Like his songs, he was a classic

Cy Coleman is not easily encapsulated, and that would please him. Those of us who knew him appreciated his depth, wisdom, humor, style and contradictorily chameleon qualities that also happened to embody his music. He never stopped moving, surprising, living and sharing who and what he was. When he entered a room, he filled it up.

At age 75, when most composers of his generation were played out, Cy was at the top of his game. Everybody was still excited to hear the next thing he was writing. He was contemporary.

Cy had four distinct careers in the music world, excelling in each of them, and each seamlessly leading to the next.

He began his life in 1929 as Seymour Kaufman and started playing the piano at age 4 on an old abandoned upright that his father finally hammered shut to keep his kid from driving him crazy with his relentless pounding. By 9, Cy had played Carnegie Hall and was a bona fide child prodigy, later bragging that he had “even played the Brahms First Piano Concerto, and you know how difficult that is.”

It appeared that Cy had a healthy classical career ahead of him, and that was good because, as he recalled, “I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth and had to earn a living.” However, by the time he graduated from the High School of Music and the Arts, he had decided to switch to popular music and jazz piano, thereby ending his first potential career and embarking on the next, where he would truly find his muse.

“He was a kid, that’s when I met him,” says Barbara Carroll, Cy’s close friend and still swinging jazz piano contemporary. “We played all the great jazz clubs like the Embers, the Composer and the Arpeggio. He was the best. Life had meaning.”

Indeed, Cy quickly established himself as an explosive musical force around New York with his hard-driving and astounding piano style. This was it; he had found what he was searching for, and it affected everything that was to come later. The “it” was jazz, and when he began writing songs, he expressed the melodic fluidity of his classical background, combined with the modern sounds and rhythms of the smoky rooms that spawned an intense expression of his soulful inner life.

Hearing Cy play the piano was one of the great joys of all who knew him. His unfettered virtuosity and spontaneous invention were always in great supply, and you always hoped he’d sit down at a party and play.

Years ago at an East Hampton party when I was just starting out, I played a number of songs in his presence and in spite of my nervousness managed to acquit myself adequately. I paid tribute to him and he seemed pleased. Thank goodness he followed me at the keyboard, so I wouldn’t have to impossibly follow him! He then feigned irritation at my talent and growled “rotten kid!,” prompting a great laugh from the assemblage. For fun, I then tried to stump him with song titles and couldn’t do it; instead, he devilishly trumped my ace, and stumped me in return. He exuded confidence and security. At the keys, he was on top of the world, and we were privileged to share in it.

Cy’s third career began germinating during his nightclub days, and songs began to pour forth. Few were then able to predict that his writing would one day eclipse his performing. But his songs were soon in demand on the club circuit. Mabel Mercer sang practically everything he wrote, and his tunes soon were being recorded by the likes of Sammy Davis Jr. and Patti Page.

His first major collaborator was Joe McCarthy, a talented but troubled alcoholic with whom he eventually had to cease writing, but not before they had created such classics as “Why Try to Change Me Now?” and “I’m Gonna Laugh You Right Out of My Life.” Written from a jazz perspective, these songs were infused with an au courant feeling that is unique and unmistakably Coleman, and it was his performances and demonstration discs of his compositions that spurred many singers to perform them. Frank Sinatra literally copied Cy’s demo disc of “Witchcraft,” and Tony Bennett lost no time in recording “The Best Is Yet to Come,” waxing it one day after hearing Coleman demonstrate it for him.

His final career began in 1960, and it is perhaps his most enduring legacy because he was able to take a lifetime of show business experience and channel it into writing Broadway musicals. He said “it was like walking right into familiar territory,” and other than Duke Ellington, he was the only Broadway composer to write jazz-influenced scores for modern musical theater, and was hugely successful doing it.

Writing -- and battling with -- the great wordsmith Carolyn Leigh, they seamlessly made the transition from Tin Pan Alley to the Great White Way with “Wildcat” and “Little Me.” “We were like Gilbert and Sullivan and fought endlessly, so after ‘Little Me,’ we decided to split up,” he recalled recently. What followed was a collaboration with the legendary Dorothy Fields that yielded his most enduring hit, “Sweet Charity,” with its classic standards “Big Spender” and “If My Friends Could See Me Now.”

Cy not only prospered through the most difficult financial decades for American musical theater, but he also freshened the sound of Broadway by incorporating rock and pop rhythms into his music. In the process, he captured a new audience.

His last years of theater composition produced a dizzying variety of synthesized musical styles -- from the operetta sound of “On the Twentieth Century” to the cowboy sound of “The Will Rogers Follies.” In commenting on his varietal nature, he said simply, “I guess I have a big palette.” “City of Angels” returned him to his classic jazz roots, and the more recent “Like Jazz” (2002) was a joyful revisiting of the infinite varieties of the jazz scene, producing with Marilyn and Alan Bergman my favorite score of his career. It finally gave him the opportunity to express, in an unfettered manner, his true love for his native medium without apology or limitation.

It is sadly and sweetly ironic that his life ended so shortly after he had returned to his first love of performing, having just finished an engagement featuring the Cy Coleman Trio at my New York nightclub, Feinstein’s at the Regency. It was a true thrill to feature him once again in his element, and in speaking of it he said, “I’m like a hungry man when I get to the keyboard, it’s just like a feast.”

We the audience knew we were experiencing something very special and rare, but little did we know how truly special the memory of those nights would soon be. Rest well Cy, and keep swinging.

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Singer and pianist Michael Feinstein is one of the premiere interpreters of American popular song.