Switzerland, and purchased a home up a mountain in Montreux, with dazzling views across Lake Léman. Charlie Chaplin lived nearby; soprano Joan Sutherland was a little higher up the mountain in the rococo grandeur of her house, Chalet Monet; Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, took up residence in a grand hotel on the waterfront. Coward was asked to play the role of Humbert Humbert, Nabokov’s dangerous protagonist, in the film of Lolita. He declined. In the end the role went to James Mason – another of Coward’s Swiss neighbours.
The Alpine setting was a retreat for Coward’s old age, and a clear influence on late plays such as A Song at Twilight. His partner Graham Payn lived on at the house after Coward’s death, and is buried nearby, close to Cole Lesley, Coward’s companion and assistant.
In 1967 Montreux became host to one of the world’s largest jazz festivals, and I wonder if Coward ever heard the music echoing up the mountain or ventured down to the lake to listen to a concert. More likely he avoided the crowds and the noise like the plague. In 2024, as part of the Coward 125 celebrations, I gave a talk on Coward and jazz at the Montreux Festival, and chose eight pieces to illustrate not only how immortal Coward’s compositions have proved to be, but how different singers have reinvented them, generation after generation.
Coward’s original recordings speak of a bygone age; reorchestrations in the 1950s by musicians such as Peter Matz renewed them for another era; and now performers such as Adam Lambert are finding fresh ways to interpret the lyrics and melodies. Coward’s songs are beginnings, not endings, their wit and emotion ever renewed.
The eight tracks that after much soul-searching I eventually chose were:
1) “Twentieth-Century Blues”, sung by Noël Coward, “Live from New York”. Coward himself was no mean performer of blues and this recording, made in the wake of his huge success in Las Vegas cabaret, is my favourite interpretation of this song from 1931, originally intended to convey the meaningless chaos of modern life. He swings with the best of them.
2) “Mad About the Boy”, sung by Dinah Washington. Written in 1932, with an extra verse so explicitly homosexual that even the American production refused to include it, this song was originally about schoolgirl (and schoolboy) crushes on a movie star. In the hands of Dinah Washington, whose version became immortal after a Levi’s jeans advert, it becomes sexy as hell.
3) “A Room with a View”, sung by Dominic Alldis. A more intimate, chamber-jazz version of a Noël Coward song that in the wrong hands can sound twee, but here – with instrumental improvisations and just three musicians (singer Alldis, double bassist Andrew Cleyndert and drummer Martin France) – was perfect for Montreux.
4) “London Pride” by Cleo Laine. A new discovery for me, found on YouTube in a televised tribute to Coward. Even this famous number – a moving and patriotic song that has little to do with jazz per se – can be completely translated by the astonishing range and wildness of the legendary Cleo Laine, with the orchestra led by her husband, Johnny Dankworth.
5) “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart”, performed by Sting. An irresistible choice for the 2024 festival (Sting was appearing a few days later), this version takes one of Coward’s most romantic and personal waltzes, from Operette, and with the harp accompaniment makes something exquisite out of Coward at his most old-fashioned. The track is the more moving for being part of Neil Tennant’s album Twentieth-Century Blues, a 1998 disc of Coward songs reinterpreted by great and unexpected artists (The Divine Comedy, Robbie Williams, Bryan Ferry), with profits donated to AIDS charities.
6) “Countess Mitzi” from Operette, with Joan Sutherland. A collaboration between Coward and his Montreux neighbour was inevitable, though in the end the album (Joan Sutherland sings Noël Coward, released in 1966) was not the smash hit everyone expected. Still, this is Coward and Sutherland in pastiche-operetta mode, and for those that like sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. A Montreux-mountain collaboration, from Chalet Coward and Chalet Monet.
7) “Poor Little Rich Girl”. Tony Bennett. Count Basie. Enough said.
8) “If Love Were All”, sung by Judy Garland. Perhaps Coward’s most autobiographical song, its pining wistfulness about the impossibility of abiding love a perfect match for the vulnerability of his friend Judy Garland, in her legendary 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall.
