Archives for October 2003

Wesla Whitfield, the greatest cabaret singer in the world, is singing for one night only this Saturday at the Oak Room
of the Algonquin Hotel. Two shows, at nine and 11:30. If you’ve never seen her, call now and make a reservation. It isn’t cheap, but it’s definitely worth it.

If you need further persuading, here’s part of a piece I wrote a few years ago about Whitfield and the Oak Room:

Eighty well-dressed people sit silently in a darkened, oak-paneled room in the center of Manhattan. Some have plates of food in front of them, others have drinks at their elbows, but nobody is paying much attention to food or drink right now, not even the waiters. Instead, they’re all listening to a woman seated on a high stool placed in the bend of a piano, her handsome face lit by a single baby spotlight. Her name is Wesla Whitfield, and she’s singing a song everyone here knows by heart: Somewhere over the rainbow/Bluebirds fly/Birds fly over the rainbow/Why then oh why can’t I? It takes a lot of nerve, and a lot of talent, to sing a song like that in a room like this. The woman has both, which is why the crowd is so quiet: you could hear a pin drop across the street…

[Whitfield] has been a West Coast cult figure for years; her full, fine-drawn mezzo voice, easy swing, and miraculously direct way with a lyric are in the great tradition of American popular singing, and more than a few admirers, myself included, consider her the best cabaret singer in the world. But it was only after she opened at the Oak Room that the rest of the world caught on. “It was a very big deal,” she says of her first booking in the room where she now sings regularly to sold-out houses. “I had tried for five years to get a gig here. And when I finally got one, it was a do-or-die thing. The first night, Al Hirschfeld, Burton Lane, George Shearing, and Michael Feinstein were all sitting three feet from me. It was terrifying.”

What makes the Oak Room so special? Obviously, the singers who perform there are the heart of the matter, though the room itself contributes significantly to the effect they make. Cabaret is an intimate art, and the 80-seat Oak Room, with its amber sconces and red velvet banquettes, is as up close and personal as a love seat at midnight: there is no finer place to listen to songs of passion and despair. “It’s nice singing in a room this small,” Whitfield says, “because I get feedback from the people. I know what works–and what doesn’t work. When they’re bored, you can hear them scrunching up their toes in their shoes. You can get that kind of response in a larger room, but it’s very slow, and very limited.”

Enough said? See you there.

Felix Salmon
is on my case (in a very gentlemanly way) regarding my recent link
about applause between movements:

Audiences these days can’t be trusted only to applaud the good stuff: give them half a chance and they’ll cheer the downright mediocre as well. And there’s no doubt that too much applause in the middle of a symphony, opera or concerto can definitely break up its drive and flow.

Besides, if people get the idea that it’s fine to clap at the end of movements, they’ll start clapping at every false ending as well, with disastrous consequences. I’m having visions here of people bursting out enthusiastically half a dozen times within ten minutes at the end of a Haydn symphony: something I’m sure no one thinks is a very good idea.

If asked, then, I’ll continue to tell novices to classical music that, in general, one doesn’t applaud until the end of the whole piece

A reader writes:

Regarding your blog entry about Kind of Blue: Coincidentally, this morning at the coffeeshop I frequent–in the middle of western Pennsylvania, as small-town as small-town gets–Kind of Blue was playing. One fellow who stopped in commented on it. This gentleman was black, which is not-so-common in this particular, quite homogeneous small town. Anyway, he, the proprietor, and the girl working behind the counter talked for a while about how seminal the album was, the geniuses who played on it and the music they made afterwards.

I thought at the time that the interchange was a great example of the bonding force of music, demonstrating its ability to help people find enough common ground to begin friendships. Perhaps it’s the music’s essential simplicity, as you say, that is truly at the core of this bonding force.

For those of you wondering why in hell OGIC and I haven’t answered your e-mail, the answer is that as of about ten minutes ago, the pile in the mailbox had shrunk to 47 unanswered items. This may not sound like much progress from yesterday, but bear in mind that I also replied to every piece of new mail that came in since then!

The point being, I both delight and regret to say, that “About Last Night” is now starting to get a whole lot of mail. We love it. We read all of it. We’re trying to answer all of it (except for the dear-sir-you-cur letters and the spam from Liberia). We’re a bit daunted by it.

The following tips may help us to get back to you sooner:

(1) If you’re writing to Our Girl in Chicago, put “OGIC” in the subject header. Otherwise, I’ll assume you’re writing to TT (or both of us).

(2) If you know either of us personally, write to us directly, not through the blog. That slows everything down.

(3) Please don’t put “About Last Night” on any routine mailing lists, not even yours. That also slows everything down.

(4) Please don’t write only to say Thank you or Ditto or I’ll do that. We know it’s polite to acknowledge e-mail, but every piece of incoming mail we get, however brief, takes the same amount of time to open and scan. We’ll take your thoughtful sentiments for granted.

(5) Be patient. I’ve turned off the autoresponder (the one that used to automatically send a Be patient response to everyone who wrote to the blog) because it stimulated the spammers. We promise to write you back as soon as we can.

Thanks for your thoughtfulness. Like I said, your mail means a lot to us, absolutely, no fooling, and we’re doing our damnedest to chew through it. You’re the best.

As I sat down to lunch today at Good Enough to Eat, my Upper West Side hangout, I heard a familiar sound floating over the purr of conversation. Buzzy, keening, coolly anguished…sure enough, it was Miles Davis playing “All Blues,” the best-known cut from the most popular album in the history of jazz, Kind of Blue.

I smiled and shook my head at the thought of Miles’ being reduced to the status of background music, but I can’t say it bothered me. The waitstaff at Good Enough picks the tunes (which vary from perfectly all right to totally awesome), so it’s more than likely that someone as yet unborn when Miles, Trane, Cannonball, and Bill Evans strolled into a New York recording studio in 1959 decided to pop Kind of Blue into the CD player 44 years later. Jazz hasn’t existed quite long enough to have definitively passed the Test of Time, but I’d say that’s a pretty good sign.

I usually read when I’m dining alone, but today the music caused me to become lost in thought. It’s easy to forget that Kind of Blue was one of the most radically innovative jazz recordings of its time. For a generation of open-eared players, it was the passport to a new world of improvisation in which the meticulously interlocked tonal harmonies of the swing era were jettisoned in favor of spacious modal prairies around which the soloist wandered seemingly at will. So how is it that so Indisputably Important a recording has wormed its way into the pop-culture landscape of America? Kind of Blue, after all, is one of the very few jazz albums owned by people who know nothing else about jazz. (As I write these words, it ranks 132 in sales among pop-music CDs on amazon.com.) It’s the record Clint Eastwood (who knows a lot about jazz) puts on when he comes home from a hard day of assassin-hunting in In the Line of Fire. A whole book has been written about its history and cultural significance. Now it’s Muzak–yet it remains as vital and listenable as ever. By what strange alchemy was this transformation effected?

Somebody (me, I guess) ought to write an essay about how jazz has come to be used as a cultural signifier in films, TV shows, and ads, an infallible indicator of upper-middle-class hipness. That’s part of the reason why a pathbreaking musical statement has become so ubiquitous–but not the biggest part. Kind of Blue, lest we forget, was always popular. It was a hit in 1959, too. Why? Because for all its undeniable radicalism, Kind of Blue is also accessible and memorable. You don’t have to know what modal improvisation is to revel in its spare, lucid textures. You don’t even have to know who Miles, Trane, Cannonball, and Bill Evans were. Yes, they’re doing astounding things–but they don’t hit you over the head with their innovations, or try to tie your ears in knots. The results are simple, beautiful, and new, and the last of these is not the first.

I’m not saying that all good new art has to be simple, or that I only like simple art. Nor am I saying that all great art is destined in time to be swallowed up and spit out by Madison Avenue. But as I grow older, I find myself increasingly suspicious of the long-term viability of self-consciously “difficult” art. This is part of what I mean when I say that the first responsibility of art is to give pleasure. Of course it is our reciprocal responsibility to be open to the new. What seems strange now may soon come to seem beautiful–but I very much doubt that a lifetime’s puzzling over Finnegans Wake will cause it to seem anything other than pointlessly complex. There’s a reason why the greatest artists dissolve into simplicity as they grow older.

I wrote a piece about “fourth-period art” for the New York Times a couple of years ago. I wasn’t pleased with the results, so I left it out of the Teachout Reader, but I did like this part:

Yet once in a while the miracle happens, and an artist not only survives middle age, but also remains creatively vital. “Father Time is not always a hard parent,” Charles Dickens wrote in “Barnaby Rudge,” “and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly on those who have used him well.” To see such folk in the flesh is to be delighted and puzzled in equal measure. I heard the alto saxophonist Benny Carter at Iridium four years ago; he was then 89, but he played like a man of 60, and I could scarcely believe my ears.

Such apparent freedom from the devastation of old age seems to come less easily to those artists who work with words. “To write tolerably over the age of 65 is exceptional,” Kenneth Clark rightly notes. That is when painters and orchestral conductors are just getting their second wind. As he embarked on his 19th novel, “The Fisher King,” the 76-year-old Anthony Powell ruminated in his journal on the special problems facing the older novelist: “The sluggish imagination of old age makes giving of reality to characters difficult. The story must be seen from the point of view of a writer’s own age group, later life being on the whole thin in action of the kind to give point to novels.”

This makes sense, and it helps explain why most of the masterpieces of old age have been non-verbal. The best fourth-period art floats free of action and character. Instead, it is about essences, which are notoriously difficult to convey in words, though the Japanese painter Hokusai came close. “All that I have produced before the age of 70,” he wrote at 75, “is not worth taking into account. At 73, I learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am 80, I shall have made still more progress. At 90, I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at 100, I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am 110, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive.”

Miles Davis and his colleagues were young men when they recorded Kind of Blue, but the muse visited them that day and brought with her the gift of essential simplicity, causing every note and rest they played to pulse with life. That’s why we listen to them a half-century later–and why, if I live another half-century, I expect to be listening to them still.

How nice for me that Terry has been back with such a vengeance. Various events here have been compromising my blogging ability, from my Microsoft Word program inexplicably going on strike, to my recent acquisition of a family of insomniac yetis as upstairs neighbors, to the usual trials inflicted by the cat who deigns to share with me this space that can only be called hers. You know how really bad parents use the tv as a handy device for hypnotizing their kids when they can’t be bothered to pay attention, and end up raising vidiots? Well, through a similar process my cat is halfway to becoming a drug addict; I’ve been leaning a little too heavily on a cache of potent catnip given to me last week by a well-meaning friend. The cat’s starting to remind me a little of the young Zonker Harris. He always seemed to be a pretty happy guy though, right?

Anyway, I’m surrendering my computer to the more technically adept Monday morning and having the system software reinstalled. I hope to have it back by evening, with only the slightest interruption in posting. It’s possible it will take longer, though, in which case I’ll try to squirrel things away for later in the week. By the way, I have discovered one useful thing thanks to the Word Processor That Would Prefer Not To: Mac Stickies are a perfectly adequate, maybe even ideal, blogging composition tool–basic and efficient.

With any luck, I’ll catch you later.

For those of you just tuning in:

(1) I’m back. I posted lots and lots and lots of stuff on Friday and throughout the weekend. Scroll down and regale yourself.

(2) OGIC is surrendering her computer to the gearheads for repair any minute now, but hopes to be back in business tonight (see immediately below).

(3) The very next thing I do is start answering blogmail.

All is explained in infinitely greater detail in the next few dozen postings. Now go wallow.

P.S. Since originally posting this note, I whittled a stack of 154 unanswered pieces of blogmail down to 62. Hold on, I’m coming!

From 2 Blowhards:

At lunch with a couple of arts buddies, we found ourselves trying to come up with fairly-recent performance forms that you don’t see (or see much) anymore. We came up with three that were very popular during our kid-hoods but that are all but invisible today:

* Ventriloquists–they were once a standard feature on variety shows.

* Impersonators–hard to remember, but people who did impressions of celebrities were once very popular: “Here’s … Jack Paar! [applause] And here’s … Dwight Eisenhower! [applause]” Remember buying LP’s by impersonators? Who was that guy who did the whole Kennedy family, for instance?

* Comedy teams–Martin and Lewis, Hope and Crosby, the Ritz Brothers, etc.

This caught my eye not only because I recently wrote about The Ed Sullivan Show, a veritable time capsule of such old-fashioned comedy, but because I happened to see Kevin Pollak, a standup comedian turned actor (he’s in A Few Good Men, among many other films) who’s doing standup again, at the Improv in Washington, D.C. not long ago. Pollak does impersonations (he’s modestly famous for his William Shatner), and he did a bunch of them at the Improv to brilliant effect. Not surprisingly, his Jack Nicholson is wildly funny, but it was his Robert De Niro that all but stopped the show–partly, I think, because he doesn’t say anything when he’s doing it. Usually, the best impersonations are three-layer cakes in which you duplicate the voice, simulate the face, and caricature the personality. Instead, Pollak just stood there and looked like De Niro (whom he doesn’t look a bit like), and my mouth fell open with amazement and delight.

I’m old enough, by the way, to remember the greatest of all impersonators, David Frye, who did Richard Nixon with such weird exactitude that it made you positively uncomfortable. And I should mention that one of my friends, a classical composer, does impersonations of other classical composers–a highly specialized niche, to be sure, but they’re really funny. (His Ned Rorem is almost too good to be true.)

(For the record, it was Vaughn Meader who did the Kennedys, and the album was called The First Family. And I like ventriloquists, too.)