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January 31, 2007
TT: As good as a mile
Experience isn’t nearly as good a teacher as it ought to be, but it has taught me a few things, one of which is to always check my tape recorder prior to conducting an interview. An hour before I planned to leave my apartment on Tuesday to meet Ennio Morricone at the Italian Cultural Institute, I changed the batteries in my trusty old miniature cassette recorder and discovered that it had breathed its last. I dropped it in the wastebasket and walked briskly to the nearest Radio Shack to buy a replacement.I was surprised—though not too much so—to discover that such old-fashioned devices had all but been replaced by digital recorders. Needless to say, I would have been more than happy to purchase one of those instead, but I didn’t have time to fumble with an unfamiliar technology and I still had a stack of Louis Armstrong-related interview tapes to transcribe, so I bought the last cassette recorder in the store, tried it out on the spot to make sure that it worked, paid the clerk, ran out the door, and flagged a cab.
Halfway through Central Park, I tried to remember how long I'd been using my old tape recorder. Suddenly it hit me: I'd bought it one afternoon in 1994 to interview a cabaret singer for the New York Daily News. I met her early that evening at a restaurant in the theater district, sat down at her table, and switched on my brand-new machine. Nothing happened. After a few minutes of futile fumbling, I put it back in my bag, mortified by my inadvertent display of professional incompetence.
What happened next is described in A Terry Teachout Reader:
I pulled out a notebook and started asking her about her early days. She came from a medium-sized town in Michigan. Her father had been a part-time trumpeter, and she had gotten her start with his band. “My family visited New York when I was twelve,” she said, “and I was already the kind of kid who read Earl Wilson’s column and wanted to go to Sardi’s and a Broadway show.” Laughing, I confessed that I, too, had read Wilson’s Broadway column as a child in Missouri. Indeed, the longer we talked, the more we found we had in common. Both of us had cut our teeth on jazz, longed to see the lights of Broadway, and traveled to New york to seek our fortunes.
What started off as an interview imperceptibly became a conversation. She spoke frankly of her struggle with Crohn’s disease, of the ileostomy she had undergone the year before in order to relieve the condition, of the hard times she had known and the hopes she had. After dinner, I walked her to the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where she was singing anonymously in the pit of an ill-fated musical called The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, a thankless chore she had taken on in order to pay her medical bills. She was so tiny that I had to stoop to hear her over the roar of traffic in Times Square.
As soon I got back home, I took a closer look at the recorder and saw that the pause switch was on. I laughed myself silly. It never again malfunctioned, and in the thirteen years that followed I used it to tape interviews with Karrin Allyson, George Avakian, Maria Bachmann, Patricia Barber, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Tony Bennett, Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Charlap, Mary Foster Conklin, Norman Corwin, Eliot Feld, Renée Fleming, Jim Hall, Fred Hersch, Stephen Hough, David Ives, Keith Jarrett, Diana Krall, Lowell Liebermann, Audra McDonald, Marian McPartland, Pat Metheny, Dan Morgenstern, Mark Morris, Mark O’Connor, Madeleine Peyroux, Bucky and John Pizzarelli, Maria Schneider, George Shearing, Luciana Souza, Frederica von Stade, Ethan Stiefel, Whit Stillman, Paul Taylor (twice), Twyla Tharp, Edward Villella, Wendy Wasserstein, Robert Weiss, Christopher Wheeldon, Weslia Whitfield, and the members of the Emerson String Quartet, Nickel Creek, and Pilobolus.
All of those conversations were memorable and a few led to treasured friendships, but none would affect me so deeply as the interview with Nancy LaMott that my now-defunct cassette recorder failed to record. May it rest in peace.
Posted January 31, 2007 10:42 AM
