Autumn Serenades

"Autumn Serenade" is the name of a song by Peter DeRose, better known for "Deep Purple," but probably neither title would be recognized by anyone under fifty. Make that sixty. But there is a fine recording of "Autumn Serenade" by John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, on their classic ballads album.

It's a toss-up whether there are more songs about spring or about autumn, but it's September, so we're going for autumn. 'Tis Autumn" is a song by the famed hipster and practical joker Henry Nemo. More famous--most famous, probably--are "September Song" and "Autumn Leaves." No one has ever touched the first version of "September Song" (Kurt Weill-Maxwell Anderson) sung by Walter Huston. And the gold standard for "Autumn Leaves" is the performance by Yves Montand (sung as "Les feuilles mortes" in the original French).

The English lyrics to "Autumn Leaves" were written by Johnny Mercer, who wrote as well "Early Autumn" ("...there's a dance pavilion in the rain") for the coda to "Summer Sequence," that evocative jazz tone poem composed by Ralph Burns for the Woody Herman band. Mercer's last, elegiac lyrics were "When October Goes," set to music, after Mercer departed, by Barry Manilow.

"September in the Rain" introduced the sound of the George Shearing Quintet in the mid-1940s, and almost everyone has done Vernon Duke's "Autumn in New York" ("Lovers who bless the dark/on benches in Central Park").

Then there are the songs that bid a rueful farewell to a summer romance--"The Things We Did Last Summer" ("How could a love that seemed so right go wrong?") and still the leader in that category, Victor Herbert's "Indian Summer" ("You're the ghost of a romance in June, going astray..."). Sarah Vaughan sang it with Basie, Sinatra sang it with Ellington.

Enjoy your own autumn serenades.