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ABOUT "ABOUT LAST NIGHT" AND ITS AUTHORS 
This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout, Laura Demanski (otherwise known as Our Girl in Chicago, or "OGIC" for short), and Carrie Frye (who signs her postings "CAAF"). Terry, who lives in New York, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the chief culture critic of Commentary. His Wikipedia entry is here. more

ABOUT TERRY'S BOOKS 
Terry's latest book is Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the U.S. and JR Books in England. One of his essays is included in Robert Gottlieb's Reading Dance. He contributed an essay to Coudal Partners' Field-Tested Books (as did OGIC) and wrote the introductions to William Bailey on Canvas and the paperback edition of Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado. more

MORE ABOUT "POPS" 
To read reviews of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, watch TV interviews and listen to radio interviews and podcasts about the book, and find out the answers to frequently asked questions about Armstrong and Pops, click on the link. more

ABOUT TERRY'S FIRST OPERA 
Terry collaborated with Paul Moravec on The Letter, an operatic version of Somerset Maugham's 1927 play that was commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera in 2006 and opened there on July 25. To see excerpts from the opera, go here. To read Terry's reports on the writing, production, premiere, and reception of The Letter, click on the link. more

TERRY'S TWITTERS 

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CONTACT
tteachout@artsjournal.com
ogic@artsjournal.com
caaf@artsjournal.com

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TOP FIVE

A list of new things we've liked (subject to unexpected and wildly capricious updating).

BOOK 
Rosanne Cash, Composed (Viking, $26.95). This is a remarkable piece of work, a making-of-an-artist memoir by a musician who is equally adept at writing prose. Composed is--all at once--funny and poetic and down to earth, and Cash also has a great many exceedingly shrewd things to say about the music business and its discontents. Don't go looking for gossip, but if you want to learn about the inner and outer lives of one of our very best singer-songwriters, you won't be even slightly disappointed (TT).

DVD 
Presenting Sacha Guitry (Criterion Collection, four discs). Four films by the great French actor-playwright-director, none of which, so far as I know, has ever been available on home video in this country. In The Story of a Cheat, The Pearls of the Crown, Désiré, and Quadrille, Guitry transferred his stage-farce style to the screen with astonishing and near-unprecedented success. I can't think of another playwright who took to film with such idiomatic gusto. If there's any justice at all, this long-overdue box set will introduce Guitry to a new generation of film buffs who have no idea how much pure pleasure they've been missing (TT).

BOOK 
Richard Stark, Deadly Edge/Plunder Squad/Slayground (University of Chicago, $14 each). Three more titles in the University of Chicago Press' ongoing uniform paperback edition of the complete novels of Richard Stark (a/k/a Donald E. Westlake). Parker, Stark's diamond-hard anti-heroic heister-protagonist, has admitted a woman into his life but remains as tough and unrelenting as ever. The plots are more complex, the language richer, the canvas wider. Get them all (TT).

CD 
Erroll Garner, The Most Happy Piano: The 1956 Studio Sessions (American Jazz Classics, two CDs). If, like me, you adore Garner's unselfconsciously joyous art, make haste to order this imported double album containing all twenty-nine of the long-unavailable trio sides that he cut for Columbia in 1956, including a show-stopping eight-minute-long version of "The Man I Love." The title is on the nose: no jazz musician, not even Louis Armstrong or Fats Waller, has ever made more purely happy music (TT).

EXHIBITION 
Charles Burchfield: Fifty Years as a Painter (DC Moore Gallery, 724 Fifth Ave., up through Sept. 25). If you've already paid a visit to the Whitney's idiosyncratic large-scale retrospective of the work of the visionary modern American watercolorist whose studies of small-town life have won the admiration of everyone from Edward Hopper to Jerry Saltz, then check out this small, tightly focused museum-quality show. It's more than a mere pendant (TT).

Out of the Past

Not new, but still worth a look or listen (and no less subject to change without notice).

CD 
Mitchell's Christian Singers, Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Vol. 1 (1934-1936) (Document). The rough-hewn, sometimes startlingly dissonant a cappella harmonies of this vocal quartet, which traveled from North Carolina to Carnegie Hall in 1939 to sing at John Hammond's first From Spirituals to Swing concert and subsequently got written up in Time, have since caught the ears of everyone from Bob Crosby to Maria Muldaur. The first volume of Document's comprehensive reissue of the group's 78 recordings contains its best-known side, "Traveling Shoes," plus plenty of other gospel songs that swing and shout like nobody's business (TT).

NOVEL 
John P. Marquand, So Little Time. All but forgotten today, this 1943 study of a disappointed playwright who married up and sold out is also a powerfully evocative snapshot of America on the eve of World War II. It's not a great book by any means, and Marquand would work the same turf more effectively in Point of No Return and Women and Thomas Harrow, but I can't think of another American novel that does a better job of suggesting what it felt like to watch the world sliding toward catastrophe (TT).

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