Dartblog

This economic wretchedness has brought me to a series of Depression-era music. Some of the American Songbook’s finest pages are dog-eared from the low 1930s, when the hotel dance bands of the twenties added sad whinnies from cupped cornets and long minor drags from fiddles. There is a healthy catalog of escapism, of brooding, of longing—all terrific music still finding favor with modern performers.

Dartblog, ever in your service, catalogs and delivers to you each Sunday morning another reason why quality melodies make for better stimulus than the vexatious reassignation of cash. Episode one is here. This is episode two.

Composed in 1928, You Took Advantage of Me is a Rodgers and Hart tune that never went out of style and, when it is constructed, could serve as a time capsule’s representation of the duo’s work. It remains fertile quarry for basic jazz ensembles like that of Duke Heitger and Ehud Asherie, who tapped it out on June 9, 2009, in Roth’s Westside Steakhouse in New York. These boys don’t have a vocalist but—like every note of Richard Rodgers’s—Lorenz Hart’s lyrics never seem far, even when you can’t hear them at all.

For your further pleasure, I give you a side from Rob Fisher & His Coffee Club Orchestra. This is You Took Advantage of Me at its sweetest. Rob Fisher does the song in concerto form, inserting a splendidly tipsy piano solo at the core.

The recording comes from Shaking the Blues Away, which is an album you must own, if you don’t already. (Arkiv Music will issue on-demand copies of this recording, which are mostly all gone and appreciating dearly in price on the secondary market.)

N.B. New readers will find entertainment by sifting through our previous musical series, Sunday Morning Sinatra.