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Rich Moran and his band had already swung through way through the classics “Let’s Fall in Love” and “Getting to Know You” when he addressed the audience directly. “Thank you for being here. We are so happy to be here, finally.”
Moran was referring to the Best Video patio, which the necessity of Covid restrictions had turned into a stage, and one of the New Haven area’s busiest music venues. An outdoor stage made gathering for music safer — but also more weather dependent. Moran had been slated to play in June, but got rained out. He was rescheduled to July, which then also got rained out. August proved the charm, albeit a hot one. But the air temperature didn’t prevent singer (and WMNR radio host) Moran and fellow musicians Judy Webber on piano, Jeff Webber on saxophone, clarinet, and cajon, and Mike Bimonte on drums, from keeping it cool.
To an appreciate crowd of dozens, Moran breezed through the Great America Songbook, with the “shtick,” Moran said, of providing some song history along the way. Such as the fact that Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein originally wrote “Getting to Know You” for South Pacific, only to cut it from that show. When a character in The King and I needed a song, the duo stuck it in. “They swapped in some new lyrics and it was a hit,” Moran said.
From Rodgers and Hammerstein he moved to Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s “With a Song in My Heart,” which, Moran explained, the duo originally wrote for the 1929 musical Spring Is Here. It proved to have a life long beyond that, being recorded on numerous albums over the years to the present day and showing up in movies for decades.
Moran mentioned the history of the song “just to show how pliable it is,” the song able to sustain changes in tastes and styles to survive. What started out as a show tune could morph into jazz and rock and beyond. “They sound good” no matter how they’re done, Moran said, “because they were written by professional songwriters” who knew what song needed to have legs.
He stayed with Rodgers and Hart to explain that they wrote the song “My Heart Stood Still” after the phrase was uttered by a female companion after a near-miss in a car on a French highway after a drunken trip to Versailles. Hart on the spot thought her glad-to-be-alive statement would make for a great lyric and told Rodgers to write it down, which he did. Later, Rodgers wrote music and showed Hart the lyric — which Hart had no recollection of. The song, meant for a musical, became a favorite among British royalty and thus another hit for the famous songwriting duo.
Moran also took time to praise his band, explaining that they’d gotten together to practice a lot during the pandemic but “haven’t played in two years” for an audience. “She’s sick of looking at me,” Moran said of Webber, who smiled from behind the piano. “It’s nice to be out here so Judy can look at other people — and my rear end,” he joked.
But Moran and band also demonstrated a serious point — that the songs in the Great American Songbook have in fact continued to be rediscovered over and over, generation after generation, whether it’s “Beyond the Sea” or Cole Porter. The influence of that particular style of songwriting likewise persisted. The band’s Brazilian-inflected take on Paul McCartney’s “Here, There, and Everywhere” showed how much the Beatles drew from the generation of songwriters before them, to the point that some of their songs could be stylistically retrofitted to sound like them. Likewise, the band stripped an Elton John song all the back to voice and piano to show the old songwriting bones beneath the 1970s style.
Humor was never far away, however. “It’s nice to sing ‘On the Street Where You Live’ when you’re on the street where you live,” he said, motioning toward Whitney Avenue. After a particularly vivacious take on the standard “Exactly Like You,” Moran said that “after the show, Judy will be selling the elixir she drinks that keeps her so youthful. Available in gallon and half-gallon sizes.” It’s possible one of the ingredients in that elixir was the music itself. After the show, several participants could be observed to have a spring in their step as they walked to their cars.
