Fred Astaire: Advent Calendar of Song: Christmas Day
How many great dancers were also great singers? When I last asked the question, the immediate answer was Josephine Baker. But, if there is one artist who can surpass her in this dual-capacity rspect, it’s the very different Fred Astaire (1899-1987). There’s no point in comparing them as dancers: they were both paragons (and contemporaries), but highly unalike. Perhaps one shouldn’t or can’t compare them as singers either: Astaire could not have sung in operetta as Baker did.
He is, however, one of the great singers, certainly one of the most historically important, and perhaps the most underrated of the greats. Underrated because his voice seems nothing special: he so effortlessly and naturally plants the words in our ears that we hardly notice he's a master-musician. Historically important? To be sure: perhaps no other singer in history has introduced so many classic numbers. Those numbers and their composers included George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, and others; he was the first to sing or co-sing – in roughly chronological order - “I’d Rather Charleston”, “Fascinatin’ Rhythm”, “The Half of it Dearie Blues”, “My One and Only,” “Funny Face’, “High Hat”, and “Let’s Kiss and Make Up” (Gershwin), “Puttin’ On the Ritz” (Irving Berlin), “After You, Who?” and “Night and Day” (Cole Porter), “Top Hat”, “Isn’t this a Lovely Day”, “No Strings (I’m Fancy Free)”, “Cheek to Cheek” (Irving Berlin), “Pick Yourself Up”, “A Fine Romance”, “The Way You Look Tonight”, “Never Gonna Dance” (Jerome Kern), “Slap That Bass”, “Shall We Dance”, “Nice Work if You Can Get it”, “I’ve Got Beginner’s Luck”, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”, “Change Partners and Dance” (Irving Berlin), “I Can’t Be Bothered Now”, A Foggy Day” (Gershwin), “So Near and Yet So Far” (Cole Porter), “You Were Never Lovelier” (Jerome Kern). “One for My Baby” (Harold Arlen)…and more. Often, to be sure, the composers felt that Astaire would turn their vocal creations into incomparable dance life, which made those songs imperishable.
But I’m not the first to point out that the great thing about the original of “Cheek to Cheek”, which he sings to Ginger Rogers in the film “Top Hat”, is how he sings it rather than the dance that follows. It’s actually impossible on YouTube, alas, to find an Astaire version of this song in its “Top Hat” that hasn’t been doctored in some way. This one at least seems good to me up to 1.59 – please ignore it after that - but I think the first two minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=n3RSlUkw9U0&list=PLwYvCYrXNi38BY2OMdszkRJ1P6BBDf4SE&index=10&t=0s shows you the five particular points I want to make:
1: he moves with ideal ease from speech to song (0.05) “All I know is that it’s (0.07 (sings) “Heaven”. In an opera house, it’s notorious how hard singers find it to bring this speech-singing transition off (Callas does it in a single live 1955 performance of La Traviata, but neither she nor anyone else manages it so well elsewhere); in a movie, it’s far easier. Even so, nobody has ever done it more wonderfully than Astaire.
2: the tiny downward portamenti that are a natural part of his phrasing: “my heart beats so that I” – you don’t notice them because he’s so rhythmically clean in the upward jumps onto the same words. He jumps up to those words, then subtly slides down a notch, again and again. A slightly bigger downward portamento comes at 1.30 (“will car-ry me through”) (In other songs, he can make much more of a downward portamento: “and everything’s okay. Isn’t this a lovely day to be caught in the rain?” in the same movie). I’m not being pretentious when I set him beside Caruso, Frieda Leider, and Callas as one of the classic masters of portamento. This is actually a rhythmically spruce line ("My heart beats sothat I can hard-ly speak", a five-note staircase. metrically regular): portamento becomes intolerable unless it is offset by a keen metric sense.
3: The seamless transition he makes into head voice – virtually a floated note – on the word “speak” at 0.16. How many male singers have we heard force a beefy top note rather than dare the putative effeminacy of - heavens above! - a head note, a falsetto? How much larger he makes masculinity seem than any unyielding machismo.
(He’s equally seamless in the following line in negotiating a return to chest register.)
4: The amazing delicacy and fluency with which he handles the grace notes in the vocal line, as in 0.27 ( “out together dan-cing cheek to cheek?”) ) and 0.46 (“seem to vanish like a gambler’s luc-ky streak”).
5: The way he negotiates the most grandiose part of the song from 1.20 (“Dance with me! I want my arm about you!”) and tapers it subtly back into the quasi-parlando naturalness of the rest of the song (“The charm about you will carry me through to”). It’s just a diminuendo from forte to piano, but every bit of it has suspense and grace.
I could have chosen a dozen other Astaire songs, sometimes to make the same points as these, sometimes to make other ones. (Try “Night and Day” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h02OmcR-be4 in “The Gay Divorcee”.) Astaire didn’t just catch the wave of the style of the 1920s and 1930s, he did much to create it. He worked with the Gershwins; he taught aspects of dancing to Noël Coward; he re-ignited Irving Berlin’s genius in the 1930s when that was flagging briefly; he was one of Dorothy Sayer’s models when she created Lord Peter Wimsey. He’s it, he’s the real thing, he's the spirit of an age.
Since this is a video, there are two further points I want to make about the visual side, stopping at 1.59. (Let’s not waste time with usual trivia about Ginger’s dress, which at this stage looks fabulous.)
6: At 0.14-018, just look at how he leads her backtowards him, a really dreamy example of ballroom partnering at its gentlest and most intimate: he’s the one moving back (so much for those who like to claim Ginger did everything he did but backwards - they haven't been watching). In fact, he mainly leads her backward in these first two minutes, but 0.14-0.18 is the quintessence of foxtrot eloquence.
7: If there is anything that can match singing and dancing of this caliber, it’s the way Ginger listens to him. She scarcely moves a muscle in her face, but the direction of her eyes, the angle of her head, the way she brings her cheek to his to match the words “cheek to cheek”, the way her eyes briefly lift (0.51-0.52) as he turns her, the way she rests against a wall for ten secondsat 0.55-1.05. As in all these Astaire-Rogers movies, her listening is deeply, deeply moving; I know of nobody on film or stage who equals or surpasses it. That rest against a wall doesn’t seem like a choreographed Moment: when he leads her back into the dance, there’s no hint of gear-change in her. Hers is the kind of seamless transition from stillness into motion that I’ve idolized in Anthony Dowell but perhaps no other dancer.
In the grandiose moment (1: 20-1.26: “Dance with me! I want my arm about you!”), she’s so calmly responsive, separating from him, then letting him return to her, while her suspended-in-midair left arm and that nearly masklike face keep us in the spell of the moment. He’s already used the word we’re all looking for: heaven.
