Crazy Rhythm: Difference between revisions

"Crazy Rhythm" is a thirty-two-bar swing show tune written in 1928 by Irving Caesar, Joseph Meyer, and Roger Wolfe Kahn for the Broadway musical Here's Howe^[1]. It has since become a jazz standard, inspiring at least 15 jazz albums named Crazy Rhythm, often with the song itself included.^[2]

"Crazy Rhythm" was first recorded (on Victor 21368-B) by Roger Wolfe Kahn and His Orchestra in New York on 1928 April 12, with Franklyn Baur singing the chorus^[1][3]:

Crazy rhythm, here's the doorway

I'll go my way, you'll go your way

Crazy rhythm, from now on

We're through.

Audio file "RogerWolfeKahn-CrazyRhythm.ogg" not found^[4].

It has been covered by a full range of artists from mainstream jazz to hillbilly bebop. At least 150 covers have been recorded. Chet Atkins, Bix Beiderbecke, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Lionel Hampton, Woody Herman, Mark Murphy, Les Paul, Hank Penny, Django Reinhardt, and Frank Sinatra have all recorded this catchy tune. Most, but not all, are strictly instrumental.^[2]

Of special note is the performance by Doris Day and Gene Nelson in the 1950 film Tea for Two. This is a frame tale around a putative production of No, No, Nanette (written in 1925 by the prolific Caesar, Otto Harbach, and Vincent Youmans); "Tea for Two" being a number inserted into the original Nanette. "Crazy Rhythm" is presented in this film as a demonstration for backers of the production-to-be. Thus, it has come to be associated with the popular "Tea" and Nanette, while Here's Howe is largely forgotten. Day and Nelson also recorded "Crazy Rhythm" on the album Tea for Two -- not a soundtrack but a distinct studio recording in which Nelson does a tap solo, not seen or heard on film.^[5]

Another notable recording of the song is on 1961's Further Definitions, by Benny Carter with Coleman Hawkins. This is one of Carter's most acclaimed recordings.^[6][7]

"Crazy Rhythm" is, for the working jazz musician, inescapable. At a 2006 Birdland performance, post-bop pianist Andrew Hill "...who never plays anyone's standards but his own, began playing the opening motif from Meyer and Caeser's 1928 'Crazy Rhythm.' The drums played against the piano and the bass repeated an off-kilter Latin beat, but Tin Pan Alley was somewhere buried in the subtext... It was a clever moment, a rare nod to accessibility in an extremely opaque evening."^[8]

"Crazy Rhythm's" lyrics, written in the year before the Great Crash, both partake of the frenetic pace of the Roaring Twenties and foreshadow the doom to come:

I feel like the Emperor Nero when Rome was a very hot town.

Father Knickerbocker, forgive me, I play while your city burns down.

The verses, performed onstage and given in sheet music, are not sung in the original 3 minute Victor 78. Due to time limitations, Franklyn Baur must content himself with the chorus:

Crazy rhythm, here's the doorway

I'll go my way, you'll go your way

Crazy rhythm, from now on we're through.

Here is where we have a showdown

I'm too high-hat, you're too low-down

Crazy rhythm, here's goodbye to you!

They say that when a high-brow meets a low-brow

Walking along Broadway

Soon the high-brow

He has no brow

Ain't it a shame?

And you're to blame

What's the use of prohibition?

You produce the same condition

Crazy rhythm, I've gone crazy too^[9]

This Tin Pan Alley classic has affected musicians to the extent that many bands have styled themselves after one variation or another of Crazy Rhythm. It has lent its name to shows, albums, books, music stores, and bars.

Showing the deep impact of the song on culture beyond music is a 2001 book, Crazy Rhythm, by Washington insider Leonard Garment, subtitled "From Brooklyn and Jazz to Nixon's White House, Watergate, and Beyond". Garment, Nixon's personal lawyer, advised him not to destroy the Watergate tapes.

"Crazy Rhythm" is credited by saxophone player Harry Francis with "...stepping up technical standards among British trombone players of the period" (in 1928). He says that a mislabeled record, nonetheless immediately recognized as being performed by Miff Mole's Molers, included a tricky phrase in the introduction, which local trombonist Edgar Jackson assumed had been given by Mole, also a trombone player. "At the time this assumption went more or less unchallenged, for although there were those around who felt sure that the phrase had been played on a valve instrument — nobody had ever heard of Mole using anything but the slide. The result of all this was that for weeks afterwards many British trombone players nearly killed themselves in an effort to reproduce a phrase that had in fact been played on the mellophone of Dudley Fosdick!" Francis says that George Chisholm, much later, confirmed to him that Fosdick, not Mole, had performed the tricky phrase. Still, Jackson's "...error of judgement must have served to loosen up local trombone technique no end!"