Archives for 2003

I had dinner on Sunday with a friend of mine who is the daughter of a guitarist who played quite a bit with the late Paul Desmond, the alto saxophonist of the Dave Brubeck Quartet and my favorite jazz musician ever. She’d recently been interviewed by Doug Ramsey, who is at work on a biography of Desmond, so we got to chatting about his life and music. Then we strolled around the corner to a Japanese restaurant, and just as we were sitting down, we noticed that the background music was “Le Souk,” the last track on the first side of the Brubeck Quartet’s Jazz Goes to College, the very first jazz album I ever heard. (My father owned a battered copy which I found in his record cabinet some 35 years ago, thereby changing my life beyond recognition…but that’s another story for another day.)

We both heard it at exactly the same moment. Then my friend looked at me, grinned, and said, “Paul’s here.”

Felix Salmon
has taken note of my recent postings on Zankel Hall, and begs to differ with my suggestion that the joint needs a center aisle. I’m not sure I’m convinced, but he definitely makes a strong case, not to mention witty and well-informed.

Blake Gopnik, art critic of the Washington Post, recently torched and sewed salt on the ashes of “Beyond the Frame: Impressionism Revisited: The Sculptures of J. Seward Johnson, Jr.,” a show of three-dimensional sculptural renderings of impressionist paintings currently on display at Washington’s Corcoran Museum of Art. I’ll cut right to the rough stuff:

Once upon a time–as recently as the ’70s and even later–the Corcoran was a significant force on the national art scene. That reputation has slipped badly over the last few years; when I’m on the road, people often ask me, “What’s with the Corcoran these days? Is it still around?”

And now, thanks to the prankster art of J. Seward Johnson, the Corcoran has fallen even further. It has tumbled all the way from nobody to laughingstock.

Go here to read the whole thing. I regret to say that it sounds all too convincing.

“In cities men cannot be prevented from concerting together and awakening a mutual excitement that prompts sudden and passionate resolutions.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The weekend was eventful–Washington and Baltimore in quick succession–but New York beckoned, so I returned. How could I leave you hanging? Here are today’s topics, from quick to dirty: (1) How to spend your jazz-related entertainment dollar this week in New York. (2) Turn your radio on and I’ll croon for you. (3) “In the Bag.” (4) A pair of revealing vignettes. (5) The latest almanac entry.

My ratings fell off a bit last Friday, after a very encouraging week. Did all of you take one last long weekend before the fall season gets going in earnest? If so, did you remember to exhort your friends, colleagues, lovers, and enemies to read www.terryteachout.com regularly–before leaving town? (Long, awkward silence.)

I suspected as much. All is forgiven–but get with the program.

Two jazz gigs worth hearing:

The Bad Plus is appearing Tuesday through Sunday at the Village Vanguard. Here’s what I wrote in the Washington Post earlier this year about their debut CD, These Are the Vistas:

The Bad Plus is a piano trio, one of jazz’s most familiar lineups–only Ethan Iverson, Reid Anderson and David King don’t sound anything like Ahmad Jamal or Oscar Peterson. Instead of the usual show tunes and jazz standards, they play “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Heart of Glass,” and weirdly tilted original compositions with titles like “Silence Is the Question” and “Keep the Bugs Off Your Glass and the Bears Off Your Ass.” Their producer is Tchad Blake, whose credits include albums by Elvis Costello, Suzanne Vega and Pearl Jam. And “These Are the Vistas” (Columbia), their major-label debut, isn’t just a breath of fresh air–it’s a tornado….

The Bad Plus doesn’t do cutesy watered-down covers of hit singles. Instead, they deconstruct the songs of Blondie, Nirvana and Aphex Twin with the same rigorous conceptual clarity that goes into their own originals, and their group sound–blunt, clear-cut, full of splintery dissonances and jolting musical jokes–blends jazz, rock and classical music so indissolubly as to make the differences between the three musics seem trivial.

Alto saxophonist Bud Shank is appearing on Wednesday and Thursday at the Jazz Standard. If you don’t recognize the name, Shank is one of the indisputable giants of West Coast jazz. Prominently featured on dozens of classic Contemporary and Pacific Jazz albums of the Fifties, he’s still alive, well, and by all accounts playing his ass off. As if that alone weren’t recommendation enough, he’ll be backed by a world-class rhythm section anchored by pianist Bill Mays, who was staggeringly adventurous last week at Marvin Stamm’s Birdland gig.

I can’t remember the last time Shank played a New York nightclub gig–in fact, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never heard him live–and I don’t plan to pass up this rare opportunity to find out what he’s sounding like these days. You come, too.

I’ll be appearing Tuesday on National Public Radio’s Performance Today to talk about the opening of Zankel Hall, as part of a broadcast from the new hall of a concert by Emanuel Ax and the Emerson String Quartet.

Performance Today airs at different times in different cities. To find out more about the show, including where and when to tune in, go here.

Time again for “In the Bag,” the game that challenges you to put aside pride and admit what art you really like. The rules: you can put any five works of art into your bag before departing for a desert island, but you have to choose right now. No stalling or dithering–the armies of the night are pounding on your front door. No posturing–you have to say the first five things that pop into your head, no matter how uncool they may sound. What do you stuff in the bag?

Here are my picks, as of this second:

PAINTING: Arthur Dove, Rain or Snow (scroll down to see it)

MUSIC: Maurice Ravel, Piano Concerto in G (slow movement, performed by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli)

NOVEL: James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

FILM: Roman Polanski, Chinatown

POP SONG: Lucinda Williams, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

Your turn.

(1) I ordered a copy of this Alex Katz lithograph from a London print dealer three weeks ago. It hadn’t reached me as of last Thursday, so I sent the dealer an e-mail asking if anything was wrong. He wrote back to say that he’d been having quite a bit of trouble of late with slow deliveries to the United States, adding that the reason must be that the U.S. Postal Service had been “Bushed.”

(2) When I arrived at Washington’s Union Station on Friday, I jumped in a cab and asked the driver to take me to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He looked puzzled, asked me if I knew where it was, scratched his head, then had an epiphany. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I believe I do know that one, but nobody ever wants to go there–I take somebody there maybe once a year.”