Susan Artemis plays "One For My Baby: The Harold Arlen Songbook"
Schedule
Thu Mar 20 2025 at 06:00 pm to 08:30 pm
UTC-07:00Location
The Century Room | Tucson, AZ
($15-$25 tickets | 6:30pm show) Pianist Susan Artemis has become a mainstay of the Tucson jazz scene and has performed at the Century Room many times, both as a leader and a sideman. She returns with her band to reprise her show, "One For My Baby: The Harold Arlen Songbook."Harold Arlen was an American composer, arranger, pianist, and vocalist who contributed such popular songs as “Over the Rainbow,” “Blues in the Night,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “I Love a Parade,” “Stormy Weather” and over 500 more songs to Hollywood movies and Broadway musicals. Arlen was most prolific from 1929 through the 1950s.
Born in 1905, Arlen was the son of a Jewish cantor and pianist and showed exceptional musical talent in childhood. He left school as a teenager to form a band, and, until he was 24, he made a living chiefly as a performer and arranger. Thereafter he concentrated on composition, beginning a successful collaboration with the lyricist Ted Koehler in 1929 with the song “Get Happy.” From the late 1920s until the mid-1930s Arlen and Koehler wrote a number of songs, including “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” and “I’ve Got the World on a String,” that were featured in shows at Harlem’s Cotton Club. Arlen’s work for the Broadway stage included scores for the musicals You Said It (1931); Life Begins at 8:40 (1934); Hooray for What? (1937); Bloomer Girl (1944); St. Louis Woman (1946) and Saratoga (1959), both with lyrics by Johnny Mercer; and House of Flowers (1954), with lyrics by Truman Capote.
For Hollywood films, Arlen wrote, among other songs, “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “Let’s Fall in Love,” Groucho Marx’s theme song “Lydia the Tatoo’d Lady,” and “That Old Black Magic.” “Over the Rainbow” (lyrics by E.Y. Harburg), introduced by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and used thereafter as her theme, won him a 1939 Academy Award. Arlen also worked with Ira Gershwin on music for the film The Country Girl (1954), starring Bing Crosby, and he recorded as a vocalist with Leo Reisman and Cole Porter.
