American music has been moving so fast for the past hundred years or so that it has hardly had a moment to look back. Sure, ragtime was great -- but listen to this. Big bands? Elvis! Hard rock? Soft rock. Acid rock. Get with it. Even a Mozart would be only as good as his latest hit in such a hip-hop marketplace as this.
Yet, either because it's the '90s now and rearview time, or because the stuff is too good to ignore any longer, many Americans have been looking back in spite of themselves at the incredible trove of Broadway show tunes and pop melodies composed between roughly 1920 and 1950 and finding it not only good but great, even classical, in a loose-jointed, informal American sense of the word.
And if it's so good, why not play it again? When Barry Manilow helped open the new Paramount theater -- a symbolic act in itself -- back in September with a volley of his favorite Broadway standards, he was the latest of several Pop stars to declare for the old-time religion: Maureen McGovern, Linda Ronstadt and Carly Simon have all issued neoconservative albums, to blend right in with your Bennetts and Clooneys and Sinatras, while several talented young singers, such as Andrea Marcovicci, Mary Cleere Haran and Harry Connick Jr., actually seem to have been born that way.
So if everybody's singing it, is anybody still writing it? No form of music can be considered fully resurrected so long as people suppose it was all written by Cole Porter, with maybe a little help from George Gershwin. It has to start ringing bells with today's geniuses as well -- and here the spotlight narrows sharply to one put-upon hero, the great Cy Coleman, who, with hits like Sweet Charity and Barnum, already has the honor of the American musical riding on his other shoulder. His classic songs, such as Hey, Look Me Over, If My Friends Could See Me Now, Witchcraft and Big Spender, are near the top of the postwar musical charts.
Not that Coleman is the last American to write good theater songs -- not while Charles Strouse, Jerry Herman and Kander and Ebb are still banging them out. He just happens to be the latest American to have had two first-run hits playing on Broadway at the same time (City of Angels and The Will Rogers Follies) since the glory days of Rodgers and Hammerstein, when America ruled the boards, and probably the last active one (unless Burton Lane and Jule Styne have something up their sleeves) to write the classic American jazz song that the young singers are just now rediscovering.
A visitor to Coleman's office on Manhattan's West 54th Street may feel as if he's stumbled upon the remains of Tin Pan Alley: over there is the old upright piano on which Cy has scored most of his songs, and next to it the thousand- year-old desk, and everywhere theater posters and photographs ("He just keeps putting them up till the wall is full," says his secretary). And through the window pipe the New York City street noises that have inspired the American song ever since Irving Berlin first picked them up in the 1900s on the Lower East Side.