By Stuart Mitchner

Someone should write a blues for the lonely offline souls suddenly bereft of all access, thwarted by codes, passwords, various unknowns. One minute you have the lyrics to Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” at your fingertips, next thing you know all the song’s “very gay places, those come what may places” have been denied you, and if you can’t get on “the wheel of life,” how can you get “the feel of life” when the lines are down? If you want to bounce some ideas off a friend in the U.K. at 3 in the morning — he’s not there. If you want to find when “Lush Life” was first recorded and by whom, you can’t. Above all, if you want to get your train of thought moving toward the subject of Duke Ellington, whose birthday is today, and Billy Strayhorn, whose centenary is 2015, the wheels are locked, you’re grounded, shut down, the column grinds to a halt — until the light-bulb of a simple truth goes on in some cobwebbed corner of the brain and a little voice says, “Try unplugging it, stupid.” And so you do, and when you plug it back in, your train is moving and the world is yours again.

Sinatra Gave Up

Back online you can choose to enjoy any one of a dozen renditions of “Lush Life.” If you want someone here and now, like Lady Gaga, she’s yours, instantly, or you can have Linda Ronstadt or Nat King Cole and his daughter Natalie or maybe you prefer Billy Eckstein or John Coltrane with or without Johnny Hartman, or, at last, Strayhorn’s own naked voicing of a composition that has been said to contain “the entire jazz project.”

Songfacts.com says that while there are over 500 covers of “Lush Life,” there’s nothing from the man born to sing it, Frank Sinatra. more