By The Landlord
“Art is a leap into the dark.” – Pablo Picasso
“A wounded deer leaps the highest.” – Emily Dickinson
“We are the hurdles we leap to be ourselves.” – Michael McClure
“This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” – Neil Armstrong
“With my little band, I did everything they did with a big band. I made the blues jump.” – Louis Jordan
“I own a '66 Jaguar. That's the guitar I polish, and baby - I refuse to let anyone touch it when I jump into the crowd.” – Kurt Cobain
“Jazz is a fighter. The word 'jazz' means to me, 'I dare you. Let's jump into the unknown!’” – Wayne Shorter
“When you work with Ray Charles, Billy Eckstine and Frank Sinatra, and you tell them to jump without a net, you better know what you're talking about.” – Quincy Jones
“Look twice before you leap.” – Charlotte Brontë
“The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.” – W. H. Auden
“Young people are like mad rabbits: they hop over the fences of good advice. But this kind of reasoning is not going to help me choose a husband.” – Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice
It’s a rare event, so I thought, like slightly early musical March hares, let’s just take the leap. The last time this coincidence occurred was in 1996, the next won’t be until 2052, then 2080, so is very likely to be a one-off. Only 13 times in a 400-year period would a theoretical Song Bar Thursday topic launch day occur on the 29th February.
That’s all thanks to Julius Caesar, who by edict in 45 BC reformed the Roman calendar with a solar cycle update, adding an extra day every four years in the intercalary or bissextile. So every year (named, no coincidence as the “Julian”) was estimated to last 365.25 days, hence the extra, though that’s not precise, so it would need a little adjustment after a few centuries.
So what’s special about 29th February? If you were born this day, being a leaper or leapling, you might feel a little bit out of sync on your birthday, three out of four times celebrated a day before, or legally later. It happened to, among others, three particularly lively musical minds – Italian composer Gioachino Rossini in 1792, jazz saxophonist Jimmy Dorsey in 1904, and the prolific American poet and rapper Saul Williams in 1972. Have any friends born on this day? I do, and we’re celebrating tonight.
So this week, to put a spring in our step, we’re looking at songs about jumps, leaps, bounds, hurdles, vaults, skips of all kinds, literal and metaphorical. Ideally not just a random occurrence of a related words, but where the leap in question is central to to the song's theme.
The topic leaps into many contexts, mental, physical or philosophical, bravely into the unknown, into the cold waters of life or even death. It’s jumping for joy or in fear, off cliffs, or up in the air, it’s the stuff of sport, imagination, of great scientific steps and exploration, of frogs and fleas and flying squirrels, impala and leopards, flying fish, dolphins and upstream salmon.
Look before you leap?
And there are particular cultural traditions attached to this date, not least that of the tradition of women proposing to men. That idea seems somewhat defunct in the modern day where equality is the goal, but is still practised. Traditionally it’s an Irish one, thought to emanate from Saint Patrick or Brigid of Kildare in 5th century, but that’s unlikely. It’s possible that a 1288 law by Queen Margaret of Scotland (so very helpfully then just age five and living in Norway) required that fines be levied if a woman’s marriage proposal was refused by the man - compensation was deemed to be a pair of leather gloves, a single rose, £1, and a kiss. Seems like the man is getting a good deal there.
According to the a play from a unknown authored play from turn of the 17th century, The Maydes Metamorphosis, “this is leape year/women wear breeches.” But at a later date, a scarlet petticoat was seen as “fair warning, if you will,” according one source. Art, including postcards put the tradition in a bit of an iffy light as far as women are concerned.
A 1908 postcard anticipates a flurry of captivating proposals
In Finland, apparently the tradition is that if a man refuses a woman's proposal on leap day, he should buy her the fabrics for a skirt. Not very practical though in a colder climate, is it? And even in warmer place, in Greece in fact, the entire idea is deemed to be unlucky anyway.
Hollywood, possibly nicking the idea from a Bollywood film, picked up on the tradition with a perhaps not amazing 2010 movie titled Leap Year, in which an American played by Amy Adams, who has certainly been in several better roles, went into the full Irish stereotype mode in an ‘hilarious romcom’ in which she attempts to fly to Dublin to propose to her neglectful boyfriend out there on business, but has a series of mishaps and adventures with an Irish fellow supposed to be helping her to her destination. Cue love triangle cliche alert!
All this seems ripe for parody. So meanwhile in France, since 1980, a satirical newspaper titled La Bougie du Sapeur comes out only on leap year, on 29 February, making it one of the easiest, laziest publishing job around. Sounds good to me.
But let’s jump in further, particularly when it comes to lyrical aspect, with love surely a big theme. The toponym, a geographical term, a prime one being Lover’s Leap, applies to a popular name for high up cliffs and other places in many parts of the word from Alabama and Arkansas, Canada to Chile, Ireland, Jamaica to Sri Lanka to West Virginia. Here’s a couple of well known views:
Natural high? Diarmuid and Gráinne's Rock / Lovers's Leap, Loop Head, Clare, Ireland
A bridge too far? View of the New River Gorge from Lovers' Leap at Hawk's Nest State Park, Ansted, West Virginia
Love and death seem intertwined when it comes to leaping. In Shakespeare, there’s leaping going on all over the place, so that’s only going to be the foundation of further jumps in song lyrics. We’re already heard from Portia facing dilemmas and difficulties in The Tempest, who adds and repeats, continuing the rabbity metaphor: “Such a hare is madness the youth—to skip o'er the meshes of good counsel the cripple. But this reasoning is not in the fashion to choose me a husband.”
From the other perspective Henry V uses another vaulting horse-frog metaphor for love:
“If I could win a lady at leapfrog, or by vaulting into my saddle with my armour on my back, under the correction of bragging be it spoken, I should quickly leap into a wife. Or if I might buffet for my love, or bound my horse for her favours, I could lay on like a butcher and sit like a jackanapes, never off.”
In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo leaps over an orchard wall to see his beloved, while Juliet, wanting to escape a family-arranged match, declares: “O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris. / From off the battlements of any tower.” Another lover’s leap.
But back to horses, Macbeth’s love is less for his Lady wife, more of his ambition to be king, but begins to realise that the folly of his ways is like falling off a horse. “To prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself and falls on th'other—”
But from horse spurs to Hotspur, in Henry IV Part 1, here’s Henry Percy aka Hotspur, declaring his more noble, youthful ambitions with metaphor that spans from the moon to the murky depths of the ocean:
“By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap
To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honour by the locks.”
But jumping around to our Song Bar jukebox there’s a variety of guests wanting to add their own leaps of the imagination on this theme. Where else in the world might you find such a context-rich but oddly mixed crew as this?
“Musically, I always allow myself to jump off of cliffs. At least that's what it feels like to me. Whether that's what it actually sounds like might depend on what the listener brings to the songs,” says Tori Amos, thinking with our piano and adding to the Lover’s Leap theme.
Tori certainly paints musical and lyrical pictures. Talking of which, here’s another sort of artist: “Leap, and the net will appear,” declares Julia Margaret Cameron, pioneering 19th-century photographer, particularly known for her portraits.
Meanwhile leaning over the bar, enjoying a whisky to two, here’s Britain’s crisis-handling, big risk-taking prime minister during the First World War, David Lloyd George, who declares, when it comes to big decisions: “You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.”
Stuntman Evel Knievel would probably agree with him, although leaping across different contexts and continents. “I’m a lucky, lucky person… All my life people have been waiting around to watch me die.” That may have been for several reasons, Evel.
Easy rider? Evel Knievel
“Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time,” adds anthropologist Margaret Mead, from a higher plane.
Now here’s another writerly perspective. “The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens,” adds Gustave Flaubert, itching to add a nice reference to those record breaking insects who can jump 50 times their own body length.
“Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall,” chips in the novelist Ray Bradbury, with one that could also make that metaphor fly.
But from the literary and metaphorical, we’ve also got some literal jumping, including great athletes such as the Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci, who recommends taking small leaps not big ones when it comes to competitive success: “You can't jump from little things to big things. It just takes time and patience.”
Patience, and hard work, is certainly required in the tough competitive world of basketball. One of the great documentaries on this is 1994’s Hoop Dreams, following the fates of young hopeful William Gates and Arthur Agee, in Chicago.
High hopes: Hoop Dreams, 1994
“Well, guys, I don't want to jump through hoops for people,” chips in Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx, completely missing the point.
But who dares wins? Not necessarily in the conventional sense, but here’s calamitously entertaining, acclaimed daredevil British ski-jumper Eddie The Eagle known perhaps more for his courage than air-gliding skills: “Ski jumping is just 10 per cent physical, 90 per cent mental. Some people can't do that. It's not just to do with the fear at the top. It takes a lot of guts to go off the top, but it takes 100 times more courage to jump off the end.”
“When I started competing, I was so broke that I had to tie my helmet with a piece of string. On one jump, the string snapped, and my helmet carried on farther than I did. I may have been the first ski jumper ever beaten by his gear.”
Leap into the unknown: Eddie The Eagle
What a character. Jump they say, and Henry Miller agrees: “All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.”
So then what leaps out of the dark depths of musical imagination on this rare 29th February Thursday? Judging not only for length, but also and style and artist impression, is the highly perceptive pejepeine! Place your songs in comments below for deadline on Monday 11pm UK time. Please have a look and listen before you leap …
New to comment? It is quick and easy. You just need to login to Disqus once. All is explained in About/FAQs ...
Fancy a turn behind the pumps at The Song Bar? Care to choose a playlist from songs nominated and write something about it? Then feel free to contact The Song Bar here, or try the usual email address. Also please follow us social media: Song Bar Twitter, Song Bar Facebook. Song Bar YouTube, and Song Bar Instagram. Please subscribe, follow and share.
Song Bar is non-profit and is simply about sharing great music. We don’t do clickbait or advertisements. Please make any donation to help keep the Bar running: