Archives for October 12, 2004

“Corker looked at him sadly. ‘You know, you’ve got a lot to learn about journalism. Look at it this way. News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.'”

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

A lot of people may not know it yet. Hell, a lot of people may never know it. But the couple hundred initiates who saw her perform at Schuba’s in Chicago last month knew it, and now I do too. Here’s the rub: you might have to see her live to fully get the picture.

You can listen to some clips here. They’re a tepid taste of a pale imitation of the real thing, though. Oh, the clips are wonderful; they do bring across how funky, quirky, smart, and eclectic McKeown’s music is. The full recordings are much, much better, however, since McKeown really knows how to put a song together. The pieces are diminished by extraction from the finely crafted wholes.

But what you really need to do, if you want an instant new pop hero, is catch McKeown live. If you live in New York, Boston, California, or a few other lucky places, you can do that in the near future. When I went to the Chicago show in September, having sampled her work on line, I wasn’t ready for the full force of McKeown’s charisma and talent. She turned out to be everything I was expecting: funky, quirky, smart, and eclectic. But she was something else over and above all that: the lady was fierce. Fiercely energetic, fiercely commanding, fiercely original. We were all in her pocket from the first number, and increasingly ecstatic throughout. Afterward she resumed human proportions, shuttling around the floor, chatting up lingerers and signing CDs. Her stuff has been in heavy–almost exclusive–rotation chez OGIC ever since.

McKeown is an omnivore whose music is all over the place, borrowing from jazz, bluegrass, blues, bubblegum, even Tin Pan Alley. Her lyrics are beguiling, evocative, sometimes mysterious, but never simply obscure. The insanely infectious “Born to Hum” muses wittily–and articulately–on inarticulateness: “Once in the spring of my twenty-fourth year / I had nothing to say / With a dangling promise, a terrible past, / I threw all the words away: / We were born to hum.” My favorite song in the show was one that will appear on the album she plans to release next year, a song about, to paraphrase her introduction, the romance of the adaptation of birds’ bodies to flight. It comes from the point of view of the birds, who have “air in my bones / where the marrow should be / but what I lack for guts and blood / i make up for in dreams.” It’s a playful, tender little marvel of a song.

Come to think of it, McKeown’s distinctive voice reminds me a bit of a particularly inspired bird’s. It’s lithe and intimate, sweetly knowing, and, as Terry pointed out when he listened to Grand with me during his recent visit, a little offhand. Her singing is decorated with inventive little flourishes that sound new and natural all at once. In “James!” she sings, “James, I told you I could be delu-xe,” and the unorthodox word division, the emphatic “xe,” make the word her own. Some of her songs remind me too of an old guilty pleasure from my twenties, the Aussie band Frent

So far I’ve received reports of bookstore sightings of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine in Nashville, Durham, N.C., and now (courtesy of fellow blogger George Hunka) this one from deepest Brooklyn:

Just a word to let you know your Balanchine book sits, prettily and face-out, on the Dance shelves at the Park Slope Barnes & Noble this afternoon.

Why delay? Buy it today.

From the London Observer (by way of The Wall Street Journal‘s Best of the Web Today):

In his fading years, the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright embarked on a final grand project. Invited in 1957 by King Faisal of Iraq to design a new opera house, Wright expanded the brief into a plan for Baghdad complete with museums, parks, university and authentic bazaar. Dispensing with his ‘prairie style’, he peppered the scheme with domes, spires and ziggurats.

The 1958 revolution meant that none of it was built. But the ever-resourceful Wright simply offered the design to a new client. And today, the Baghdad opera house is the Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium at Arizona State University: an example of Wright’s versatility and the forum for next week’s presidential debate. Under the arches of a lost Iraqi skyline, George W Bush and John Kerry will meet in debate for the final time….

Talk about unlikely coincidences! Alas, I’m embarrassed to say I hadn’t noticed this one–and I know a pretty fair amount about Frank Lloyd Wright.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Having gone to Arizona State as an undergrad (I grew up in Phoenix), I spent a lot of time at the Gammage building for rehearsals (in very weird-shaped rehearsal rooms, the layout of which was a function of Wright’s obsession with circles at the time) and performances (I had the fun of being in an upper-balcony-brass-choir for a performance of the Berlioz Requiem). The most significant peculiarity of Gammage are the sweeping ramps that stretch out from the mezzanine into the vast parking lot in which the building is situated. (Everything in Arizona is situated in the middle of vast parking lots). The ramps are never actually used (even though they might be seen as the most ambitious expression of the noble impulse behind the Americans With Disabilities Act). So why are they there? It’s the legacy of the building’s Baghdad origin–the opera house was to have been built on an island in the Tigris and the Gammage ramps are truncated versions of what were to have been pedestrian bridges connecting the building to the shores on every side.

A reader writes:

Just wanted to write to tell you how much I enjoy your blog and your
writing. I took the TT Reader
with me to Yellowstone: sitting by
Yellowstone lake, enjoying the view of the mountains, and reading about
ballet, modern dance, jazz, literature, etc. struck me as a triumph of
aesthetic appreciation. Thanks.

Right back at you.

– From twang twang twang, the blog of Helen Radice, a British harpist:

The passionate attachment you feel when first you discover a work of art is precious: youth orchestra concerts are so great because they are ardent (I remember in mine, a shaven-headed fifteen year old chap getting the Paul Gasgoigne award at the end of the course for crying during the Alpine Symphony). It is also easily lost. Professional music-making is gruelling. Driving through the night when you’re so tired after a concert you have to wind the window right down in January so you keep awake; red-eye flights and a lunchtime concert in Barcelona, then straight back home and teaching all day the next; pouring energy every spare moment into generating your own income or chasing those who have “forgotten” to pay you; never being sick or injured; never having time to work on your favourite repertoire because you are doing outdoor prom dates in Northumberland in October. This is why musicians can look so famously miserable on the concert platform because everybody is just so bored: another Beethoven 5; once again the 1812; I’m just going to make this contemporary music up because I can’t be arsed to practice it and I know everyone else will be so busy struggling with their own parts they won’t notice me miming at the back….

Do I ever know what Helen means, and then some. I still have horrifying nightmare-gig memories from my bass-playing days in Kansas City–as well as memories of occasional evenings of pure bliss when the band was in the pocket, my instrument seemed to be playing itself, and all I had to do was stand there and grin like an idiot. Those are the ones you live for.

– From Footnotes, the blog of West Coast dance critic Rachel Howard, who recently saw New York City Ballet dance in Orange County:

We have entered an age of the Balanchine smorgasbord. You can walk down the buffet line and pick your favorite Jewels as Miami City Ballet’s, your favorite Stravinsky Violin Concerto as San Francisco Ballet’s; your favorite Serenade as Suzanne Farrell Ballet’s. You can make a case for preferring these renditions based not on uniformity of technique, but on subtle yet crucial shadings of interpretation, intention, and mood. Whatever your argument, the conditions for it remain the same: NYCB no longer holds the monopoly of authority on how these ballets should be danced. Whether it relinquished this authority or whether that authority was bound to fade during the Balanchine diaspora remains, to me, an open question.

Perhaps to keepers of New York City Ballet history, this new laissez-faire Balanchine market is but another symptom of the sad slide they lament. But to those who came of age after Balanchine’s death, it is impossible to mourn a golden age you didn’t witness. Freed from memories of New York City Ballet under Balanchine, I was delighted to discover new dancers and to see new choreographic details in ballets, such as Rubies, that I had previously seen only other companies perform….

This shrewd observation reminds me of something I wrote in the last chapter of All in the Dances:

No less noteworthy, though, are the numerous ballet companies, most of them based in America, which are led by New York City Ballet alumni. These “Balanchine companies,” as they are known, include San Francisco Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Miami City Ballet, and Carolina Ballet. All dance Balanchine’s ballets constantly and for the most part convincingly, and by the Nineties, many New York-based dancegoers had begun to wonder whether the city long known as “the dance capital of the world” was now no more than primus inter pares in the decentralized world of post-Balanchine ballet….

“You know, these are my ballets,” Balanchine told Rosemary Dunleavy, New York City Ballet’s ballet mistress. “In the years to come they will be rehearsed by other people. They will be danced by other people. But no matter what, they are still my ballets.” Of all the self-contradictory things he said about his work, that one seems to me closest to the truth. In the years since I saw my first Barocco, I have taken countless friends to see their first Balanchine ballets, in New York and elsewhere, and watched them weep at the sight of blurry, infirm performances far removed from the way such works look when lovingly set by first-string r