"Tea for Two" is a song from the 1925 musical “No, No, Nanette” composed by Vincent Youmans with lyrics by Irving Caesar.
"Tea for Two" is a song from the 1925 musical “No, No, Nanette” composed by Vincent Youmans with lyrics by Irving Caesar. It is a duet sung by Nanette and Tom in Act II as they imagine their future. It became a jazz standard and was recorded by numerous bands and instrumentalists. Jazz virtuoso Art Tatum regularly performed the work and recorded it in 1939. In October 1927, the conductor Nikolai Malko challenged Dmitri Shostakovich to do an arrangement of this piece in 45 minutes. His"Tea for Two" arrangement, Opus 16, was first performed in November1928. It was incorporated into Tahiti Trot from his ballet “The Golden Age”. Another famous interpretation of the song is Tommy Dorsey's cha-cha-cha version, which made the top ten in 1958, and was re-popularized in 2005 by adverts for McVitie's biscuits.
Vincent Millie Youmans (1898–1946) was an American composer and producer. A leading Broadway composer of his day, Youmans collaborated with virtually all the greatest lyricists on Broadway: Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II, Irving Caesar, Buddy De Sylva and Gus Kahn.Youmans' early songs are remarkable for their economy of melodic material: two, three or four note phrases are constantly repeated and varied by subtle harmonic or rhythmic changes. In later years, influenced mainly by Jerome Kern, he turned to longer free-flowing melodic lines. Born in New York City into a prosperous family of hat makers, his early ambition was to become an engineer and he attended Yale University for a short time. He dropped out to become a runner for a Wall Street brokerage firm but was soon drafted into the US Navy during World War I, although he saw no combat, while stationed in Illinois, he took an interest in the theatre and began producing troop shows for the Navy.After the war, Youmans was a Tin Pan Alley song-plugger and rehearsal pianist.In 1927, Youmans began producing his own Broadway shows and began publishing his own songs. In 1933, Youmans wrote the songs for “Flying Down to Rio”, the first film to feature Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as a featured dancing pair. The film was a tremendous hit. After a professional career of only 13 years, Youmans was forced into retirement in 1934 after contracting tuberculosis. He spent the remainder of his life battling the disease.
