Where is Liza when you need her?

Tickets are on sale for this summer as of today!

Merriam-Webster: “Cabaret: a restaurant serving liquor and providing entertainment"

“Life is a cabaret, ol’ chum”
(Random piece of trivia:
Liza Minelli's godfather was Ira Gershwin)

This summer, NCMF holds its very first cabaret at The Joy Nest. This will have a very different vibe from other stuff we do and will involve sitting at tables while listening, a set menu, a cash bar, and a (mostly) dedicated and different program of music from the other concerts. There will be two 30’ sets with a break in the middle where one can catch up with friends, forage for food, or wander to the watering hole.

The music will consist of jazz with NCMF composer-in-residence Guthrie Ramsey on keyboard and his daughter, soprano Bridget Ramsey, intermixed with string quartets of Gershwin and Jerome Kern with a spot of Beethoven mixed in (because we couldn’t resist). Then everyone comes together for the world premiere: Beat Chick, Tunes for Hettie Jones for string quartet, jazz vocalist, & digital beats.

I’m aware that Jerome Kern isn’t the first composer you might associate with an NCMF program. Maybe Haydn, Beethoven, Bartók, Schoenberg, even Kurtág (ok, especially Kurtág) but Kern, the early 20^th Century master of the musical?

New Yorker and child of immigrants (like so many of the composers this summer) Jerome Kern was a giant of American theatre. He wrote more than 700 songs for over 100 hit stage works, including classics you didn’t even realize he wrote, such as Ol' Man River, A Fine Romance, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, All the Things You Are, and The Way You Look Tonight. He collaborated with the leading librettists of his era, including P. G. Wodehouse, Oscar Hammerstein II, Johnny Mercer, and Ira Gershwin.

American theater music from this era falls in an interesting place: it is classical, but also “popular,” and drew enthusiastic audiences from hard-core concert-goers and also people who normally never set foot in a concert hall. This was a hopeful period in American culture when one could imagine a sort of sweet-spot of popular classical music: think Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and Bernstein’s West Side Story.

Six songs by Jerome Kern

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It is difficult to find well-written quartet transcriptions of Kern songs but I hit the jackpot when I came across a delightful recording by the Alexander String Quartet of six Kern songs. After pulling my hair out trying to locate these out-of-print transcriptions, I finally wrote the first violinist, Zakarias Grafilo, directly. He wrote back immediately with the scores and provided me with some great information about these gems.

‍“The transcriptions of six Kern songs for string quartet were copyrighted in January 1942, nearly four years before Kern's death, and the published score notes that these songs were "arranged by the composer and scored for string quartet by Charles Miller." Kern did not do any of his own orchestrations; he arranged these songs as he wanted them to appear, in purely instrumental garb, and his assistant Charles Miller then made the transcriptions for quartet.”

What makes these pieces so great is that Kern didn’t just take his melody and add some mindless accompaniment. No, these are full-on miniature string quartets, beautifully balanced between the four voices and composed with a confident hand. It helps to be in a field where collegiality is important; I’m super grateful to Zakarias for his generosity. Their recording has all six Kern songs along with the Gershwin we’re playing this summer. It is perfect for our first NCMF Cabaret.

David Yang, Artistic Director