Cylinder Lists: Columbia Brown Wax, Columbia XP, Columbia 20th Century, and Indestructible (2000)

SOME ATTRACTIVE GIRLS IN IRVING BERLIN’S MUSICAL SHOW, "WATCH YOUR STEP," AT THE NEW AMSTERDAM A TWENTY - SIX- YEAR-OLD who can't read music, Berlin—A spent in industrious, cheerful poverty on New York's East Side. He who can play the piano only in the key of F sharp, who never had an hour's instruction in harmony and counterpoint, is strid- ing into the temple to confute the learned doctors. The clatter of his rythmic heels comes nearer and nearer the Holy of Holies. Who, where Chopin is sacred or Brahms is bruited or Wagner is handed about the table as nonchalantly as the salt—who in these precincts has heard of Irving Berlin? Everybody! Where English is spoken, Irving Berlin is to-day unquestion- ably one of the most popular living composers. He is as well known in London as in New York; for him the proletariat shoots off its huzzas, and the melodic aristocracy is divided in its own person, for while its lips deny, its feet refuse to keep still. This is no panegyric of "Watch Your Step,” Berlin’s first and extraordinarily successful show. It is about the quiet, intense. sang in his father's services, and the Cantor taught him some- thing of music, but his teachings were not so fine as the artistic birthright unconsciously bestowed. Irving Berlin’s music, in its good examples, is always better than its form and medium. In single songs, he has never surpassed his great triumph of four years ago, Alexander's Rag-Time Band, of which a Western critic wrote: "With the irresistible virility of this single melody, Puccini could have popularized ‘The Girl of the Golden West,’ " With his little voice and his frail hands, and his ludicrously limited pianistic ability, the boy had been vainly supplicating his own street to listen. When Alexander spoke the world answered, and made respectful requests in turn. The song was the sort of triumph fatal to any man save a genius. It made Berlin. It gave him what he had never had— a little leisure, and some popularity, and a few big rocks for the gentle, dark little personality—Berlin him- self. He has the busiest publishing house in New York; he could not count his songs any more than Rockefeller pere could enumerate his oil-tanks; he is writing a new musical comedy, he is continually writing new songs, for which he keeps a whole staff of arrangers busy embalming the airs that fly from his spirit onto black keys only; yet so far, he says, he has done very little that he wished to do. Six years ago he was a singer in East Side cabarets, with an ambition toward popular song-writing. To-day he is the most successful writer of his type of song* in the world, and he declares that he will never be content until he has written The Genuine American Music Drama. His favorite music masters are the modern Russians. He doesn't pretend to under- stand their music. He bows to its spell unquestioning. Moussorgsky, Rimskv- Korsakoff, Borodin. Tschaikowsky, alter- nately thrill, chill and inflame him. It is the simple earnestness of the boy which makes one believe in him. He is a Russian Jew. son of an itinerant Cantor, and the greater part of his childhood was foundation of the publishing business. The business proved to be an ogre in the form of an animated cat-o'-nine-tails. lashing him into unceasing and unsparing effort ever since. We sat in the twilight of one of the fifteen piano rooms of his song-shop—in which he himself manufactured ninety per cent, of the goods. "I suppose we all work best under pres- sure,” he smiled, abstractedly touching something in his sole key of F sharp. "I can't get to work until my partners tell me that sales are falling, that the rent is in- creasing, that salaries are going up—all because I’m not on the job. Then I sweat blood. Absolutely. I sweat blood between 3 and 6 many mornings, and when the drops that fall off my forehead hit paper they're notes. "That’s the way I wrote International Rag. I was in London. I had a grip full of stuff; nothing especially new, nothing characteristic enough, they said. I com- posed the melody and wrote the first verse of International Rag in the Hotel Savoy at 4 o’clock the morning of the day be- fore I opened, ( Continued on page 9“) Apeda IRVING BERLIN