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I'm headed to Smalltown, U.S.A., to spend the week with my mother, who is recovering from a heart attack. (Yes, she's doing fine.) I have a couple of pieces to write while I'm out there, so don't count on much more than the usual daily stuff in this space. I'll be back when I'm back.
Posted August 8, 2011 12:00 AM
ABOUT "ABOUT LAST NIGHT" AND ITS AUTHORS ABOUT TERRY'S BOOKS MORE ABOUT "POPS" ABOUT TERRY'S PLAY AND OPERA LIBRETTI Terry collaborated with Paul Moravec on Danse Russe, a backstage comedy about the making of The Rite of Spring that was premiered by Philadelphia's Center City Opera Theater on April 28, 2011. To read more about Danse Russe, go here and here. To view excerpts from the opera and see Paul and Terry talk about its creation, go here. Terry previously collaborated with Paul 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, 2009. 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.
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A list of new things we've liked (subject to unexpected and wildly capricious updating). PLAY CATALOGUE BOOK JAZZ NOVEL
Not new, but still worth a look or listen (and no less subject to change without notice).
FILM CD
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.
Terry's latest book is Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the U.S., JR Books in England, and Larousse in Brazil. He is currently at work on Mood Indigo: A Life of Duke Ellington. He wrote the introductions to William Bailey on Canvas and the paperback editions of Richard Stark's Flashfire and Firebreak and Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado. One of his essays is included in Robert Gottlieb's Reading Dance, and he contributed notes on recordings by Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa, and Oscar Peterson to Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology.
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.
Terry's first play, Satchmo at the Waldorf, opens on September 15, 2011, at Orlando Shakespeare's Mandell Theatre in Orlando, Florida, where it will run through October 2. For more information, go here.
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TOP FIVE
The Memory of Water (Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, Mass., closes Sept. 4). A pitch-perfect revival of Shelagh Stephenson's dead-serious 1996 comedy about how three mutually disaffected sisters prepare for the funeral of their senile mother. The laughter--and there's lots of it--does nothing to paper over the remembered anger and present pain. This one's a winner in every way (TT).
Debra Bricker Balken, John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury (Yale, $40). The catalogue of the Portland Museum's superlative exhibition of Marin's late paintings and watercolors, which runs through Oct. 10, is itself a first-class effort, a penetrating study of a great painter whose work is no longer widely known save to students of American modernism. Might a Marin revival be in the offing? Between this show and the watercolor retrospective now on display at Atlanta's High Museum, it's starting to look like a real possibility. Read Balken's book and find out what you've been missing (TT).
Jens Malte Fischer, Gustav Mahler (Yale, $50). This is the first full-scale single-volume primary-source English-language biography of Mahler, and it's a winner. Don't be fazed by its seven-hundred-page length--the style is straightforward, the structure clear and sensible, and Fischer never gets bogged down in superfluous detail. If you've read Mahler Remembered, Norman Lebrecht's important collection of contemporary reminiscences, and want to learn more about the great composer-conductor, start here (TT).
Gene Bertoncini (Bar Henry, 90 W. Houston St., 646-448-4559, Mondays at 7:30-10:30). After a distressingly long hiatus caused by the closing of Le Madeleine three years ago, the great jazz guitarist now has another regular New York gig. If you don't know Bertoncini's playing, go here and marvel at the liquid tone and supple romanticism of his solo style. Then go to Bar Henry and hear him in person--often (TT).
Wesley Stace, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer (Picador, $15 paper). A bewitchingly clever historical thriller in which the lives and work of Peter Warlock, Constant Lambert, and Carlo Gesualdo are blended into the hair-raising tale of an unworldly music critic who writes an opera libretto for a flint-hearted composer who returns the favor in the most malevolent way imaginable. The author (better known in pop-music circles as John Wesley Harding) has done a virtuosic job of fusing fact with fiction, and the result is one of the few novels with a musical setting in which the background is rendered accurately. Absolutely not for musicians only, though those who already know the dramatis personae will be dazzled by the sure-footed skill with which Stace has put their real-life stories to novelistic use (TT).
Out of the Past
Hollywood Homicide. Half cop drama, half Bull Durham-esque adult comedy, this wonderfully agreeable Ron Shelton-Harrison Ford-Josh Hartnett film was so hard to pigeonhole that it slipped between the commercial cracks when it was released in 2003, even though two prominent critics praised it. They were right. Ford is at his best as a middle-aged detective lost at sea in the everything-goes culture of postmodern Los Angeles, and the supporting cast (Keith David, Martin Landau, Lena Olin) is solid from top to bottom (TT).
The Rockin' Hammond of...Milt Buckner (Jasmine). Released in 2009, this two-for-one CD contains twenty-two hard-charging tracks originally recorded for Capitol in 1955 and 1956 by one of the unsung pioneers of jazz organ. The fare is bluesy and the mood is swinging (especially on the tracks that feature Duke Ellington's Sam Woodyard on drums). Buckner's trademark "locked-hands" style is in evidence throughout. Definitely not for irremediable eggheads, but if you like jazz that makes you pat your foot, prepare to turn it loose (TT).
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