December 16 is Alice Parker’s centenary.
When I think about the impact Alice had in her 7 decades of professional music-making, I think the word that comes first to mind is true.
What makes her arrangements and compositions so timeless is that they feel true when you sing them. She chose impeccable melodies, of course, but she also wrote harmony lines that felt true. She had hard-won, no-nonsense insight about what made a musical line true, and she filled her writing with them.
That makes her works singable, and more importantly fun to sing.
Other composers have mastered harmonic sophistication, rhythmic complexity, innovative form.
No one writes lines truer than Alice.
Happy 100th Birthday, Alice. Thanks for all the music.