Archives for May 20, 2004

Wednesday was brisk, but I kept my promise to myself
and made room for a little art:

– I read two more Isaac Bashevis Singer stories, “The Gentleman from Cracow” and “The Wife Killer,” over lunch. As I mentioned the other day, I’m going to be writing an essay about Singer later this summer for Commentary, the magazine in which many of the stories reprinted in the Library of America’s forthcoming three-volume Singer set originally appeared. I love Singer, but I’ve never written anything about him, and I thought it might be both amusing and oddly appropriate for a small-town WASP to do so for the famously (though never exclusively) Jewish Commentary, in whose pages I normally hold forth on musical matters. I told Neal Kozodoy, the editor, that I wanted to call the piece “A Goy Looks at Singer.” Needless to say, we won’t, but the piece is already starting to take shape in my head, and I think it’s going to be good–and funny.

– I watched a self-edited version of Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night on my trusty DVR, zooming through the dumb stuff (and there’s a lot of it) to concentrate on the scenes in which Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger appear together. Anybody who knows anything about the Deep South knows how absurdly implausible Steiger was in the role of a southern sheriff. Even so, he could be a hugely exciting actor in his overripe way, and between them, he and Poitier managed to muster up quite a bit of on-screen chemistry. My finger was never far from the fast-forward key, but I still enjoyed myself.

– Now playing on iTunes, naturally: Louis Armstrong’s “Weather Bird,” with Earl Hines in the hottest possible pursuit. Has there ever been a better record of anything? (It’s been reissued a hundred times, but if you don’t already have it in your CD collection, your best bet is to order a copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1923-1934, Sony’s wonderful Armstrong box set.)

I’m off to Washington as soon as I shower and pack. I’ll be back some time tomorrow, and I’ll try to work in a little pre-weekend blogging before I head out again to catch the first press preview of Bebe Neuwirth’s one-woman Kurt Weill show.

Later.

Last night I went down to the New School for a panel discussion presented by the Jazz Journalists Association. Those of you who know me are probably wondering whether I’ve slipped a cog, since I loathe panel discussions and never join professional associations, but this get-together was different. The JJA invited representatives from the Institute of Jazz Studies, the
Louis Armstrong House and Archives, and the
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to talk about their archival holdings and how jazz journalists can make use of them for research purposes.

As you may recall, my next book after All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine will be a full-scale biography of Louis Armstrong (the working title is Still Wailing), on which I expect to spend the next five years or so. Once I get All in the Dances put to bed early next month, I’ll start on the Armstrong book at last. I recently received a small but timely grant to hire a research assistant–a luxury I’ve never had–and I chose Steph Steward, a student of journalism at Rutgers/Newark, where I had the pleasure of teaching a course in criticism for two years. Since Steph was one of my brightest pupils and the Rutgers/Newark library houses the Institute of Jazz Studies, it seemed foreordained that she should spend the summer doing my preliminary research-related dirty work.

When I got the e-mail announcing last night’s panel discussion, it struck me that it might be a good way to introduce Steph to the archives where she’ll be spending much of her time for the next three months. Little did I know how good it would be. Peggy Alexander, curator of the Armstrong Archives, gave a brilliant multimedia presentation on the marvels therein, including audio clips from Armstrong’s personal tape archive; Dan Morgenstern, the celebrated jazz critic and Armstrong authority who runs the Institute of Jazz Studies, talked at fascinating length about the IJS and its holdings. In the audience was the jazz singer-bassist Carline Ray, who knew Armstrong (she was married to Luis Russell, who led Armstrong’s big band in the Thirties and Forties).

By evening’s end, Steph was so excited that I thought I might have to sedate her–she was ready to start sifting through reels of microfilm that very night. But, then, I was excited, too. I got the idea to write the Armstrong book a year and a half ago, and as soon as my agent sold the proposal to Harcourt, I put it out of my mind. I had to. Between All in the Dances and my new career as a part-time drama critic for The Wall Street Journal, I already had more than enough on my plate. I knew that once I started thinking about Armstrong in earnest, I’d quickly become preoccupied, even obsessed, so I made a point of not listening to his music or giving any thought to the book I’d be writing. Last night, I let myself race my mental engine for the first time.

Louis (everybody calls him that) has meant a great deal to me ever since I was a child. One of my favorite essays in A Terry Teachout Reader is called “Louis Armstrong, Eminent Victorian,” and it was in the course of writing that piece that I became inspired to try my hand at an Armstrong biography. This is how it begins and ends:

My favorite Louis Armstrong anecdote concerns his audience with Pope Paul VI. The Holy Father, so the story goes, asked Armstrong if he and his wife had any children. “No, Daddy,” the trumpeter cheerfully replied, “but we’re still wailing.” Though it seems unlikely that Armstrong said anything quite like that, it is the sort of thing one would have wanted him to say, and the two men did in fact meet at the Vatican in 1968–which is, of course, the real point of the story. They were photographed together, and an unmistakable glint of pleasure can be seen on the Pope’s tired, worn face; as for Armstrong, he looks blissful. Perhaps he was thinking about how far he had come from New Orleans, where he was born in direst poverty in 1901, the bastard child of a fifteen-year-old whore who had no idea that her son would become the most celebrated American musician of the century….

Armstrong’s own moral wholeness was caught in the words his mother spoke to him on her deathbed in 1927: “Son, carry on. You’re a good boy. You treat everybody right, and everybody white and colored loves you. You have a good heart. You can’t miss.” Thirty-seven years later, I saw him for the first time, singing “Hello, Dolly” on The Ed Sullivan Show. I didn’t know who the old man with the ear-to-ear smile was, but I can remember my mother calling me into the living room and saying, “This man won’t be around forever. Someday you’ll be glad you saw him.” That was in 1964, back when the public schools in my home town were still segregated, two decades after a black man was dragged from our city jail, hauled through the streets at the end of a rope, and set afire. Yet even in a place where such a monstrous evil had once been wrought, white people came to love Louis Armstrong–and, just as important, to respect him–not merely for the beauty of the music he made but also for the self-evident goodness of the man who made it.

That great smile, then, was no game face, donned to please the paying customers: it told the truth about the man who wore it, a man who did not repine but returned love for hatred and sought salvation through work. “I think I had a beautiful life,” he said not long before his death in 1971. “I didn’t wish for anything I couldn’t get, and I got pretty near everything I wanted because I worked for it.” It would be hard to imagine a more suitable epitaph for jazz’s most eminent Victorian.

Who wouldn’t want to write a book about a man like that? H.L. Mencken, George Balanchine, and now Louis Armstrong: it’s a pretty good American trilogy, as American trilogies go, and now the time has come to start sketching the third panel. Well do I know that the hard part is ahead of me, but even so, I can hardly wait to get All in the Dances wrapped up. Another long, straight road is stretched out in front of me, and I’m ready to start running again.

For most of my life, I’ve kept my pens and pencils in a coffee mug. It used to be a Miami City Ballet mug, but I knocked that one off my desk and broke it a few weeks ago. Now it’s a sturdy white number which sports a colorful (and accurate) self-caricature of the one and only Cup of Chicha, one of “About Last Night”‘s favorite bloggers. You can purchase this item, and others no less fetching, by going here.

While I’m on the subject, you may not know that Nathalie Chicha, the blogger in question, has just launched a second blog called Another, which I added to the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column last week. Here’s the mission statement of “Another“:

This is an online space for my thoughts on depression and literature. My hope is that, in assembling an honest account of my depression and by providing relevant excerpts from writers’ autobiographies and psychiatric literature, I can offer readers moments of identification that undermine the loneliness and shame of mental illness. And I suspect that blogs can contribute to the public discourse on depression in ways that more traditional representations of depression can’t; since a blog is continually updated, its representation of depression is less likely to hide or mitigate contradictions and ambiguities, and more likely to challenge practiced wisdom and “pop psychology” simplifications….

To which I can only add that speaking as a chronic writer who has his own psychic ups and downs, I think this is a great idea, thoughtfully and imaginatively executed (as if I’d have expected anything else from Chicha).

Take a look–and buy a mug!

“Try to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style.”

Wolcott Gibbs, “Theory and Practice of Editing
New Yorker Articles”