Jonathan Schwartz is Back (And So is Sanity on Sunday Afternoons)

For me and plenty of other people who love decent music, sanity has returned to our Sunday afternoons. Jonathan Schwartz is back on the radio. Internet radio this time – TheJonathanStation.com – but no one really cares. After a long winter and spring with Jonathan absent from the airwaves, we’re just happy to have him back.

Jonathan’s new Sunday show debuted on Father’s Day, and the occasion was fitting. For more than 50 years, wherever he wandered on the dial, from WNEW-FM to WNEW-AM to WQEW-AM to Sirius and finally to WNYC, Jonathan had served as our idiosyncratic master teacher in The Great American Songbook, created by people like George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Stephen Sondheim, Richard Rodgers, and his own father, Arthur Schwartz.

On a personal level, he was an almost palpable part of my existence, an angel on my shoulder with unusually good taste. In the late 1970s, as a homesick college freshman with hall-mates who favored Donna Summer and “Le Freak,” I discovered one night that if I opened my window, held my boom box in the air and tilted it at a 90-degree angle, I could hear Jonathan’s voice on WNEW-AM, 150 miles away from my Providence dorm. I could hear Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald too, but it was Jonathan’s voice that mattered the most to me. Still does.

Later, back in New York, I would listen to Jonathan pontificate about his beloved Boston Red Sox and Philip Roth as I wrote speeches and press releases at work. When the kids were little, I drowned out the “Barney” theme song that perennially emanated from my living room by keeping Jonathan at top volume in my kitchen. (The super-sized mimosas I hid in red Solo cups also helped.) Much later, it was Jonathan, and the little packages of graham crackers in my oncologist’s waiting room, that helped sustain me through six months of chemo.

In mid-December, a #MeToo frenzy exploded at WNYC and Jonathan was removed (along with fellow on-air host Leonard Lopate). The station’s paltry attempts at justification only made it apparent that the dismissals were without cause, which made the situation especially heartbreaking. Jonathan issued no public statement. Listeners, including me, promptly cancelled our WNYC sustaining memberships. Many of us congregated on the internet, gravitating to the Facebook group The American Songbook with Jonathan Schwartz – which was not formally affiliated with Jonathan — to express our anger and sadness.

On the Facebook page, listeners, both men and women, pointed to the lack of due process in Jonathan’s removal. Age-ism seemed the likely culprit. (Jonathan was 79 at the time of his removal; Lopate was 77.) It occurred to me, in the current un-nuanced climate, that if Sinatra himself had suddenly materialized and serenaded his female coworkers with a song like Rodgers’ “My Funny Valentine” – “Is your figure less than Greek? Is your mouth a little weak?” – well, he probably would’ve been fired too.

People joined the Facebook group from as far away as Dubai, and a community took shape around Jonathan’s absence. We mourned. We reminisced. We had a lone malcontent banned from the group. And we did our best to recreate what we’d lost, posting songs that Jonathan would play and even attempting our own “Salute to Baseball” like the one he hosted every Super Bowl weekend. We wondered if we’d ever hear Jonathan on the radio again.

In early April, after searching the internet regularly for news on Jonathan, I spotted a logo on Twitter for a new entity called The Jonathan Station. Shortly after that, the station launched a 24-hour music stream featuring the American Songbook. Finally, on Father’s Day, Jonathan went live for the first time in six months. There’s a photo of him, smiling, on the Facebook page, taken right before the inaugural show. He looks like he’s precisely where he’s supposed to be. One member of the Facebook group said that when she heard Jonathan’s voice, she cried.

There’s something to be said for loyalty, for continuity, for well-deserved resurrections, and for those memorable voices that make your heart sing. I’m not just talking about musicians here.

“Oh! So there you are,” Jonathan began his first show. “It’s become June.” As though he’d never been away.

 

October Song

It was the fall of 1982. I’d been back in Brooklyn since graduation, living with my parents and trying to figure out what to do next. I had a bundle of clips from Seventeen magazine and The Brown Daily Herald and no game plan to speak of. My friends were all in med school or law school, which left me with no one to talk to all day except the dog. No, that’s not exactly true. Sometimes I talked to the mailman when he delivered the rejection letters I got from small newspapers in towns I didn’t want to live in. But still. By the time September came along, depression had set in. I needed to make a few bucks until I got a real job. I walked into a local chain pharmacy, filled out an application (“What the hell are you doing here?” the manager asked after seeing where I’d gone to school) and shortly thereafter found myself behind a cash register, wearing an ugly jacket with the word “Rockbottom” written on it. It seemed appropriate.

Desperation may have made me a cashier, but it didn’t make me a good one. I bagged two-liter soda bottles on top of Marshmallow Peeps. I didn’t pay attention to what I was doing and made wrong change. (I majored in Latin and Ancient Greek, in case you’re wondering.) Once, I yelled “How small is small?” across the store when a surly customer had a question about proper condom fit. The latter transgression ended my Rockbottom career before my training period ended.

Then it was October. I answered an ad and got a job as a features reporter for Courier-Life Publications, a weekly newspaper chain headquartered in a windowless building in Sheepshead Bay. About a week later, the editors got fired. Since I was the last one hired, I figured I was next out the door. That wasn’t what happened. From my days at the college paper I knew how to edit, assign stories and write headlines. As long as the pay was more than I was getting — which was nothing — I was good to go. So it happened that by the end of October I’d managed to climb from Rockbottom to a job as managing editor of what was, at the time, the largest chain of weekly newspapers in Brooklyn. (Courier-Life was swallowed up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. a few years ago.)

Years later I married someone I met that same October. He was the guy I shared an office with, the editor-in-chief. On one of our first dates he took me for a late-night spin on the Staten Island Ferry. Cars were still allowed on the ferry then — paranoia wouldn’t descend on the city for another nine years — and he brought along a couple of cassette tapes to serenade us. Whenever I think of that roller-coaster October, the month of romance, Rockbottom and, finally, my rebirth as an honest-to-goodness employed person, what comes to mind is a song I heard for the very first time that night on the ferry: “Penthouse Serenade (When You’re Alone)” by Tony Bennett.

Just picture a penthouse way up in the sky
With hinges on chimneys for stars to go by
A sweet slice of Heaven for just you and I
When we’re alone.
From all of society we’ll stay aloof
And live in propriety there on the roof.
Two heavenly hermits we will be in truth
When we’re alone.
We’ll see life’s mad pattern
As we view old Manhattan
Then we can thank our lucky stars
That we’re living as we are.
In our little penthouse we’ll always contrive
To keep love and romance forever alive
In view of the Hudson just over the drive,
When we’re alone.
We can thank our lucky stars
That we’re living as we are.
In our little penthouse we’ll always contrive
To keep love and romance forever alive
In view of the Hudson just over the drive,
When we’re alone.

(Penthouse Serenade (When We’re Alone) lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, LEIBER & STOLLER MUSIC PUBL, CARLIN AMERICA INC.)

There are plenty of eponymous songs for September, a handful for October, even fewer for November, and then you hear nothing but holiday music until January because no one really wants to hear songs about a month that signifies The End. I attribute the October drop, creatively speaking, to emotional overload. After all the bittersweet regrets (“September Song,” especially Jimmy Durante’s version), the pain of lost love (“September in the Rain”), and the realization that youth is long gone (“September of My Years”), you reach the point when you say enough already. You’re wiser than you were before, maybe a bit battered, but you come to the conclusion that you just need to let it be for a while. Stop worrying. Eat chocolate. Enjoy the music without wondering when it’ll end. That, folks, is October. “Penthouse Serenade” isn’t an October song, but it should be.

When you hit Rockbottom — or rock bottom — eventually you figure out that there’s nowhere to go but up. I’ve remembered that long-ago October lesson on many occasions.

When I left the newspaper in 1988, I started a new job that October. Six years later, there was yet another job. I started that one in October, too — October 8, 1994, to be exact. I expected it to be a transitional move, the kind of job I’d keep until the kids were old enough to manage without a twice-daily chauffeur. Of course I stayed — for 18 years. I loved my job. Several of us raised our kids there, and we figured we’d retire there as well. But on a late-December day it became evident that our clock, already ticking insistently, was about to stop for good. Some of us felt the pain more keenly than others. I went into mourning, not just for the impending loss of a great job but for the imminent absence of an employer I’d grown to consider a friend.

Our office closed on March 20, 2012. For the first time since graduation 30 years earlier, I had nowhere to go during the day. I began staying in my pajamas later and later and eating too many Oreos. I answered a bunch of ads for writing/editing positions and learned that the job application process had changed considerably since I last needed it. This time around I didn’t get any rejection letters. My resume simply ended up in the black hole of cyberspace. (I hear this from anyone over 50 who’s job-hunting, by the way, and there are too many of us to write it off as coincidence. Note to potential employers, who are probably younger than the people they’re not hiring: Get some manners. Quickly.) I dreaded the arrival of September. I stopped eating Oreos and switched to Mallomars after they arrived in the stores.

Finally, October came to the rescue. So did a new employer (not through a job ad), and I am most grateful for the opportunity as well as a compelling reason to get out of my pajamas. I have two new employers, actually: When times are tough you have to be flexible and hope for the best. So that’s what I’m doing. The work is fun, and, unexpectedly, I’m learning something new. I’m not worrying about how long it will last, or what I’ll do when it ends. I’m trying, anyway. Jobs end. Friends leave. If you’re lucky, they come back. Sometimes you need to let things be. Just enjoy the music.

It seems fitting to end with “When October Goes,” written by Johnny Mercer and Barry Manilow, and recorded here by Nancy Wilson.

Words, Music and the Art of Staying (Moderately) Sane

I deal in words. I start off the day with the New York Times crossword puzzle, read the New York dailies online, and browse Facebook, Twitter and my email. That’s all before 7 a.m. I write and edit for a living, and then most nights I spend a few hours on my laptop, working and chatting. For fun, I read. (At the moment I’m still trying to get through the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and “Passage of Power,” Robert Caro’s third volume on the life of Lyndon Johnson.) I fall asleep playing “Words With Friends” on the iPad. Then it starts again the next morning.

Invariably, at some point during the day my head starts to hurt. First I thought I needed new glasses, but that wasn’t the case. After ruling out several other possible but unlikely causes, ranging from having three children to having a brain tumor, I concluded that it was word overload. It made sense. Imagine words swirling around you all day like mosquitoes. Eventually, the buzzing starts infiltrating your brain until you can’t hear yourself think. That’s where Yo-Yo Ma (pictured above) comes in.

Today is Yo-Yo Ma’s 57th birthday, so this morning I started searching on YouTube for videos to post in his honor. I love Yo-Yo Ma — he has his own playlist on my iPhone — so I took my time looking for just the right ones. I ended up getting lost in the music the same way I get lost in words, but without the accompanying headache.

The selection shown above, which is different from the two others I posted on Facebook, happens to be my all-time favorite Yo-Yo Ma performance. It’s from his 2003 CD “Obrigado Brazil,” and the song is “Doce de Coco” by Brazilian composer Jacob do Bandolim. I invite you to stop reading and take a listen. If it’s at all possible, make sure the room is quiet. Pour yourself something soothing to drink. Even if the room isn’t quiet and you’re not drinking something soothing, the rhythm and sensuality of “Doce de Coco” will transport you. I dare you. Try it.

For me, at least, that’s the thing about “Doce de Coco” and Yo-Yo Ma. If words are my swarms of mosquitoes, Yo-Yo Ma is the bug spray that silences my inner noise. Works every time.

It’s not just Yo-Yo Ma. The same goes for jazz, standards, cabaret, the timeless and intelligent stuff of the “American Songbook” that Jonathan Schwartz plays on Sirius XM (and before that on WNYC, preceded by WQEW and WNEW. Believe me, I know — I’ve been listening to Jonathan Schwartz since I’m 14.)

I blocked out the disco era of my teens and never had much of an affinity for pop or ear-splitting guitar riffs. But give me “Autumn in New York” by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong — anything by Ella and Louis, separately and together — and that’s something else entirely. Or “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” by Sammy Davis, Jr. and Laurindo Almeida, “Wave” by Sinatra, “Penthouse Serenade” by Tony Bennett, or “Two for the Road” by Nancy LaMott. Give me Stacey Kent, Julie London, Rosemary Clooney, Eva Cassidy, Kenny Rankin and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Many others, too.

Many high-strung people resort to Xanax, but music is my preferred drug. The sad or bittersweet songs work better than the happy ones. I’m really not sure why. I start breathing easier almost immediately. The stress begins to fall away.

When I work at home, music is always on in the background, very softly. It’s greatly minimized the physiological effects of word overload, and for that I am grateful. I can’t explain my response to music. The wonderful thing is that I don’t have to. It just is.

I’ll end with the impossibly beautiful rendition of “Simple Gifts” that Yo-Yo Ma recorded with Alison Krauss.