Fran Landesman

Fran Landesman, born Frances Deitsch on October 21, 1927, in New York City, was an American lyricist, poet, and Broadway book writer who died on July 23, 2011, at the age of 83. Her mother worked as a journalist and her father was a dress manufacturer, and Landesman attended private schools before pursuing higher education at Temple University in Philadelphia and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, where she initially entered the fashion industry.

While living in New York, she met writer and Neurotica magazine publisher Jay Landesman, whom she married on July 15, 1950. The couple relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, where Jay and his brother Fred Landesman established the Crystal Palace nightclub, a venue that drew prominent performers and staged avant-garde theatre. Observing musicians and patrons at the Crystal Palace bar inspired Landesman to begin writing song lyrics in 1952. The club's pianist Tommy Wolf set her words to music, and their collaboration produced one of her most recognized songs, "Spring Can Really Hang You up the Most," which drew on T. S. Eliot's line "April is the cruelest month."

The Landesman-Wolf partnership extended to the Broadway musical The Nervous Set, which featured a book by Jay Landesman and lyrics by Fran Landesman. The show had a brief Broadway run and included the songs "Spring" and "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men." In 1960, Landesman began collaborating with singer, pianist, and composer Bob Dorough, who had been brought to St. Louis by Tommy Wolf to perform in a proposed musical adaptation of Nelson Algren's 1956 novel A Walk on the Wild Side, for which Landesman wrote the lyrics. Among the songs she and Dorough created together, "Nothing Like You" was recorded by Miles Davis and appeared on his 1967 album Sorcerer, and "Small Day Tomorrow" served as the title of Dorough's 2007 CD, which collected twelve songs with Landesman lyrics. One of those songs, "The Winds of Heaven," had originally been recorded in 1968 by Jackie and Roy and was later covered by The 5th Dimension.

In 1964, the Landesmans moved to London, where Fran Landesman wrote lyrics for musicians including Pat Smythe, Georgie Fame, Tom Springfield, Richard Rodney Bennett, and Dudley Moore, with a particular emphasis on jazz. She also continued working with American composers, among them John Simon and Roy Kral. In 1965, she contributed lyrics to Joyce Adcock's musical Dearest Dracula, produced at the Dublin Theatre Festival.

Landesman began a new creative partnership in 1994 with British composer Simon Wallace, and the two went on to write approximately 300 songs together. Theatre productions built around Landesman-Wallace material included There's Something Irresistible in Down, produced at the Young Vic in 1996 by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company; Forbidden Games, performed in 1997 at the Ustinov Theatre in Bath, the Pleasance Theatre in Edinburgh, and the Gdansk Shakespeare Festival; and Queen of the Bohemian Dream, produced at the Source Theatre in Washington, D.C. in 2007. The Decline of the Middle West, performed at The Supper Club in Manhattan in 1995, also featured her lyrics. Several recording artists released collections of Landesman-Wallace songs, including Nicki Leighton-Thomas in 1997, jazz singer Sarah Moule beginning in 2002, and Boston-based singer Sheplay Metcalf in 2010. In 2012, jazz singer, composer, and music director Ian Shaw released A Ghost In Every Bar (The Lyrics of Fran Landesman), a tribute album accompanied by Simon Wallace that included four previously unreleased songs.

From the 1970s onward, Landesman also wrote and published poetry, becoming particularly well known for that work in the United Kingdom, where she performed at festivals and on BBC Radio. In 1996, she appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs and requested cannabis seeds as her luxury item, prompting a number of complaints to the BBC. In the final decade of her life she performed more regularly, appearing in 2003 at Joe's Pub in New York with Jackie Cain and Bob Dorough, and returning to St. Louis in October 2008 for a one-woman show at the Gaslight Theatre. In May 2010, the South Bank Centre presented A Night Out with Fran Landesman at the Purcell Room, and in April 2011 the Leicester Square Theatre presented An Evening with Fran Landesman as part of the Art of Song Festival. Her final public appearance took place at RADA on July 21, 2011, two days before her death.

Landesman and her husband Jay had two sons: Cosmo, who became a journalist, and Miles Davis Landesman, who became a musician and performance artist. Their nephew Rocco Landesman became a producer.