David Frishberg
b. 23 March 1933, St Paul, Minnesota, USA. Frishberg learned to play piano as a child, at one point horrifying his teacher by arranging a Mozart test-piece as a conga. After studying journalism at the University of Minnesota, he spent two years in the US Air Force before he decided to take the plunge and try to earn his living playing piano in New York City. During the '60s, musically his formative decade, he played in bands led by jazz musicians such as Bobby Hackett, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge and Gene Krupa. He also accompanied many singers, including Carmen McRae, Dick Haymes, Susannah McCorkle, Anita O'Day, Irene Kral and Jimmy Rushing, often creating stylish arrangements which presented the singer in a new light (see for example, the Rushing album, THE YOU AND ME THAT USED TO BE). During this period, Frishberg was busily writing songs, which were performed by O'Day, Blossom Dearie, Al Jarreau, Cleo Laine and others, while he was gradually summoning up the nerve to perform them himself in public. In 1971 he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked in film and television studios, spent a long stint with Herb Alpert, played occasionally in the big band of Bill Berry and began performing a cabaret-style act that combined superb jazz piano playing with highly sophisticated, witty songs. Although his piano playing is of a very high order, ranging from bebop through mainstream and back to romping stride, it is as a composer and lyricist that Frishberg has made his greatest and probably most lasting mark on music. His songs, which tell contemporary tales and fables, concern themselves with seemingly mundane topics, such as lawyers, (My Attorney Bernie), long-forgotten brands of beer (White Castle), love's deceits (Blizzard Of Lies) and heroes of baseball and jazz (Van Lingle Mungo) and (Dear Bix). His wittily ironic lyric writing, which Daniel Okrent in Esquire suggests is how ‘ Noël Coward would have written had he been born Jewish in St. Paul’, combines devilish ingenuity with a childlike innocence and an appreciation of life's better but fleeting moments, as in the song Here's To Yesterday, which contains the line, ‘…tomorrow wasn't built to last.’ 
In the '80s, Frishberg, now resident in Portland, Oregon, continued to play on the west coast but also regularly appeared in clubs and at festivals across the USA and in the UK. In the early '90s he was still touring, playing the piano and still writing songs which eloquently prove that, for all fears to the contrary, they still do write songs like that anymore.