Fran Landesman

Fran Landesman ( born October 21, 1927 in New York City as Frances Deitsch, † July 23, 2011 in London) was a native of the United States, living in England, songwriter, artist and poet.

Life and work

Frances 's father was a tailor and her mother a journalist. Her brother Sam Deitsch founded and led the Washington Square Bar and Grill Bar in San Francisco. She attended private schools, and later the Temple University and the Fashion Institute of Technology to initially work in the Modebracnche. In New York she met the writer Jay Landesman know who published the short-lived magazine Neurotica, and married him on 15 July 1950. They have two sons, Cosmo and Miles Davis Landesman. With her husband- she moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he and his brother Fred opened the night club Crystal Palace this. The company was successful, came up with the big names and offered at the same avant-garde theater productions.

1952, Fran Landesman suggested by the experience in the bar of the Crystal Palace, to write lyrics. Her most famous Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most, inspired by TS Eliot's poem April is the cruelest month ... Composer counts was the pianist at the Crystal Palace, Tommy Wolf. The song soon became a hit by jazz singers such as June Christy, Chris Connor, Ella Fitzgerald, Irene Kral and Betty Carter, and led to further work of Landesman and Wolf. He wrote the melodies for the songs of The Nervous Set, a musical based on a book by Jay Landesman, the short run on Broadway, and Spring, and The Ballad of the Sad Young Men contained. Another Musical, Molly Darling by Jay Landesman and Martin Quigley, was produced for the St. Louis Muny Opera. Fran Landesman wrote the lyrics for A Walk on the Wild Side ( 1956) by Nelson Algren.

In 1960, she began with the singer, pianist and composer Bob Dorough together, the wolf had brought to St. Louis to play the lead role in A Walk on the Wild Side. Your jointly written song Nothing Like You was recorded by Dorough and Miles Davis, included on his album Sorcerer of 1967. Another song, Small Day Tomorrow, was the title of the Dorough album of 2007, which contains twelve songs with texts by Landesman.

1964, the couple moved Landesman to London, where she wrote both lyrics for artists like Pat Smythe, Georgie Fame, Tom Springfield, Richard Rodney Bennett and Dudley Moore continued their collaborations with composers in the United States. So she wrote lyrics for a further musical of her husband, Dearest Dracula (1965 ) for the Dublin Theatre Festival

In the 1970s, Fran Landesman also began to write poetry and publish, which they presented at festivals and on BBC radio. In 1994 she met the British composer Simon Wallace, with whom she worked in her last years. Thus arose songs for various theater shows like There's Something Irresistible in Down ( 1996), which was produced for the Young Vic by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Forbidden Games ( 1997) listed in the Ustinov Theatre Bath, Pleasance Theatre Edinburgh and on the Gdansk Shakespeare Festival, and Queen of the Bohemian Dream ( 2007), produced by the source Theatre in Washington DC. the Decline of the Middle West ( 1995) played in the Supper Club in Manhattan also contained texts of Landesman. In 1996, she cared for protests at the BBC, as they justified their cannabis use in the broadcast Desert Iceland discs.

1999 handed Landesman their archive at the University of Missouri -St. Louis, where it has since located in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection. Circumstantial Productions published in 2006 a new edition of her poems and song lyrics, Small Day Tomorrow, edited by Richard Connolly.

In the last ten years of her life she performed regularly, recited their poems, sang songs, and spoke occasionally about her life and work. In 2003, she appeared in the New Yorker on Joe 's Pub with Jackie Cain and Bob Dorough; In October 2008, she returned to St. Louis back for a solo show at the Gaslight Theatre. Between 2010 and 2011 she had two monthly guest appearances at RADA for Farrago Poetry; every six months, she has performed in the 606 Club in London. In May 2010, presented the South Bank Centre, the show A Night Out with Fran Landesman at the Purcell Room and in April 2011, Leicester Square Theatre An Evening with Fran Landesman as part of the Art of Song Festival. Your last appearance was at RADA July 21, 2011, two days before her death at the age of 83 years.