“He had sensed that in educated America, humor was the number 1 language, for criticism, passion, even cooking: and he set about learning it with grim intelligence.”
Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison
Archives for April 20, 2004
TT: As others see us (if we’re jerks)
From Edward N. Meyer’s Giant Strides: The Legacy of Dick Wellstood, here’s a list drawn up by Wellstood of the kinds of people who came to hear him play jazz piano at Hanratty’s, the New York saloon where he appeared in the Eighties:
1. The drunken girl who sits on the piano and nuzzles while the boyfriend watches. She plays at you or, as one did once, on the backs of my hands.
2. The singers, about whom the less said the better. It’s always worse after Cardiff has won.
3. They who like it and talk about it at length so that I can’t play.
4. The ones who mumble inaudibly and expect an answer.
5. The shouters from the back of the room.
6. The glowerers who say nothing.
7. The experts, who, after I have just made a success of a Jelly Roll Morton stomp, request a Cy Coleman song with a meaningful glare and a nasty edge to their voice.
8. The critics, who buttonhole me during the intermission and talk of (1) Tony Jackson, J. Russell Robinson, and Cripple Clarence (if I’ve played too modern); or (2) McCoy Tyner, Albert Dailey, and Harold Mabern (if they think I’ve been hopelessly old-fashioned).
9. The know it alls: You’re wonderful, surely you compose–what?
10. The Hotel Carlisle executive types: Must you play like THAT?!!
11. The out & out hostile types: You Stunk.
12. The mistaken nitwit, who chides me for having played “Dark Eyes” badly, when in fact what I played was “Bourbon Street.”
13. The out of place, who wants to sing Irish songs in a room full of jazz lovers and vice versa.
14. The jury: silent, attentive, well versed, determined. It’s important.
15. The jazz lover, who finds shreds of people you never heard of in your playing.
16. The groupie, who just saw Cecil Taylor and knew Peck Kelley well.
17. The total nerds, who compliment me ad infinitum and then ask for the River Seine or the Warsaw Concerto.
If you want to know what manner of music this darkly sardonic wit played when he wasn’t exasperated, get a copy of The Classic Jazz Quartet: Complete Recordings, on which Wellstood figures prominently and beautifully. It’s one of my all-time favorite albums…and not even slightly angry.
TT: Consumables
– No show Monday. In addition, I spent most of the afternoon and evening playing catch-up–answering accumulated e-mail, working on my calendar, running long-deferred errands–and thus wasn’t able to spend much time consuming art. Fortunately, I did have time to start watching John Huston’s The Misfits, which I’d never seen, and I liked the first half-hour a lot better than I’d expected. (I normally can’t stand Arthur Miller, but his dialogue sounds rather more plausible when spoken by Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe.) More as it happens.
UPDATE: It got awful, alas.
– I read most of Sam Staggs’ Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream over lunch and while waiting for an appointment. Alas, it’s too campy and not nearly as detailed as Aljean Harmetz’s Round Up the Usual Suspects, but I liked it well enough.
– Now playing on iTunes: Teddy Wilson’s “Jungle Love,” featuring Bobby Hackett on cornet and Johnny Hodges on alto sax, available on this two-CD set of great Wilson sides from the Thirties and Forties. Talk about suave! Fred Astaire would have approved.