Melody Man

Montreal, October 3, 2005. It’s the last night, the last show, of a festival that is one of the most ambitious in music today. Pop Montreal has been the launching pad for more than one international career?—?the bands Interpol and Arcade Fire foreshadowed global success with breakout turns at the festival. To mark the finale, festival organizers have abandoned the familiar music halls and clubs for the elegance of the Théâtre Nationale. The three acts on the bill tonight include Gonzales, hip hop’s answer to Keith Jarrett, and Socalled, the poster boy for hip hop–klezmer fusion. But it’s the opening act 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 ninety years old and he looks fit to bury us all.

“Hello, my name is Irving Fields,” he says in a syrupy, radio-friendly voice. “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!”

Fields was always good. And by good, I mean the kind of instantly undeniable talent that opens doors and keeps them open. Born Isadore Schwartz on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1915, as a young boy he sang in choirs under famous cantors like Zeidel Rovner, the Jewish Bing Crosby of Europe, and he was a featured performer in the Yiddish Theater’s production of The Galician Wedding. He began playing piano when he was eight years old, and by the age of ten, Fields had 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 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. First prize was $50 and a week-long showcase at the Roxy in New York.

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 back in New York, as Fields pressed against the bitter cold, a poster 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??’?” He marched over to the cruise-line offices and fast-talked his way into the first of many gigs on the cruise-ship circuit.

Cruise-ship work gave Fields two things that would ultimately define his life: entry into the society of America’s well-to-do and, more importantly, an introduction to Latin music.

Fields’ love of Latin music deepened through the 1930s, coinciding with a United States government campaign to improve relations with Latin America. The Good Neighbor policy wasn’t just a series of political reforms; it was a cultural revolution that reached deep into American popular culture. Hollywood trotted out one pro-Latin flick after another. In 1933, 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 as partners in the film, performing a dance number called “The Carioca” that raised eyebrows for its overt sexuality. The rumba, tango, cha-cha, paso doble, merengue, and mambo all met with similar clamour. Well into the forties, Latin music had the same feisty appeal as, say, Beyoncé performing “Baby Boy.”

“I couldn’t get enough of the melodies and the rhythms. The variety and assortment 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 1930s, ’40s, and even into the ’50s, Latin was the top craze everywhere from the music world through Hollywood,” says Josh Kun, a professor of English at the University of California at Riverside and the 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, a professor at Columbia University, has called ‘mamboids,’ faux Latin albums that came out by the dozen. It was very prevalent. It was not a marginal thing at all.”

Fields, who anticipated the wave in the 1930s and whose instinct for the Latin sound put him in a different league than most white emulators, was able to ride this craze through its early stages into a career as one of lounge culture’s reigning monarchs. Xavier Cugat, the 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 with a twinkle. “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.’?” Cugat and later Tito 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.”