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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Start here

August 10, 2004 by Terry Teachout

A reader writes:

Could you please name five jazz CDs the beginning listener should own?

Another reader writes:

I have loved watching dance over the years, but have almost no idea of what goes where and why. Could you please recommend four or five books that might give me a formal and historical introduction to the art?

I love e-mail like this, and I never get tired of answering it.


To Reader No. 1, here are five CDs containing music that I listen to often, all of it jazz but otherwise extremely varied in style:


– The Essential Louis Armstrong (Sony). A brand-new two-CD set by the greatest of all jazz musicians, not perfectly chosen but full of good things and easy to find.


– Duke Ellington, Masterpieces 1926-1949 (Proper). An unusually low-priced four-CD imported box set that contains most of Ellington’s best pre-LP recordings.


– Ken Burns Jazz Collection: The Definitive Charlie Parker (Sony). An exceptionally good single-disc introduction to bebop’s key figure.


– Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (Sony). The most popular and influential jazz album of the Fifties.


– Pat Metheny, Bright Size Life (ECM). One of the earliest and most successful attempts to “fuse” jazz and rock. It still sounds fresh.


If you don’t like any of these recordings, you probably won’t like jazz.


Reader No. 2 should read these books, in this order:


– Robert Greskovic, Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving the Ballet (Hyperion). The best introductory book about ballet ever written, by the much-admired dance critic of The Wall Street Journal.


– Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (Yale). A comprehensive, well-written, impeccably reliable history of ballet and modern dance.


– Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry (Yale). The only available collection of writings by the most important dance critic of the century.


– Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker: An Arlene Croce Reader (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A superbly edited one-volume collection of reviews by the outstanding dance critic of the postwar era.


And, if I do say so myself:


– Terry Teachout, All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine (Harcourt). A short book about the greatest of all choreographers, written specifically for those who have either just discovered Balanchine’s ballets or are eager to do so. It’s out in November.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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