Eden Abhez: The strangest hit songwriter | Hacker News Reader

Eden Abhez: The strangest hit songwriter

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230 pointstintinnabula32 comments

Fascinating. I only knew this song as one of the centrepieces of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!, but this article doesn't even mention that.

Same. I didn’t recognize the name but the instant I read those first two lines I heard the Moulin Rouge version in my head.

It's also a recurring theme in the soundtrack of The Talented Mr. Ripley.

If you want something interesting, listen to Ahbez sing "Nature Boy" and then listen to Cole sing it.

Since Ahbez sings a cappella, he sings "untempered" notes in the correct key while Cole is singing "tempered" ones to match the piano accompaniment--and it changes the feel of the song.

I have no idea why people are downvoting you. Are they assuming “untempered” is an insult (it’s not, it’s called just intonation), or is the parent post wrong?

Don't worry about up/down votes.

I've had very strange things with a large number of downvotes on a comment and then a very large number of upvotes one or two layers downthread.

Presumably there are some bots/brigades that are trying to create a "good history" to try and pretend they are "organic". The bots/brigades don't care about anything more than the first layer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=339UrDjHDio

Interesting, this video mentions a Yiddish song "Shvayg, mayn harts" ("Hush, my heart") that it seems to have been inspired by. And on a video of that song https://youtu.be/uT7GcjBnWaw is this info

> ("Shvayg mayn harts") was in the 1935 Yiddish theater show Papirosn. Years later eden ahbez paid Yablokoff $25,000 out of court to settle a plagiarism complaint. Listen to the chorus and see if you think it was stolen. Some say they were both stolen from Antonin Dvorak’s 1887 “Piano Quintet No. 2” - which may have been stolen from Czechoslovakian folk music.

Here's a Dvorak comparison https://m.facebook.com/MastersonHomeConcerts/videos/dumka-an...

Also noteworthy is the fact that eden ahbez preferred to spell his name as all lowercase.

All of this and more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_Boy including the original poster of this HN item.

Are you sure he's singing untempered?

Sounds more like vernacular singing without precise tuning.

Surprised to see this name at the top of this website. Obscure in the moment perhaps but ultimately legendary. Eden's Island is fantastic exotica, perhaps the most iconic. There's even a documentary in the works.

There’s only one other jazz standard I know of with comparable lyrics:

“Lush Life” by Billy Strayhorn. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lush_Life_(jazz_song)

Listen to Johnny Hartman singing in this recording with John Coltrane: https://youtu.be/sNIn1_RLkmc

I like how these kinds of articles hit front page on HN, quite refreshing

I think this version is my favourite (kurt elling): https://youtu.be/s8WxZfAV3Bc

Saw the photo and assumed it was Norman Greenbaum.

In case anyone else is interested in the "unbaked bread, and unfired pies", here is a recipe book:

https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.4683/page/111/mode/2up

I read an article about Ahbez last year - it went into his early history in (I think) the 1930s around the health food movement, and also about the legal troubles that an attempt to make a documentary about him got into. But now I can't find the article. I seem to recall that his friends had lots of unreleased recordings but weren't allowed to put them out because whoever ended up with the rights to his estate was being unreasonable.

https://pleasekillme.com/nature-boy-eden-ahbez/ looks good but it wasn't that one.

I was surprised by how much he and others anticipated the hippies already in the 1930s. https://lyrakilston.com/2015/03/05/the-remarkable-nature-boy... has a lot of that backround.

I’m not sure either about the legal trouble, but I’d also recommend https://www.iowasource.com/2020/12/02/eden-ahbez/ for some anecdotes.

Wow. That those men were shockingly ahead of their time.

> Frankly, I consider him the first hippie, an advocate for a lifestyle that didn’t even exist when he rose to fame.

Hippie-like movements have always popped up as an escape from authoritarian rule and oppression. Raoul Vaneigem frames this well in his book The Movement of the Free Spirit, about medieval and Renaissance heretical movements: https://monoskop.org/log/?p=7986

"He sees not only resistance to the power of state and church but also the immensely creative invention of new forms of love, sexuality, community, and exchange."

The 1930s in Britain were a great time for Utopian communities. Jonathan Meades did a documentary about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wujXeI6rj6U (review: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/feb/02/wonders...)

Love this. I don't remember hearing the song before, so it was a double treat!

TIL that "Nature Boy" is quoted in the Num Num Cat Tiktok collaboration.

(0:53 to 1:26)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C1FZ4HtzGY

Didn't know him but listening to his biggest hit you grow an appreciation for how the lyrics string together which is not something you'd hear from not musical person like myself.

One of his songs was featured in the first season of Fargo, which has throughout its run distinguished itself with its off-kilter needle drops.

I had no idea he wrote Nature Boy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sMqgetHxww

One thing about this song that the article doesn't really go into is that the chords are just insane, really unusual, and yet it works perfectly - it sounds very different to your average song but it doesn't sound wrong or off-key.

There's much this articles doesn't mention, such as the hugely popular modern representation of the song in the movie Moulin Rouge, and the songs origin in a Yiddish song and even as far back as Dvorak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_Boy

Just to be contrarian: 'Alone Together' and 'You and the Night and the Music' by Dietz and Schwartz, as well as 'Yesterdays' by Jerome Kern, feature similar harmony, just to name a few popular jazz standards. I'm looking at an original sheet of 'Nature Boy' now and see 1 diminished chord, a couple #5's and a couple b9's: not that unusual really, certainly not in jazz.

The chord progression is rather conventional for this style of music, especially for the late 1940s. Listen to some songs by Cole Porter, Duke Ellington or Vernon Duke from the 1930s.

Agreed. For spicier chords also recorded by the Nat King Cole Trio on the same set check out Mona Lisa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIDX18Xl16s

Glad to see Ted Gioia’s work here. He writing over the last year has been helpful in getting new understanding for me.

His posts on technology are sane and levelheaded without being Luddite.

Excellent article. I'd love to watch a documentary on him

I highly recommend Ted Gioias jazz history books. "West Coast Jazz" is fantastic.

His song Full Moon is one of my favorites, it completely transports you to a place.

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