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Tommy Wolf |
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| Basic InformationBorn: 1925, St. Louis, Missouri (US) Died: January 9, 1979 (age 53) Primary songwriting role: Co-writers: chiefly Fran Landesman and Fred Astaire. For songs written with these co-writers and others, view the DBOPM database. |
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Overview and Commentary: |
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| Overview |
For best on-line biography of Tommy Wolf, see FranLandesman.com. |
Kris Berg chart: arrangement to showcase the lead trombone and trombone section. |
In his New York Times review of Jackie Cain and Roy Kral singing and playing at The Village Vanguard in New York in 1962, John S. Wilson writes,
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Ted Gioia suggests that Tommy Wolf is such a little known jazz composer that most people hearing his name associated with his more well known songs such as "Ballad of the Sad Young Men" and "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" might think they had encountered musical works written by one of his more famous literary namesakes (Thomas Wolfe who wrote Look Homeward Angel in the Thirties and Tom Wolfe who penned Bonfire of the Vanities in the Eighties. But Gioia writes that although the composer Tommy Wolf never enjoyed the fame that the other "Wolfes" (with an "e") did, he was "an exceptional songwriter, one of the most talented of his generation." Gioia points out that although his compositions are not well known to the general public they are "prized by musicians for their poetry and sophistication." |
Fran Landesman and Tommy Wolf
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Tommy Wolf was a pianist, composer, arranger, and musical director who met Fran Landesman while she was sitting in the bar of the Crystal Palace, a night club in St. Louis, while he was on the bandstand playing. This experience inspired her to begin writing song lyrics and in 1952 Wolf began setting her lyrics to music. More Landesman–Wolf collaborations followed including the melodies for the songs for the Broadway musical The Nervous Set. Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball comment on the team of Wolf and Landesman writing that they produced a series of songs including the anthemic "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" and Ballad of the Sad Young Men" that Wolf would later refer to as "American Lieder," songs that "took on even more resonance in the age of AIDS" (p. 581). |
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Cafe Songbook |
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| "As fans of musical theater, we're used to offbeat projects, but this long-forgotten show takes the cake--and it's completely entrancing. The opening number alone makes nasty fun of the then-popular beatniks and is immediately followed by "New York," a list song enumerating all the awful things about the city. Rarely has so much bile been spilled on the New York stage--but perhaps that's because the show originated in St. Louis. Tommy Wolf's finger-snapping score and Fran Landesman's biting lyrics are very compelling, especially because it's hard to tell when they're serious and when they're drily sarcastic. The energetic cast, which includes Larry Hagman (best known as JR in Dallas), is backed by a jazz quartet, and the result often sounds strangely contemporary. And then you have some numbers, such as "Night People," that are almost Sondheimian. What a strange, wonderful little show this is." --Elisabeth Vincentelli (Amazon editorial review) | |
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New York: Routledge, 2006 (sub-chapter on plus multiple references to Wolf).
, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 (entry for the Wolf song "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" including list of recommended recordings, pp. 392-394).
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Credits(Tommy Wolf page) |
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