Porter, I Love Paris

Our 7-year-old granddaughter, Patti, loves Paris. The walls of her room are covered with images of the city. I’m not sure what prompted this. She has visited Germany twice but never set foot in France. Visiting Paris is her dream and she’s planning to take all of her friends with her.

Cole Porter apparently shared that affinity. His grandfather sent him on a tour of France after he graduated from high school in 1909 as valedictorian. He then entered Harvard to study law but later switched to music. (Another for my growing list of composers who moved from law to music.) In 1917, as America entered World War I, Porter moved to Paris and taught gunnery at the French Officer’s School in Fontainebleau. That’s quite a leap from music and law to gunnery, but you have to admire any musician who can wield artillery.

Porter inherited significant wealth from his grandfather and lived quite well in his adopted city. He retained a residence there until war was again imminent in 1939. As his career progressed, however, he lived primarily in Hollywood.

His first Broadway success came in 1928 with the musical Paris. In 1929, he wrote the film score for The Battle of Paris, and the same year wrote the Broadway musical Fifty Million Frenchmen. But the song I Love Paris was not in that musical. It was written instead for the 1953 musical Can-Can.

The Avalon Jazz Band, featured here once before, does a nice job of recreating the unaffected acoustic style appropriate to this music.