Archives for August 26, 2004

I’m in The Wall Street Journal today, a special midweek appearance–I wrote a piece for the Leisure & Arts page, a short tribute to Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, and David Raksin, all of whom died recently. Here’s part of what I said:

Three important American composers died this past month. Had they written operas or symphonies, their deaths would have been front-page news. Instead, Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith and David Raksin scored Hollywood films, and so they never got the respect they deserved. (Raksin’s New York Times obituary, for instance, was written not by a music critic but by Aljean Harmetz, an entertainment reporter.) Yet their best work was fully deserving of critical attention….

Why weren’t these talented men more widely known in their lifetimes? Because the art they practiced was long treated as an ugly stepchild by classical music critics, most of whom took it for granted that anyone who chose to work in Hollywood had sold his soul to the devil of commercialism for the highest possible price. Even a distinguished, solidly established European composer like Mikl

I almost forgot to mention that Karrin Allyson, one of my very favorite jazz singers, is appearing through September 5 at Le Jazz au Bar, New York’s newest high-end nightclub. She’s touring in support of her latest CD, Wild for You, which contains subtly reworked jazz interpretations of 13 songs by Elton John, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Carly Simon, and Cat Stevens–the AM-radio music Allyson grew up on in the days before she discovered and embraced jazz. Like everything she does, it’s purest pleasure.

Here’s part of what I wrote in the Washington Post about her last album, In Blue:

Outside of moving from Kansas City to Manhattan a couple of years ago, Allyson (whose first name is pronounced KAH-rin) has consistently refused to play by The Rules. Yes, she’s good-looking, but she doesn’t glam up for gigs or pretend to be fresh out of college. She’s a fully grown woman who has been making records her way for a decade now, singing what she likes and working with players she knows, shimmying up the greasy pole of renown inch by inch. The two Grammy nominations she received for last year’s “Ballads: Remembering John Coltrane” suggest that the rest of the world is finally starting to catch up with her–and about time, too.

Allyson has a slender, smallish voice, precisely focused and pleasingly rough around the edges, whose distinctive timbre is at once plaintive and engaging. You can tell she knows all about life’s ups and downs, and this album is more about the latter than the former. Don’t be misled by the title, though, for “In Blue” isn’t an all-blues program. As always, Allyson has cast her net far more widely and imaginatively, choosing 13 songs that range in tone from the sophisticated sorrow of Bobby Troup’s “The Meaning of the Blues” to the no-nonsense earthiness of “Evil Gal Blues,” an old Dinah Washington specialty (“I’ll burn you like a candle, honey, I’m gonna burn you at both ends”). In between these two stylistic bookends is plenty of room for every other imaginable shade of blue, including a pair of dark-hued standards, “How Long Has This Been Going On?” and “Angel Eyes,” that fit the prevailing mood perfectly.

Go–and if you’re there on Saturday, look for me.

I’m not funny, and wish I were. Witty, yes, sometimes, and I’m pretty good at making an audience laugh when lecturing (a situation in which the prevailing standards are admittedly fairly low). But plain old drop-dead funny? Absolutely not. The only time I ever brought down a house was when I contrived to be hit in the face with a cream pie in front of an audience of pubescent classmates who thought they were going to be forced to listen to me give a prize-winning speech as part of a talent contest. That stopped the show. Short of such skullduggery, though, I lacked the power to impose my personality on a crowd, and still do. As a naughty but honest colleague said of Leopold Godowsky, a legendary turn-of-the-century pianist who was miraculous in the studio but dull in the concert hall, my aura extends for about five feet. This incapacity has made it hard for me to be funny and impossible for me to be either an actor or a conductor, two professions toward which I was briefly drawn when I was young and foolish.

I also wish I were graceful. Gerry Mulligan wrote a song called “Just Want to Sing and Dance Like Fred Astaire,” which has always been my own vain wish. Instead, I suffer from a chronic condition dubbed Inanimate Object Trouble by the playwright George S. Kaufman, who suffered from the same disorder. I’m a dropper and a tripper, and I don’t need anything to fall over in order to fall–my shadow is quite sufficient, thanks. This problem I attribute to my lifelong left-handedness. I once read a study whose authors concluded that most of the variance in the lifespans of lefties and righties (we die younger) can be explained by the fact that left-handed people are accident-prone. It seems we’re more likely to crash cars, cut off our pedal extremities with power saws, and other such domestic tragedies. The study went on to suggest that our curious penchant for self-destruction is due to the fact that the world is arranged to suit the convenience of right-handed people, a hard truth I learned the first time I picked up a pair of scissors.

Whatever the reason, I gave up on sports as fast as I could, and never made serious attempts to master any manual skills other than typing and playing assorted musical instruments. At the former I was and am a virtuoso. At the latter I was solidly competent without touching the high C of maximal dexterity. I got work as a jazz musician because I had a good ear, knew all the old standards, and was a reliable sideman, but I never did get to be much of a soloist. What I liked to do was keep perfect time, which is more a function of mind over matter than anything else. Hence I fell in love at an early age with Count Basie’s original rhythm section–four unshowily graceful cats who did nothing but swing like the wind–and when I discovered the records they made on their own in 1938, minus the Basie band, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. If I could have played music like that for a living, I’d have never become a writer. Alas, jazz in 1978 was completely different from jazz in 1938, and in any case I was too bourgeois to spend my life playing music in gin joints until sunup.

Having ruled out all possible alternatives, I succumbed to the inevitable and became a critic, which turned out to be what I should have done in the first place. Never since then have I doubted that I made the right choice. Instead of acting in boulevard comedies, playing jazz in nightclubs, dancing pas de deux with sylph-like women, or tossing off John Marin-like watercolors with a dazzling twist of the wrist, I write appreciatively of those who do. I can’t imagine anything more delightful than to write a profile of a little-known artist that makes him better known, and I know from experience that my abilities in this line of work are cherished by those who’ve been on the receiving end of them.

So no, I’m not frustrated–I’m fulfilled. I know exactly how lucky I am. I adore my work. And would I give it up in a heartbeat in order to be able to dance like Fred Astaire, or play piano like Count Basie? Please don’t embarrass me by asking.

On the other hand, Astaire probably would have cut off his left foot in order to write songs like Irving Berlin, a thought I find oddly comforting. I don’t know about Basie, though. If he had any thwarted aspirations, I’m not aware of them. He might well have been one of the few people in the world who was perfectly happy to do what he did and be who he was, and I think he would have been right to be. That’s the way his music sounds–an eternal present in which no one is tempted to take thought for the morrow.

Basie’s divinely carefree music reminds me of something I wrote about George Balanchine in All in the Dances:

Having come so close to death at so young an age, he determined instead to spend the rest of his days living in the present. It was a resolution from which he never wavered. Of all his oft-repeated refrains, the most familiar was Do it now! “Why are you stingy with yourselves?” he would ask his dancers. “Why are you holding back? What are you saving for—for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.” His ruthlessly practical approach to running a dance company was rooted in the hard-won knowledge that his next breath might be his last. He worked within the means available at the moment, using them to the fullest, never wasting time longing for better dancers or a bigger budget: “A dog is going to remain a dog, even if you want to have a cat; you’re not going to have a cat, so you better take care of the dog because that’s what you’re going to have.” He ran his private life along the same lines: when he had money, he spent it lavishly, on himself and others, and when he didn’t, he lived frugally. “You know,” he said, “I am really a dead man. I was supposed to die and I didn’t, and so now everything I do is second chance. That is why I enjoy every day. I don’t look back. I don’t look forward. Only now.” This dance, this meal, this woman: that was his world.

And yes, I wish I could be like that, too. It’s the spiritual equivalent of physical gracefulness. But at least it’s a habit of being to which even the clumsy and unfunny among us can aspire. Not in this lifetime will I do a gargouillade or play Beethoven’s Op. 111 like Artur Schnabel, but I can try to live in the moment today, and try again tomorrow and the day after that–and while I’m at it, I can listen to Count Basie all I want. I can think of worse bargains.

What, still alive at twenty-two,
A clean, upstanding chap like you?
Sure, if your throat ’tis hard to slit,
Slit your girl’s, and swing for it.

So, when the spilt ink of the night
Spreads o’er the blotting-pad of light,
Lads whose job is still to do
Shall whet their knives, and think of you.

Hugh Kingsmill (“after A.E. Housman”), The Table of Truth

Do this:

(1) Go here.

(2) Scroll down to the link that says “Northwest Passage.”

(3) Read what Lileks says.

(4) Click on the link, which will cause your computer to download an mp3 file containing Woody Herman’s 1946 recording of “Northwest Passage.”

(5) Crank up the volume really loud.

(6) Enjoy yourself.

Optional extra-credit assignment:

(7) Read “Elegy for the Woodchopper,” the chapter about Herman in A Terry Teachout Reader.

On one leg of my delightful recent vacation (about which more soon) I was close enough to the northern border to be able to listen to CBC Radio One, where I heard an installment of a miniseries called “50 Tracks”. Proceeding one decade at a time, the show’s host Jian Ghomeshi and his guests are picking the fifty essential songs of the 20th century. Last week’s show covered the 1980s, which yielded:

1. “Billie Jean” [Michael Jackson]

2. “With or Without You” [U2]

3. “Message” [Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five]

4. “Fight the Power” [Public Enemy]

5. In a tie, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” [Joy Division] and “When Doves Cry” [Prince]

The runners-up were Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue” and “Hungry Like the Wolf” by Duran Duran.

Now, I’m a child of the 80s, and it’s the popular music from this decade that stirs up the strongest raw feeling in me. The music I love from these years, and the music I hate, rings up equally high readings on the nostalgia meter. All of it, the good and the bad, sounds affectingly like my life once upon a time. Somebody, I can’t remember who, said “memory is the key to everything, but with it comes nostalgia, which is the key to nothing,” a dictum I sort of loathe but grudgingly credit–although, then again, I don’t think my own attachment to nostalgia is an illusion that it will unlock or illuminate anything. To flip-flop yet some more, maybe nostalgia is the key to lists like this. In other words, it’s the key to something–just not something meaningful.

It turns out that “essential” is a tricky criterion to pin down, though not a bad one if you take it, as I do, as connoting influence and quality in roughly equal parts, along with a soupçon of, you know, je ne sais quoi (this is where the nostalgia comes in). By these standards, there’s nothing on the Radio One’s 1980s list that absolutely begs to be lopped off, and yet it’s an oddly unsatisfying laundry list. Is it trying to be too representative? Is it too focused on including essential artists at the expense of great songs? Surely Michael Jackson and Prince need to be there, but the panelists’ cases for including these particular songs from their respective 1980s oeuvres carried a whiff of compromise and overthinking, as though the songs were bundles of abstract qualities that needed to be checked off.

And though it may be awfully lowest-common-denominator of me, I have to question how Joy Division ended up in the top 5 while Duran Duran, a single well-chosen chord of whose music elicits a positively Pavlovian response in everyone I know who hit 16 during the 80s, didn’t make the cut. A friend raised the similar question of Madonna (if she cracked our list, we agreed, it would be with “Material Girl”).

And so the CBC’s list does its proper work: starting some good snarling brawls. (OK, I’m not much of a snarler, but you get my drift.) Feel free to send some fighting words. I’ll also accept predictions for the top five from the 90s, a decade that sounds altogether fuzzier to my by-then-post-teenage ears. I’ll go ahead and shoot the fish in a barrel that is “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” but beyond that I’m stumped.

Cinetrix is recommending to New Yorkers a BAM film series that starts today, I Can Hear the Guitar: Selected by Olivier Assayas. You should, of course, always heed the Cinetrix’s directives. Much like Dr. Science, she knows more than you do. But in this case even more than usual.

The series slate includes a movie I adore and long to see again, Assayas’s own Cold Water. Alas, it’s a hard movie to get your hands on. Originally made for French television as a sort of after-school special pour sophisticates, it’s a compact, eloquent, and utterly affecting little mood piece. Here’s BAM’s pr