Eden Ahbez

Eden Ahbez (actually: Alexander Aberle; born April 15, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York, † March 4, 1995 in Los Angeles ) was an American composer.

Life

Ahbez was the composer of one of the most unusual so-called "one- hit wonders " of American popular music in the mid-20th century. He is best known today through his song Nature Boy, the jazz pianist and singer Nat King Cole recorded in 1947. With the interpretation of this song Coles took worldwide success as a singer in the border area between jazz and pop its beginning.

One Jewish family from Brooklyn entstammend, claimed Ahbez, to have grown up in an orphanage and to have eight times crosses the age of 35 years, the U.S. on foot. His " alternative" life was far more unconventional than that of most beatniks and hipsters its time and can best be described with a term developed later than that of a dropout. With his wife Anna Jacobson he lived without a permanent shelter; the couple camped mostly in Griffith Park in downtown Los Angeles or below the first "L" of Hollywood Signed Ahbez took claim for themselves, they can manage a week as a vegetarian with a sum of three dollars, he stopped at street corners lectures on oriental mysticism and dabbled as a poet of Beat poetry and as a musician. He wanted to know written entirely in lower case, to which he gave as a reason, capital letters should be " the Divine " Subject to its name; from friends and relatives, he called himself ahbe.

Gunther Schuller describes his appearance as that of a " long-bearded, barefoot, Christ-like hermits " ("a long- bearded, barefoot, Christ- like hermit "). With a dirty, rolled-up piece of paper that contained his sketches to Nature Boy to Ahbez have turned to Nat King Cole's manager Mort Ruby and insisted that Cole look at the song. Cole saw clearly the similarity of Ahbez ' composition with the Yiddish song Hush my Hertz, but what he did was located because he was interested in his repertoire add a Yiddish or Yiddish sounding piece.

The resounding success of Coles recording also gave Ahbez some attention in the mass media. On questioning, he stated that the portrayed in the lyrics very strange enchanted boy was his friend Robert " Gypsy Boots" Bootzin, as Ahbez himself a former hippie and pioneer of yoga and health food in the U.S..

Become aware by the surprise success of Nature Boy, involved the rights holders of Hush my Hertz both Ahbez and Cole in lengthy legal battles that were eventually settled in an out of court settlement. Only when Nat King Cole's widow after her husband's death in 1965 their share of the rights to Ahbez over appropriated, this had significant income from his only hit.

Mid-1950s Ahbez occasionally performed as a musician, composer and singer of Jazz ( with Herb Jeffries ) and early rock and roll in appearance. In 1960 appeared an LP under his own name, entitled Eden's Iceland, whose idiosyncratic mix of Beat poetry was felt with exotic sounds of contemporaries usually as " bizarre ". For Nat King Cole, he wrote another title, Land Of Love, which could build on the success of Nature Boy in any way. Moreover led Ahbez, now also has a son, his ascetic lifestyle without significant changes on.

Some photographs that Brian Wilson show Ahbez in the studio, are sometimes cited to support the thesis that the Beach Boys were influenced in their work on the project album Pet Sounds (1966 ) much of Ahbez ' ' exotic ' conception of music. Another recording under his own name, Echoes From Nature Boy, linked stylistically to at Ahbez ' first LP, but was only published posthumously.

Eden Ahbez died in 1995 as the result of a traffic accident. Nature Boy is now an integral part of the jazz standard repertoire and was seen by many major artists ( including such diverse figures such as John Coltrane, Frank Sinatra, George Benson, Céline Dion and Kurt Elling ) played and sung.