By Ellen Gilbert

* Suggested accompaniment while you read: log on You Tube and play “Autumn In New York–Eddie Higgins

Descriptions of the bittersweet lyrics and music of Vernon Duke’s jazz standard “Autumn in New York” invariably reference the melancholy elegance of this much-recorded song. “There is something so improbably consoling about the sadness at the heart of the best Vernon Duke melodies,” observes writer Barry Singer, who rates “Autumn in New York” as one Duke’s three most enduring songs (“April in Paris”, and “I Can’t Get Started” are the other two). “It’s not that the songs are even inherently unhappy,” he adds. “They inhabit an emotional realm uncommon in the American popular song canon, that of dry-eyed ballads of unusual poignancy. The melancholy induced by these songs, while hauntingly seductive, is never glum.”

“Duke’s lyrics to the verse could easily be the message from a post card,” writes musician and jazz historian Chris Tyle. “‘It’s time to end my lonely holiday, and bid the country a hasty farewell.’” So it’s goodbye to the room on the 27th floor of the Manhattan hotel from which he or she has looked down, as the song says, “on the city I hate and adore”; adieu to the “glittering crowds and shimmering clouds in canyons of steel”; and an acid-tinged au revoir to “jaded roués and gay divorcées, who lunch at the Ritz.”

Forget the awful movie of the same name that came and went in 2000 (Richard Gere falls in love with terminally ill Winona Ryder). This is 1934, and Vernon Duke is expressing “his feelings about his city of Gershwin, Ellington and Goodman,” suggests John Robert Brown. “By then, the canyons of steel that Duke describes already included the Chrysler Building and the Empire State. And, inspiring Duke’s thrill of first knighting, Harlem danced, Broadway sang, and Manhattan was the location of the center of the jazz universe.”

AUTUMNAL

The autumnal equinox, which brings the fall season to the Northern Hemisphere, occurs this year on September 22 at 10:29 P.M. EDT. The word equinox comes from the Latin words for “equal night.” The fall and spring equinoxes are the only days of the year in which the Sun crosses the celestial equator. From here on out, the temperatures begin to drop, and the days start to get shorter than the nights.

The writer and musician John Robert Brown thought that Duke’s song and the season are well matched: “‘Autumn in New York,’ that great ballad of urban longing, describes for me the best season to visit Manhattan.” The Essential New York City Guide foregoes the angst, and simply suggests that “Autumn is a wonderful season in New York City. The weather is nice, the leaves change colors, and the parks are beautiful. It’s a very enjoyable time to visit NYC.” Commemorations of 9/11, though, will forever cloud that enjoyment.

For many people the idea of Autumn begins much earlier, around Labor Day, the first Monday in September. Women of a certain age don’t wear white after Labor Day, and school kids know that a new school year is about to begin. New York-area boomers may recall the uneasy feeling that came over them when the Robert Hall clothing store jingle started playing on local radio stations in in late August:

School bells ring and children sing

It’s back to Robert Hall again

Mother knows for better clothes

It’s back to Robert Hall again

You’ll save more on clothes for school.

Shop at Robert Hall.

Closely related to the queasiness evoked by The Ed Sullivan Hour on Sunday evenings signaling the end of the weekend, the jingle reminded you that it was just a matter of weeks until the fun was up. The brilliant, unhappy novelist John Cheever provided an adult version of this sense of impending doom: “A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.” The English writer Angela Carter was similarly gloomy: “Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late Autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart.”

The late Nora Ephron thought otherwise, finding joy in the back-to-school rituals associated with autumn. “Don’t you love New York in the fall?” she asked. “It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.” The French Nobel Prize winning author, journalist and philosopher Albert Camus dropped his absurdist, “conscious dissatisfaction” long enough to suggest, “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” The urbane poet/Museum of Modern Art curator Frank O’Hara was perfectly willing to be uplifted by the season:

It was autumn

by the time I got around the corner, oh all

unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but

the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!

RUSSIAN ROOTS

Composer/songwriter Vladimir Dukelsky (1903-1969) came from an aristocratic background and received his musical training in a Russian conservatory. Arriving in New York in the early 1920s, he was quick to make the acquaintance of people like Sergei Prokofiev, Pablo Picasso, Coco Chanel, George Balanchine and Jean Cocteau. He collaborated with lyricists such as Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin, Ogden Nash and Sammy Cahn. George Gershwin (né Jacob Gershowitz) suggested the Americanized version of his name around 1922.

Duke used his given name, though, when he wrote classical music and poetry, but it is for songs like “I Like the Likes of You” and “Taking a Chance on Love” that Vernon Duke is remembered; Vladimir Dukelsky’s “Dédicaces,” (a concerto for piano, orchestra and soprano obbligato), and “The End of St. Petersburg” (premièred by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra) seem incidental.

In his wonderfully entertaining book The House that George Built, Wilifred Sheed notes that Duke “actually received worse reviews for his classical work than George [Gershwin] ever did, but behaved as if he came from a superior species anyhow, just for having written it.” Sheed credits Gershwin’s generosity toward up-and-coming songwriters like Duke with “ushering in an era of goodwill along Tin Pan Alley in the 1920s. Gershwin biographer Edward Jablonski describes Duke as George’s “excitable, gossipy, class conscious composer friend.”

GREAT RECORDINGS

Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but, like Frank Sinatra, he was able to record more than one moving version of “Autumn in New York.” Duke wrote the song in 1934 for a show called “Thumbs Up.” The Wikipedia list of “Notable Recordings” of it since that time runs to eight pages. It reads like a Who’s Who of the world of musical artists, beginning in 1946 (Charlie Parker) and ending in 2011 (Ferit Odman). In 1951 alone, Barbara Carroll, Charles Mingus, Charlie Mariano, Mary Lou Williams, and Stan Kenton each made recordings of “Autumn in New York,” and 1952 was pretty good too, with contributions from Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Oscar Peterson, Teddy Wilson, and Dan Terry and His Orchestra. JazzStandards.com identifies Charlie Parker’s version that year, which included strings, “stands as perhaps the definitive instrumental interpreter of the song according to JazzStandards.com. Billie Holiday’s version with pianist Oscar Peterson is No. 5 on Timeout, New York’s list of the 100 best New York City, and people familiar with the recordings don’t need to be told that the 1957 collaboration between Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald is a standout. A Lena Horne recording was released in 1998, and Dawn Upshaw; Sun Ra; David Liebman and John Scofield; and David Murray all issued versions in 1999. Duke did not provide “the uplift that Tin Pan Alley consumers overwhelmingly preferred,” as Barry Singer has noted. His “music for grownups,” though, seems the exception to the rule.