The Walrus – October 2006

Melody Man:
The long, unpredictable, career of Irving Fields
By Dylan Young

Montreal, October 3rd, 2005 -- It's the last night, the last show, of a music festival that has
come to be seen as one of the most influential in music today. Pop Montreal has been the
launch pad for more than one stratospheric career. Indierock legends Interpol and Arcade
Fire foreshadowed global success with breakout turns at the festival. Tonight promises to
be similarly defining. To mark the event, festival organizers have abandoned the familiar
music halls and clubs for the vaulted austerity of the Théâtre Nationale. There are three
acts on the bill tonight, including Gonzales, hip hop's answer to Keith Jarrett, and
Socalled, the poster boy for Klezmer hip hop fusion. But in a strange inversion of the
traditional scale, it’s the opening act that most are here to see. When the house lights snap
off, a lone figure steps into the spotlight then walks slowly toward the middle of the
stage. He seats himself at a piano, lets his fingers graze the surface of the keys, then rolls
out a single trill. With that, he turns toward his audience, a shock of white hair flashing.
His smile is childlike, his eyes sparkle. He’s 90 years old and he looks fit to bury us all.
“Hello, my name is Irving Fields,” he says with the practiced syrup of the radio friendly.
“The first selection I’m going to play for you, very lucky for me, is based on the r-r-r-
rumba! When everybody was doing the rumba in Florida, I wrote and recorded this
selection. It was very popular and sold two million copies. So, here it is, the Miami Beach
Rumba!”

Irving Fields was always good. And by good, I mean the kind of instantly undeniable
talent that opens doors and keeps them open. He’d been playing piano since he was eight.
That was 1923. By the age of ten, he’d started cobbling together his own tunes. “My
piano teachers found me frustrating,” he recalls. “I would never play the music the way it
was meant to be played. I was always trying to play it in my own way. They would say,
that’s not the way the music is written. Why do you play it that way? And I would
answer, because that's the way I feel it.”

At fifteen, Fields had outperformed two hundred contestants to become the youngest
finalist on Fred Allen’s coast-to-coast CBS radio program. He played the “Continental,”
in his own style, his own arrangement, and won the lot. First prize was $50 and a week
showcasing at the Roxy. His professional career began inauspiciously enough with
summer stints at little New Hampshire resort hotels where the bands doubled as wait
staff. Then, one particularly harsh winter day, as Fields pressed against the bitter cold, a
sign caught his eye: “TAKE CRUISE -- WEST INDIES.” Fields says, “I thought, why
can’t I do that? Then, I thought, why can’t I do that?” With what would prove to be a
talent secondary only to his skill at the keys, Fields marched over to the cruise line
offices and fast-talked his way into his first cruise circuit gig.

Cruise ship life gave Fields two things that would ultimately define his life—side- door
entry into the cosmopolitan society of America’s well-to-do, and, more importantly, Latin
music.

Fields’ deepening love of Latin music through the 1930s coincided with a U.S.
government campaign to improve relations with the folks south of the border. The Good
Neighbor Policy wasn’t just a series of political reforms; it was a cultural revolution, with
an influence that reached deep into American popular culture. Hollywood trotted out one
pro-Latin flick after another. 1933’s Flying Down to Rio, one of the earliest and most
emblematic, launched Mexican actress Dolores del Rio to international stardom. Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers also got their start in the film, performing a dance number
called “The Carioca” that raised eyebrows for its overt sensuality. The rumba, tango, cha
cha, paso doble, merengue, and mambo were all met with similar clamour. Through the
thirties and well into the forties, Latin music had the same feisty appeal as, say, Beyoncé
performing “Baby Boy.” In fact, the mainstream dominance of hip hop is not an unfitting
analogy for how pervasive Latin Tinge (as it came to be called) was at the time. And
Irving Fields was in it right from the start.

“I couldn’t get enough of the melodies and the rhythms, the variety and assortment of
them astounded me,” Fields says. “Whenever I was in San Juan or Havana, I sat in with
the orchestras. Then I started introducing those sounds into my sets.”

“In the 30s, 40s, even into the 50s, Latin was the top craze, everywhere from the music
world through Hollywood,” says Josh Kun, author of Audiotopia, a book exploring inter-
ethnic dialogues in American popular culture. “In addition to albums by authentic players
like Xavier Cugat and Tito Puente, there was record after record of what Gustavo Pérez
Firmat, this scholar at Duke has called mamboids, these faux Latin albums that came out
by the dozen. It was very prevalent. It was not a marginal thing at all.”

For American kids growing up in 30s through to the early 50s, regardless of ethnic origin
or geographic location, the pervasiveness of Latin Tinge would have made it nearly the
dominant American pop culture. In an atmosphere of Carmen Miranda films, Señor
Wences, Miss Chiquita banana ads, West Side Story, and a full-on music wave, the
average American youth would have identified as much with at least a bleached version
of that culture as they now do with hip hop. “It's what Firmat calls the Desi Effect,”
explains Kun. “You've got to remember, at the time, the biggest show in TV history was I
Love Lucy and featured Desi Arnez, a Cuban bongo player who was a holdover of that
'40s Latin movement, and was a household hero..” But by the 50s and 60s, the music that
had been risqué and fresh in the 30s, although still well seated culturally, had become
Dad music -- in the vernacular of the day, disastrously uncool.

Fields, who anticipated the wave in the 30s, and whose skills and instinct for the Latin
sound put him in a different league than most white emulators, was able to ride it through
its cool stages on into a career as one of lounge culture’s reigning monarchs. Xavier
Cugat, the crowned King of Rumba and Latin music’s most authentic crossover success,
tried to recruit Fields for his band. “The night I met Xavier Cugat, he spoke to me in
Spanish,” Fields says. “I had to say, Mr. Cugat, I'm American. He couldn't believe it. I
thought you were Cuban, he said. You play like a Cuban.” The story is obviously self-
serving but its credibility is sound. Cugat, and later Puente, recorded their own versions
of at least two original Fields compositions, “Managua, Nicaragua” (also featured in the
film The Third Man) and “Miami Beach Rumba.”

“What's so interesting about a song like ‘Miami Beach Rumba’ is that it doesn't pretend
to be a Latino song,” observes Kun. “In every way it’s an American song, an American
song about the love of Latin music. For Fields to have written this clever retooling of the
genre and then to have the ruling patriarchs of the Latin sound, to have Cugat and then
Puente record their own versions and have those become some of their most recognizable
hits, is a phenomenal legacy in itself.”

Unchecked success gets stale though. By the late 50s, Fields had been living large for
nearly three decades. He held court at venues like the Waldorf‘s Crest Room, the
Versailles in Florida, and the Sahara in Vegas. Ava Gardner danced barefoot beside his
piano and Meyer Lansky casually “insisted” he play three weeks at his Reno casino. He
was a celebrated veteran of cocktail chic, jet-setting between stints at Caesar’s Palace, the
Surf Club in Virginia Beach, and the St. Moritz in New York. He’d toured the best rooms
from London to Japan, and played Carnegie Hall, more than once. He’d shared the stage
with the likes Nat King Cole, Cab Calloway, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Artie Shaw,
Louis Prima and Harry James. But he felt cramped creatively. His record label,
RCA/Victor, wasn’t allowing him any room to experiment. “Latin is a pet love,” Fields
admits. “But I’m a melody man foremost and always. Latin melodies aren’t the only ones
available. I like all types of music, jazz, classical, operatic, anything where the nature of
the music is strong with melody. I felt constrained.” Fields broke his contract and became
an independent producer.

In 1959, while playing an extended engagement at the Sherry-Biltmore Hotel in Boston,

Fields went into a studio and recorded a series of songs that blended melodies from his
childhood with the rhythms and tempos of his Latin influences. He was just toying
around but that album, Bagels and Bongos, and the innovations it contained, would end
up being the defining statement of his career.

***

When Isadore Schwartz was born on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1915, the youngest
of four sons and one sister, he already had music in his life. His father was a respected
chorister in the local choir and it was he who first put Isadore on the stage—long before
the name Irving Fields came into his life.

“He used to sing with very famous cantors from Europe,” Fields says of his father.
“Particularly with a cantor named Zadel Rupner who was like the Jewish Bing Crosby of
Europe. And it was my father who got me a spot singing in the choir with some of those
great cantors.” From that, Isadore was given the opportunity to play a part in the Yiddish
Theatre's production of the Galician Wedding. “It was a very big deal,” Fields notes “The
musical ran for two years but I only had the role on the weekends. I was only ten at the
time.”

Seven years later, Isadore had disappeared, leaving the affable Irving Fields in his place.
Fields never denied his roots but he didn’t draw attention to them either. Like many
ambitious American Jews of his day, Fields understood that assimilation was the key. In
1959, even as he was spinning classic Jewish melodies like “Bei Mir Bist Du Shon” and
“Raisins and Almonds” over rumba and paso doble beats, Fields was only partially aware
of the full weight of what he was doing, creatively or as an expression of identity.
Unwitting or not, in being a pioneer of Jewish/Latin fusion, probably the preeminent one
and certainly the one around whom, what Kun calls “the Jewish Latin craze of the 1950s”
was focused, Fields was mostly just giving people what they wanted. Given the nature of
the Miami Beach and New York piano lounge set, made up significantly of well-to-do
Jews keen on Latin music, high balls, and high spirits, Bagels and Bongos fed a willing
niche, one that Fields was not alone in sating. What distinguishes his efforts from those
other pretenders may reside in that ephemeral quality -- feel.

Bagels and Bongos led not only a furor for Jewish-inflected Latin sounds, but launched a
trend in popular music that opened the field to all manner of fusion experiments. Avant-
garde pianist Anthony Coleman has likened Fields’ knack for blending sounds to that of
fusion standard-bearer Ahmad Jamal. He writes, “how could I have found the perfect
soupcon of romantic irony to counterpoise the weight of the mournful Sephardic songs in
my Sephardic Tinge project if wasn't for the revelation of Irving Fields' Bagels and
Bongos?”

Josh Dolgin, , who performs as Socalled, weaving sampled Klezmer, Bulgar, and other
Eastern European influences over hip-hop beats, sees Fields as a kindred spirit. “There's a
tradition I'm following and a tradition he's following,” Dolgin says. “Throughout history,
Jews have always been influencing and being influenced by the culture around them.
Klezmer itself is a mix of Hungarian, Romanian, Greek, Russian, Serbian, Gypsy
influences. On an intrinsic level, Fields is a sampler as well, using the most versatile
technology of his time to preserve and reference old music and remix in a way that was
current and uniquely him. Where I use a groovebox , he uses a piano.”

If initially Bagels and Bongos seems inconsequential and light, then you need only pay
closer attention to hear just how much is going on: the subtlety of how Fields waggles a
finger over a key, the little trill or the insertion of a Latin, Jewish, French, Classical, or
Polynesian element. He coaxes the keyboard like an orchestra, playing the highs like
woodwinds or strings and the lows like horns. “He improvises but he's not like a Bud
Powell. It’s not jazz. He’s influenced by Gershwin but doesn't compose symphonic
masterpieces. He's a lounge pianist,” Dolgin says. And that’s a great part of Fields’
appeal. He knows exactly what he is. His mastery is not one of singular artistic invention,
in the way you would talk about Bob Dylan or John Coltrane, it’s in his uncanny ability
to adapt across styles and to own them. Fields comes from a time when if you wanted to
hear a song you asked a piano player. Before the jukebox, the deejay booth and the i-pod,
it was piano players that rolled out the tunes, just as Fields has been doing for the last 82
years. It’s his technique, his control of the instrument, and his feel that is singular. And
what is his feel? Dolgin answers rhetorically. “An intangible balance of interpretation,
melodic phrasing, rhythmic sense, and beat? The emotional connection between the
music and the musician, the earnestness of his expressive power? The sense of humour
he brings, a knack for tossing laughable jabs into otherwise rapt melodies?” These
stunning little gestures elevate his oeuvre from the forgettable lounge kitsch it could be
mistaken for. And though he may find it difficult to wrap his mind around the “binging
and banging” of rock music and hip hop, his cavalier approach resembles these in spirit.
After all, Fields didn’t have a master plan to meld Latin and Jewish music or to be seen
as some grand innovator. He was just winging it, squirreling around for a fresh gimmick
to hook the audience. He broke moulds as an afterthought. And it’s that purity of intent
that’s winning him fans today, a quality dearly sought and dearly bought, but second
nature to him.

Through the 70s and 80s, Fields continued to secure jobs—he had standing engagements
at the Plaza, played private parties for the likes of Donald Trump and Candice Bergen,
etc—but he never regained the happy glut of the 50s. Fields remained steadfast,
embittered only when he couldn’t play. Even past 70, huckster charm and indomitable
humour kept him going. Still, as the twentieth century crested into the twenty-first, Fields
was in recession. The well had dried up. The hotels divested themselves of their pianos
and the nightclubs were catering to a different scene, rock shows and DJ nights. Then the
unexpected happened.
Out of the blue, a young man called to ask Fields if he would be interested in recording
with him. Fields invited him over on the spot. This proved to be the harbinger of a
zeitgeist. While Josh Dolgin was sitting in Fields’ Central Park South apartment, Kun
was teaming up with like-spirited friends Roger Bennett, publisher of Guilt & Pleasure
magazine, documentary filmmaker Jules Shell, and music industry types David
Katznelson and Courtney Holt to liberate Fields’ 1959 classic from the archives of
Universal Music. “When we first heard Bagels and Bongos it just blew us away,” Bennett
says. “We couldn’t understand why we hadn’t heard it before.” These efforts eventually
evolved into Reboot Stereophonic, a non-profit venture for rescuing and reissuing what
Bennett calls “the lost history of electrifying and challenging music.” In 2005, Bagels
and Bongos served as their inaugural release.

These two boons set off a chain of related events including write-ups in the New York
Times and hip magazines like Flaunt, appearances on Regis & Kelly and The View,
deejay remixes of Fields’ songs, and, not least, his performance at Pop Montreal. “He’s
more popular at 90 than he was at 60,” says Dan Seligman, Pop Montreal’s Creative
Director and the man who put Fields on the bill. “He’s an incredible musician and
creative force. That he decided to express it through cocktail lounges and society hotels
doesn’t diminish that.”

Fields has never been happier. He’s found renewal in a new generation of fans. And the
"Godfather of Schmaltz," as Seligman has affectionately dubbed him, has currency as the
hipster community's truest icon for career achievement and longevity. But what really
keeps Fields’ star firing is the beauty of a melody, and the continued ability to extol it. He
has a new gig five nights a week at the chic eatery Nino’s Tuscany, big shows in San
Francisco and Paris to look forward to, Dolgin is helping to sell copies of his unreleased
home recordings, beginning with Nicht fur die Kinder, a collection of brilliantly hilarious
original songs, and talks have begun for Fields to collaborate on his memoirs, tentatively
titled The Pianos I’ve Known.
For the uninitiated, for those who haven't seen the man perform, or sat at the bar at Nino's
as he tickles infectious medleys from the hammers of his toy-like beige piano, it's hard to
understand what today's pop innovators may glean from him. The characteristics of
anyone interesting are usually tangled up in their intrinsic contradictions. Fields is no
exception. He is the Godfather of Schmaltz but he is also innovator, pioneer, and
virtuoso. He is a champion and extoller of Jewish culture who doesn't see himself as
such. And he is both a shameless self-promoter and the humble vessel of divine melody.
His appeal is strange but weirdness is intrinsic to a hip thing.

The fact that Fields is at odds with the frequently beat-driven melody-light music of
today's driving pop trends is a good part of why the purveyors of those styles love him.
Fields is nothing if not steadfast and, as a figure of career sustainability, his dedication to
his particular vision of musicality is inspiring. So, perhaps the Fields revival isn’t that
hard to understand. And being the hipster “it boy” is just one more good story in a life
spanning 90 years of them.

A few weeks after Pop Montreal, Fields is casually sipping a Stinger and winking at the
diners from behind his piano. Back in New York, in the wood-paneled coziness of Nino’s
Tuscany, the chic Manhattan eatery where he has a gig six nights a week, Fields seems in
his element.

“I have a joke for you,” he says to no one in particular. “Three notes walk into a bar, a C
an E flat and a G. ‘I'm sorry,’ the bartender says. ‘We don't serve minors.’ Fields pauses.
“So the E flat leaves and the C and the G have a fifth between them.”

Laughter rings out across the room and the piano player, grinning like a kid, starts into
the first resplendent bars of “Glow Worm.”