“The Not-
The Saturday Review – Mar. 29, 1958
By: Abram Chasins
A new apparition has appeared on the musical scene recently, not only in America,
but abroad. He walks like, talks like, looks trim-
At his most recent appearance in New York, with an for the benefit of the Philharmonic
Orchestra’s Pension Fund, Kaye showed that he is more than a world-
Kaye has been lending his enormous prestige to the benefit of orchestral musicians
since 1954, when he tried his spurs at a Pension Fund Concert of the Philadelphia
Orchestra. Last year he appeared in Boston, to the delight of the audience and the
despair of an assistant conductor who said, “He has a tremendous advantage over the
rest of us. We work half our lives with our noses in the score and the other half
trying to get them out. He’s already there.” After the event, Kaye was inducted to
become the only non-
Despite all this, Danny Kaye’s total musical preparation for such activity was a small stretch as a member of a boys’ choir in Newark, New Jersey. Danny learned his part he says, by listening to “Pinky, the guy next to me, who nowadays also sings under the name of Jan Peerce.” It was a brief encounter, for Danny was soon haunting the Catskill summer resorts where the itinerant entertainer doubled as a waiter when he wasn’t participating in some skit or play or musical. But this was considerably short of his ambitions.
In the fall, Danny would come back to the big town, looking for some likely project.
It was a fine day when a little review was being planned for one of those off-
“Danny was fascinated,” says Mrs. Kaye. “At first he showed some resistance, trying to break me up by making one of his faces, especially during the operatic duets, but pretty soon he was getting genuinely excited. Finally, when his old pal Pinky knocked ‘em cold one night, that did it. Danny went out to buy all his recordings. When his interest extended itself from the performers to the music, when he began to sing every note and word of whole operas, I suddenly realized that I had created a Frankenstein.”
From then on, music was nothing that Danny could ever take or leave. For him, music has become a passional experience [sic]. He hears everybody and everything possible, and what he hears either transports him to ecstasy or infuriates him to unprintable language. He is never trapped by surface appeal or by mere virtuosity. “When he came upon Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’,” Sylvia said, “Danny threw over everything else for a long time.”
Musicians are the people for whom Kaye feels the greatest respect and kinship. Although he prizes his ability to capture and fracture audiences, way down deep he does not set nearly so high a valuation on the art of the actor or comedian as on the art of the musician. He is proud of his friendships with Artur Rubinstein, Isaac Stern, Ormandy, Munch, and with other eminent artists. But his respect is not only reserved for celebrities. When he makes his films, he spends his spare moments on the sound stage with the orchestra men, listening to the music and watching the techniques of instrumentalists and the characteristics of instruments. On recording dates, it is the conductor and the players who get the bulk of Danny’s time and attention.
He doesn’t just look and hear. He also observes and learns with photographic and phonographic accuracy. He is perhaps the most innately musical person I have ever known. Ask any piano teacher of his struggles to teach even the most gifted pupil a perfectly spaced duplet in one hand against a triplet in the other. Danny mastered it in a flash, on a table.
Sylvia relates that she wrote a gypsy musical number for the film, “Inspector General,” which featured Danny playing the fiddle. This called for a composite trick shot where the left hand of one violinist and the right hand of another would combine to perform the composition while the camera trained on Danny’s face as it reacted to the music. The effect was tried over and over again. It simply wouldn’t work. Danny, used to freedom of movement without restriction, was paralyzed. “I was about to give up,” says Sylvia, “when I suddenly realized with whom I was dealing.” She asked Danny if he thought he could learn the bowings and fingerings of that piece in a week. He said he’d try. It took him two days. In the picture it was impossible to tell that Danny wasn’t actually playing.
Apart from an unlimited capacity to learn, Kaye’s professional pride balks at using
“stand-
In his own work, Danny Kaye has long mastered the techniques and principle of communication. His voice is unique in range, color, and flexibility, and his vocal method is flawless. He has a tonal accuracy, a clarity of diction, and a breath control which makes the average trained singer sound amateurish. When he deliberately croons or gives his voice a permanent wave or when he scoops, screams, and sobs a la the operatic ham, he becomes the lethal satirist of all the worst vocal techniques.
At the Carnegie Hall concert only one person watched in absorbed fascination, not a smile crossing his lips. It was Dimitri Mitropoulos, who had invited Kaye to share the podium with him. When I asked Mitropoulos how he had been able to resist Kaye’s hilarious antics, he said: “The reason I wasn’t laughing is that what I was seeing was so incredible. I sit down to watch a man who can’t read a note or play a musical instrument, who has no musical training actually, and suddenly I see a born conductor who can get whatever he wants from my orchestra. Danny is fantastic. He should study and make conducting a second career, and I hope you will quote me.”
His timing in song or speech is a model, his “rubato” in delivery a lesson to all. His mercurial face and lithe body complete the enchantment. As he slows down or speeds up, as he employs the full range of his voice from a seductive purr to a maniacal shriek complete with facial contortions, everything has the perfection and spontaneity of a carefully prepared impromptu; Danny is playing on the only instrument he knows—people.
The personnel of an orchestra consists of people too. But Danny’s respect for music and musicians does not permit him to rely on his personal magnetism alone. In preparation for a concert, he studies his music from his own records of past performances and from the discs of the greatest conductors. His repertory is limited at present, but his command of it is complete. One of the Philharmonic men said, “None of us could ever play anything better, more expressively or more precisely than Danny sang it at rehearsal when he illustrated what he wanted. He knows exactly what he wants and he conveys it in the clearest way. He made us play with a verve and spirit which only the most inspirational conductors can draw from an orchestra. And underneath all the glorious insanity we all knew that Danny was giving himself fully and wouldn’t tolerate any less from any of us.”
Danny does give himself fully, as all know who have seen the film on his selfless work for UNICEF. As a comic artist he is unequalled. As a human being he works incessantly to realize his inherent potentialities. It is a happy thing for all that this man of prodigious gifts includes among them the gift of music on a scale that makes him a musical millionaire who can’t sign his own name. To music lovers he brings delight and pleasure, to musicians aid and comfort of the most tangible sort, a real contribution to their welfare. For if the public is Kaye’s favorite instrument, musicians are his favorite people.