Dave Frishberg, writer of songs sardonic, nostalgic

His best-known tune: “I’m Just a Bill” for “Schoolhouse Rock!”

Dave Frishberg, a jazz songwriter whose sardonic wit as a lyricist and melodic cleverness as a composer placed him in the top echelon of his craft, died Wednesday in Portland, Ore. He was 88.

His wife, April Magnusson, confirmed his death.

Frishberg, who also played piano and sang, was an anomaly, if not an anachronism, in American popular music: an accomplished, unregenerate jazz pianist who managed to outrun the eras of rock, soul, disco, punk and hip-hop by writing hyperliterate songs that harked back to Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer, by way of Stephen Sondheim.

His songwriting wit was for grown-ups, yet he reached his widest audience with sharpshooting ditties for kids as a regular musical contributor to ABC’S long-running Saturday morning television show “Schoolhouse Rock!”

Merely being aware of Frishberg and his songs conveyed an in-the-know sophistication. He poked fun at this self-congratulatory hipness in his lyrics for “I’m Hip,” a classic of clueless with-it-ness that he wrote to a melody by his fellow jazz songwriter Bob Dorough:

See, I’m hip. I’m no square.

I’m alert, I’m awake, I’m aware.

I am always on the scene.

Making the rounds, digging the sounds.

I read People magazine ’Cuz I’m hip.

Frishberg’s original lyric for “I’m Hip,” written in 1966, was “I read Playboy magazine,” but he later changed it.

People magazine never did get around to profiling him (although it did briefly review one of his albums in the 1980s). But his niche in the niche-songwriting world of the cabaret smart set (when such a breed still existed) was lofty. Superb saloon singers came to be identified with the Frishberg tunes they sang. One of those singers was Blossom Dearie, whose rendition of his “Peel Me a Grape” was, in Frishberg’s view, definitive.

Still, no one quite sang a Frishberg song like Frishberg, with his thin, reedy voice and compellingly constricted vocal range. Frishberg’s performance of his acerbic paean to “My Attorney Bernie” was unsurpassed, particularly his laconic crooning of the song’s refrain:

Bernie tells me what to do Bernie lays it on the line Bernie says we sue, we sue Bernie says we sign, we sign

Frishberg’s songwriting gift extended well beyond the satirical jab. He composed some beautiful ballads, and he was an elegant nostalgist who wrote longingly (although also knowingly) about the mists of time and loss. There was the bittersweet Frishberg of

“Do You Miss New York?,” the aching Frishberg of “Sweet Kentucky Ham” and the ingeniously eloquent Frishberg of “Van Lingle Mungo,” a touching wisp of a ballad constructed solely from the strung-together names of long-ago major league baseball players.

David Lee Frishberg was born March 23, 1933, in St. Paul, Minn., the youngest of three sons of Harry and Sarah (Cohen) Frishberg. His father, who owned a clothing store, was an émigré from Poland; his mother was a native-born Minnesotan.

He began sketching athletes from news photos when he was 7 and hoped to become a sports illustrator, but he also listened closely to music growing up and could sing the entire score of “The Mikado” and other Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. His brother Mort, a selftaught blues piano player, soon steered him toward jazz and blues records, and to the keyboard, where the teenage Frishberg replicated by ear the boogie-woogie styles of Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis before discovering the modernist pianism of bebop.

“Jazz musicians were hip,” Frishberg wrote in his memoir, “My Dear Departed Past” (2017); “they were funny, they were sensitive, they were clannish, and they seemed to have the best girlfriends.”

After graduating from St. Paul Central High School, Frishberg briefly attended Stanford University before returning home to enroll at the University of Minnesota. Although he was already a semiregular on the local jazz scene, his sight reading skills were too poor for a formal music degree. Instead he flirted with majoring in psychology before gravitating to journalism and securing his degree in 1955.

He served two years in the Air Force as a recruiter, to fulfill his ROTC obligations, and then, in 1957, was hired by the New York radio station WNEW to write advertising scripts and other material for its disc jockeys and announcers. He quickly forsook WNEW to write catalog copy for RCA Victor Records, then finally stepped out as a working solo pianist with a latenight slot at the Duplex cabaret in Greenwich Village.

Frishberg became an indemand sideman at jazz spots such as Birdland and the Village Vanguard for jazz luminaries including saxophonists Ben Webster, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims and drummer Gene Krupa. He also accompanied an array of great singers, including Carmen Mcrae, Anita O’day and, for one dizzying night while backing O’day at the Half Note, a timid Judy Garland, who tremulously sat in and sang “Over the Rainbow,” then asked Frishberg to become her musical director. He demurred.

In the early 1960s, Frishberg began writing songs — “all kinds of songs,” as he recalled in “My Dear Departed Past.” When singer

Fran Jeffries asked if he could write her a bit of special material, something she could “slink around while singing,” he responded with “Peel Me a Grape”:

Peel me a grape

Crush me some ice

Skin me a peach, save the fuzz for my pillow

Start me a smoke

Talk to me nice

You gotta wine me

And dine me.

Written in 1962, “Peel Me a Grape” became Frishberg’s first published tune — although the publishing company that acquired it, Frank Music, owned by the illustrious Frank Loesser, did little with it. “As far as I knew, the song was a pretty confidential item,” Frishberg later wrote, “until Blossom Dearie’s version.” Still, it launched Frishberg as a songwriter.

Frishberg decamped to Los Angeles in 1971, ostensibly to write material for “The Funny Side,” a new NBC variety show starring Gene Kelly. The show lasted only nine episodes, but work as a studio musician kept Frishberg afloat. He also began to perform his songs regularly in local clubs.

In 1975, Bob Dorough invited him to contribute to “Schoolhouse Rock!,” for which Dorough was the musical director and one of the writers. Frishberg’s first contribution, in the show’s third season, was “I’m Just a Bill,” an explanatory swinger about the legislative process sung by jazz trumpeter Jack Sheldon. It brought him unexpected acclaim and long-lasting residuals for what he later ruefully acknowledged to be his “most well-known song.”