Who wrote what is this thing called love

In order that he might be able to work in natural light, his wife Linda had the entire back wall ripped out and replaced with frosted glass.

Each spring they reserved a series of rail cars on the Orient Express or some such, and decamped with their entire entourage to the Lido in Venice, where Cole would write amusing songs and get his friend Diaghilev to choreograph them for the lavish parties the Porters hosted at the Palazzo Rezzonico.

A Broadway show? Oh, but it might interfere with that marvelous weekend they were planning at Antibes. It was an unusual life for a budding songwriter, but a creatively productive one, and among its fruits was "What Is This Thing Called Love? When short of an and-then-I-wrote anecdote, Porter tended to give Islam the credit for all his big hits, including "Night and Day", which was supposedly sparked by the Muslim call to prayer.

Alec Wilder described the harmony as so unusual that, were he to be given the chords without the melody, he would have had difficulty creating a plausible tune for them.

Yet Porter did. By contrast with the music, the words are simple, at least by Porter's standards - no flashy rhymes, no wordplay, no allusions or imagery. On the page they can look rather trite - one wonderful day you threw my heart away:. But Porter knew what he was doing: The words are simple, but the music tells you that the answer to the question is complex and profound and ultimately unknowable.

Its the combination of unaffected directness in the lyric and great depth in the music that gives the song its power. But he chanced to run into the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Cromer, during the tryout in Manchester, and instead Cromer congratulated him on his extensive wildlife research and said he particularly enjoyed the line about grouse doing it out of season.

Frank Sinatra was a fourteen-year-old boy in Hoboken at the time Wake Up And Dream opened in London, but he knew Cole Porter's songs and within a few years was singing them in little joints around New Jersey. But his own turn at the song didn't come until exactly 60 years ago today - February 16th For Frank, the dawn of the Capitol era was the best of times, and the worst of times.

His long career slump was over, and he had, as the defining song of those first Capitol days says, the world on a string. Except for one thing. In October Sinatra and Ava Gardner split. We were happy when he was on the skids. These twin tracks - the spectacularly successful career and the imploded personal life - merged a few months later as Frank began planning his first ballad album for Capitol: In The Wee Small Hours.

You can hear Jule talking to me about Frank on our Sammy Cahn centenary podcast. I come home at night and the apartment is all dark. I yell, 'Frank! I walk into the living room and it's like a funeral parlor. There are three pictures of Ava in the room and the only lights are three dim ones on the pictures. Sitting in front of them is Frank with a bottle of brandy. I say to him, 'Frank, pull yourself together. Leave me alone. It's his first wife, Nancy. His voice is soft and quiet and I hear him say, 'You're the only one who understands me.

Sinatra in the wee small hours, for real. And he had the up-and-coming arranger Capitol had teamed him with, to help create a new Sinatra sound: Nelson Riddle. One time Mr and Mrs Riddle had been arguing, and she threw at him the line: "All you ever think about is music and sex.

On Swing Easy , he'd proved he could do it on the swingin' stuff. But could he do it for Frank on the ballads? He started with a core rhythm section: guitar, bass, drums, Bill Miller on piano plus Paul Smith on celesta. There are strings but not a lot of horns.

And that's just Side One. What made Riddle such a transformative arranger was his generosity: rather than just arranging the material on the sheet, he provided his own accompanying and counter melodies, many of which could easily have been saved for his next film score or television theme.

And as he gets to the "mystery" and demands to know "why should it make a fool of me? Sinatra makes just one misjudgment, I think - and that's the interpolation of "just" just before the last line:. I'm not a snob about these things.

A year earlier, on "A Foggy Day", he'd sung "And in foggy London town the sun was shining shining shining shining shining everywhere", and the sheer joy he brings to it is the shiningest thing you've ever heard. But on "What Is This Thing? But I'm being nitpicky, and, if it is a small blemish, it doesn't detract from the power of the recording. In contrast to the inventive harmony, the words tell a rather conventional love tale with no references to idols or Moroccan dances.

Porter undoubtedly had a feeling for the relative merits of both his words and his music. As the song is most often performed as an instrumental it would appear that his instinct was correct.

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Reading and Research. Soundtrack Information. Free Chord Changes for this Tune. Video Playlist. This is an inspired version of a song Parker would revisit regularly. More on Cole Porter. More information on this tune There is also a companion CD. McElrath - Musicologist for JazzStandards. Book includes CD. William G. Thomas S. Comment Policy Your comments are welcome, including why you like this tune, any musical challenges it presents, or additional background information.

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