Archives for 2003

A reader writes:

I agree that the Mosaic Mulligan Concert Jazz Band collection is absolutely magnificent….Here’s an idea for future research: Bob Brookmeyer is one of the unacknowledged giants of American 20th century music. I hadn’t realized that he pretty much ran the CJB, and of course there were his innovative arrangements for the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band, and much great music since then.

And I in turn I couldn’t agree more. Brookmeyer isn’t quite unsung–I profiled him a few years ago in the New York Times–but he’s definitely undersung, and I was delighted that Bill Kirchner gave him full credit for his behind-the-scenes role with the Mulligan Concert Jazz Band in the liner notes for Mosaic’s CJB set, a link to which you’ll find in the “Teachout’s Top Five” box of the right-hand column. In addition to being a no-nonsense, utterly distinctive valve-trombone soloist (and a damned fine pianist, too, amazingly enough), Brookmeyer is gradually coming to be recognized as one of the most individual and significant of all jazz composers, as well as one of the very few to have grappled successfully with the challenge of large-scale form.

For those who don’t know Brookmeyer’s music, here are links to a few of his best albums:

New Works: Celebration (Challenge), recorded in 1997, features Brookmeyer’s Europe-based New Art Orchestra in a performance of his four-movement suite Celebration, a fully realized, highly impressive large-scale work for big band.

Holiday: Bob Brookmeyer Plays Piano (Challenge), recorded in 2000, is proof that all men are not created equal–some can play valve trombone and piano with equal skill and individuality. Life is unfair.

Live at the North Sea Jazz Festival (Challenge), recorded in 1979, is a wonderful collection of duets teaming Brookmeyer with Jim Hall, the best of all possible jazz guitarists.

Live at Sandy’s Jazz Revival, Vol. 1 (DCC Compact Classics), recorded in 1978, is the first half of a long-unavailable two-disc album in which Brookmeyer was teamed with Jack Wilkins on guitar, Michael Moore on bass, and Joe LaBarbera on drums–one of the finest small groups he ever led. (Whatever happened to Volume Two, by the way?)

Brookmeyer also recorded extensively as a sideman with Gerry Mulligan (start with the Mosaic set, then look for At Storyville, a live album by the Mulligan Quartet) and Stan Getz (I especially like Stan Getz-Bob Brookmeyer).

That’ll get you started, though you should also take a look at Brookmeyer’s Web site, which contains a wide-ranging selection of his famously outspoken comments on everything under the sun. I’ve never known a more candid man, or a more extravagantly gifted one. May he live to be at least a hundred.

“A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.”

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

Jaime O’Neill, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday, appreciatively reviews a new collection of Alfred Kazin’s criticism. Right off the bat O’Neill coins a neat new term for that increasingly rare bird, the lucid literary critic (and a corresponding term for his opposite number):

When I was a kid, there was a smart-ass remark we used to make to people who were blocking our view: “You make a better door than a window.” I kept thinking of that phrase as I read “Alfred Kazin’s America.” Far too many literary critics make a better door than a window. Not Alfred Kazin.

In case you were wondering what kind of aperture Harold Bloom is, he has a brief cameo in the review as a representative door.

To be perfectly honest with you, last week at this time I didn’t know who Shirley Hazzard was. But on Monday a friend mentioned her new book, The Great Fire, and that opened the floodgates. On Wednesday came word of Hazzard’s National Book Award nomination. (Did you know the NBA nominee pages list upcoming events for each author? Now you know.) Then Friday the Wall Street Journal Weekend section ran a review in which Jamie James said the novel “reads like the last masterpiece of a vanished age of civility, even of a certain understanding of civilization” and referred to the “Penelope-like vigil” of the many readers who loved Hazzard’s last novel, published 22 years ago, Transit of Venus.

22 years? I felt much better knowing that her reputation was sealed when I was–well, let’s just say when I was young enough to be excused for the oversight.

Over the weekend I read two more thunder-struck reviews by notable writers: one by the novelist Howard Norman in The Washington Post, and another by Thomas Mallon in The Atlantic.

I’m now more than sold on reading The Great Fire. But I want to start at the beginning, with Transit of Venus, which Mallon calls “a swirling asteroid belt of connected stories” and “a novel stuffed with description so intellectually active as to be sometimes exhausting, as if metaphysical verse were presenting itself to the reader as prose.” The book is in hand, and the first lines do not disappoint:

By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation.

It was simply that the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning. Purple silence petrified the limbs of trees and stood crops upright in the fields like hair on end.

Onward.

Fans of Allison Moorer, the wonderful young country singer about whom I’ve previously written in this space, should go here to read an excellent Washington Post profile by Eric Brace that supplies the inside skinny on her latest doings.

In brief, Moorer has finally given up on the major labels, signed with Sugar Hill Records (the nonpareil independent country-bluegrass label that brought you Nickel Creek), and now has a new album in the can set for release next spring:

In five short years, she’s released four records (her most recent, “Show,” a live affair with accompanying DVD) and has just signed with her third record label. She’s been touted as the next great country singer and faulted for not playing the game by Nashville’s rules. She’s had an Academy Award nomination for one of her songs, and been virtually ignored by country radio….

But while Moorer puts on a bravely defiant face, she admits to doubts about her methods. “Oh, sure, I ask myself all the time, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ ” she says, her corduroy cap pulled low over her face. She stares hard at her cappuccino for a second, regaining her bravura. “But I’ve been true to myself in everything I’ve done. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

Of course I wish Moorer had made it big in Nashville, but I can’t tell you how pleased I am to hear that she’s hooked up with the best roots-music label in the business. They know a good thing when they hear it. (In the meantime, try her debut CD, Alabama Song, for a taste of Allison Moorer at her major-label best.)

Deidre Rodman, the pianist-composer about whom I’ve recently written on this blog and in the Washington Post, is appearing with her quintet on Monday at the Jazz Gallery. The gig is in celebration of the release of her second CD, Simple Stories, about which I had this to say in the Post:

If you liked the Bad Plus’ “These Are the Vistas,” an all-acoustic piano-trio album with a strong pop flavor, your next stop should be Deidre Rodman’s “Simple Stories” (Sunnyside), the second CD by an up-and-coming young pianist-composer from New York City. Rodman has put a similarly fresh spin on the time-honored trumpet-sax quintet lineup, with results as crisp and sweet as a bite out of a Fuji apple.

Like so many other twentysomething players, Rodman has performed all sorts of music. She’s worked with Elvis Costello, played in a circus band and now doubles as a member of the Lascivious Biddies, a witty girl group. Not surprisingly, her idiosyncratic approach to jazz is colored by this wide-ranging experience. For one thing, her compositions are far more than just props for aimless blowing. Some are songs (Rodman is also a talented lyricist), others large-scale compositions notable for their high melodic profiles. The influence of rock on pieces like “Sleeping Ground” (sung to perfection by Luciana Souza, who sits in on three cuts) is unmistakable, yet you don’t doubt for a moment that you’re listening to jazz….

Two sets, at nine and 10:30. For more information, go here.

While you’re at the record store, check out Acoustic Romance (Sons of Sound), a gorgeous guitar-bass-drums CD by Gene Bertoncini originally recorded in 1992 for a Japanese label and now being released stateside for the first time. Bertoncini’s gently elegant finger-style acoustic jazz guitar and classically flavored arrangements of such blue-chip standards as “The Shadow of Your Smile” and “Two for the Road” have rarely been captured in such warm yet transparent recorded sound, and Akira Tana and Rufus Reid provide impeccable support.

You can order Acoustic Romance by going here, or you can take matters into your own hands by dining at Le Madeleine, the theater-district bistro (it’s on 43rd Street just east of Ninth Avenue) where Bertoncini plays solo guitar on Sunday and Monday nights whenever he’s in New York. It happens that he’s in town for the next few weeks, so I dropped in this evening to eat the excellent food and savor the music. Both were up to par (they always are), and copies of Acoustic Romance were available for purchase and signing (ditto). Nightclubs are all very well and good, but there’s nothing like listening to great jazz while eating a good meal in pleasant surroundings, and we all know that some of New York’s most admired jazz clubs aren’t exactly, ahem, comfy.

Anyway, go see Deidre Rodman at the Jazz Gallery on Monday and Gene Bertoncini at Le Madeleine next Sunday. Buy their albums–and tell ’em I sent you.

In addition to the several miles’ worth of new postings that materialized in this spot on Friday, I’ve just installed a brand-new, all-new set of Top Fives in the right-hand column. Take a look, click on a link, enhance your life.

Much more to come on Monday and Tuesday, including the return of “In the Bag,” postings about Carolina Ballet, the Louis Armstrong House, “German Art Now” at the St. Louis Art Museum, and whatever else tickles my fancy. Stay tuned.

Seeing as how this site is officially big on the paintings, watercolors, and etchings of John Marin, I thought you might enjoy reading a very interesting newspaper story suggesting the possibility of a Marin revival:

John Marin is back in vogue.

Thanks to a new book, two new exhibitions and renewed attention stemming from the 50th anniversary of Marin’s death, interest in the American-born modernist has peaked. His popularity is borne out not only among young art students who trace his path up and down the Maine coast, but also in art auction houses, where even routine Marin paintings fetch millions of dollars these days….

Much of the new fervor is because of the recently opened retrospective “John Marin’s Maine” at the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor. The small exhibition of fewer than two dozen pieces traces Marin’s evolution as a painter from his first trip to Maine in 1914 to his death Oct. 1, 1953.

Colby College, which owns 55 Marin works and dedicates two galleries to their display, has published a long-overdue hardcover catalog of its holdings, “The John Marin Collection at the Colby College Museum of Art.”

And on Nov. 9, the Richard York Gallery in New York City will open “John Marin & Paul Strand: Friends in New England,” an exhibition that explores the dialogue between Marin and his photographer friend. It will be the first time their work has been exhibited together since 1925, when both were included in arts patron Alfred Stieglitz’s “Seven Americans” exhibition.

The only thing lacking is a major-museum retrospective, the last of which the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., mounted in 1990. Marin’s daughter-in-law, Norma Marin, hopes renewed interest will result in a thorough re-examination of the painter’s career.

“I’m obviously a little biased, but I think it’s time,” says Norma Marin, who divides her time between a Manhattan apartment and her home at Cape Split….

And where, pray tell, did this story appear? In today’s Portland Press Herald. That’s Portland, Maine, not the New York Times, thank you very much. To read the whole thing, go here. To purchase a copy of Colby College’s gorgeous Marin catalogue, go here. And to find out why you had to go to a Maine newspaper by way of an arts blog to find out about all this Marin-related activity…well, go figure.