Skyliner
I was listening to the Manhattan Transfer's Swing today. Aside from being a natural set of songs for them and one of their best albums - since they're very much in the model of swing vocal groups like the Hi-Lo's and the Modernaires - it contains my single favorite Man Trans cut: "Skyliner". This Charlie Barnet song, with vocalese lyrics and Ricky Skaggs playing some tasty guitar, is about someone flying home to a waiting loved one who gets totally caught up in the romance of flying.
"The romance of flying" - hard to say that nowadays without a thick coat of irony. I suppose I'm old enough to remember when flying had some shade of exoticness to it; when the Saarinen TWA building opened out at Idlewild (later Kennedy a/k/a JFK); when being a stewardess (not a "flight attendant") was considered a glamourous job; when airplane food was not a sad joke; when you could kick back with a cigarette and a cocktail and watch the clouds flow by....well, you get the idea.
The first flight I ever took was when I was in High School and flew up to Rochester for a college interview. My father took me out to LaGuardia airport where we encountered Mayor Robert Wagner; Dad, an inveterate amateur photographer always ready to take a snapshot, inveigled the Mayor to pose with me ("OK, your honor - big smile now!") and then it was time to walk out on the tarmac and up the portable stairs to the plane. That first lift-off was a moment of pure joy mixed with a little fear, which surprisingly sweetens the moment. There's a Taxi episode where Reiger goes sky-diving; as he free-falls he's screaming "I'm gonna die! I'm gonna die!" - then the chute pops open, he realizes he's not going to die, and he bursts into Sondheim's song "Being Alive". It was kind of like that, without the singing.
Anyway, this song brings it all back - a swinging kind of romantic optimism whose very sound - timbre and rhythm - is totally cool but in a happy, engaged kind of way - hip without the anomie. Sometimes I miss that exuberant vision of a streamlined future, even as false as it ultimately turned out to be. All technology eventually becomes banal, I suppose. The trouble with the future, as someone once said, is that it's always tomorrow, and never today; you can't live there.
"The romance of flying" - hard to say that nowadays without a thick coat of irony. I suppose I'm old enough to remember when flying had some shade of exoticness to it; when the Saarinen TWA building opened out at Idlewild (later Kennedy a/k/a JFK); when being a stewardess (not a "flight attendant") was considered a glamourous job; when airplane food was not a sad joke; when you could kick back with a cigarette and a cocktail and watch the clouds flow by....well, you get the idea.
The first flight I ever took was when I was in High School and flew up to Rochester for a college interview. My father took me out to LaGuardia airport where we encountered Mayor Robert Wagner; Dad, an inveterate amateur photographer always ready to take a snapshot, inveigled the Mayor to pose with me ("OK, your honor - big smile now!") and then it was time to walk out on the tarmac and up the portable stairs to the plane. That first lift-off was a moment of pure joy mixed with a little fear, which surprisingly sweetens the moment. There's a Taxi episode where Reiger goes sky-diving; as he free-falls he's screaming "I'm gonna die! I'm gonna die!" - then the chute pops open, he realizes he's not going to die, and he bursts into Sondheim's song "Being Alive". It was kind of like that, without the singing.
Anyway, this song brings it all back - a swinging kind of romantic optimism whose very sound - timbre and rhythm - is totally cool but in a happy, engaged kind of way - hip without the anomie. Sometimes I miss that exuberant vision of a streamlined future, even as false as it ultimately turned out to be. All technology eventually becomes banal, I suppose. The trouble with the future, as someone once said, is that it's always tomorrow, and never today; you can't live there.
posted by DJStan at 7:32 PM
3 Comments:
"It was kind of like that, without the singing."
LOL!
"hip without the anomie ... exuberant vision of a streamlined future, even as false as it ultimately turned out to be ...
That whole second paragraph is a poem. And now I want me some Manhattan Transfer.
I think the "Swing" album is really their finest CD, but the Rhino "Best of" collection is an excellent overview of the group's abilities and range.
And thanks for praising the prose. Back in my salad days, I tried to be a poet for a while; maybe there's still hope?
You like salad? ;)
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