Archives for February 17, 2005

A reader passes on this quote from Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony and one of the artists I admire most:

For seventeen years, I lived in New York. It was a wonderful adventure, a great part of my life. But, after a while, it began to bother me that the whole purpose of living in those concrete canyons–the world of right angles–was all the cultural events that you could take in. That somehow seemed to put a lot of pressure on the cultural events. Unless you have attended three operas and five ballets and six new restaurants this week, you’re not keeping up. I found that people taking in these events weren’t thinking about them, but they were sure listing them. There was a lot of “have you seen this,” but not enough of “what was this like for you?” As I reach this advanced age [sixty], the luxury of having time to think, to savor it, has become important to me.

The quote was new to me, but the sentiment wasn’t. It’s something I think about often. (Well, fairly often.) New York is a cultural echo chamber, and it’s noisy inside. Especially if you do what I do for a living, you’re always aware that there’s exciting stuff going on every day, and you feel compelled to try to see and hear as much of it as you possibly can, since that’s the whole point of living here. Of course New York is full of wonderful people, too–I’ve never had so many good friends as I do right now–but we’re all here for the same reason, which is to be as close to the center of things as we can get. No doubt there are also plenty of hermits in Manhattan, but I tend not to run into them at intermission.

I don’t claim to be the most spiritual person in the world, but I’m very much aware of the dangers of living in a place that puts so many obstacles in the path of contemplation. Last year I posted an almanac entry by Santiago Ramon y Caj

“Thought works in silence, so does virtue. One might erect statues to silence.”

Thomas Carlyle, diary entry (September 1830)

We’ve been getting a lot of fresh traffic lately (no doubt in part because Peggy Noonan mentioned us this morning in her OpinionJournal column about blogging and bloggers). So if this is your first visit, or even your second, welcome to “About Last Night,” a 24/5 blog hosted by artsjournal.com on which Terry Teachout writes about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, assisted by the pseudonymous Our Girl in Chicago, who writes from…Chicago.

(In case you’re wondering, this blog has two URLs, the one you’re seeing at the top of your screen right now and the easier-to-remember www.terryteachout.com. Either one will bring you here.)

All our postings from the past seven days are visible in reverse chronological order on this page. Terry’s start with “TT,” Our Girl’s with “OGIC.” In addition, the entire contents of this site are archived chronologically and can be accessed by clicking “ALN Archives” at the top of the right-hand column.

You can read more about us, and about “About Last Night,” by going to the right-hand column and clicking in the appropriate places. You’ll also find various other toothsome features there, including our regularly updated Top Five list of things to see, hear, read and otherwise do, links to Terry’s most recent newspaper and magazine articles, and “Sites to See,” a list of links to other blogs and Web sites with art-related content. If you’re curious about the arty part of the blogosphere, you’ve come to the right site: “Sites to See” will point you in all sorts of interesting directions, and all roads lead back to “About Last Night.”

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The only other thing you need to know is that “About Last Night” is about all the arts, high, medium, and low: film, drama, painting, dance, fiction, TV, music of all kinds, whatever. Our interests are wide-ranging, and we think there are plenty of other people like us out there in cyberspace, plus still more who long to wander off their beaten paths but aren’t sure which way to turn.

If you’re one of the above, we’re glad you came. Enjoy. Peruse. Tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com. And come back tomorrow.

I stopped saving printed copies of my published pieces long ago–I threw most of them out when I put together the Teachout Reader–but I recently pried open a half-forgotten cardboard box stuck in the back of a closet and found a short stack of fading newspaper clips, one of which I thought worth calling to your attention.

In 1999 I wrote a piece for the Sunday New York Times called “Loved the LP, Waiting for the CD” in which I listed “13 first-rate jazz albums recorded from 1955 to 1982, none of which has ever appeared on CD in the United States.” Since then, six of the albums I mentioned have finally made it to compact disc: Jim Hall Live!, Bobby Hackett’s Gotham Jazz Scene, Ahmad Jamal’s Chamber Music of the New Jazz, Roger Kellaway Cello Quartet (but not Come to the Meadow, the Cello Quartet’s second album for A&M), Gerry Mulligan Meets Johnny Hodges, and Pee Wee Russell’s New Groove. (A seventh, Stan Getz’s Poetry, was reissued in 2001 but quickly went out of print, though it’s still available as a Japanese import.)

Here are the remaining albums, all of them still in limbo, along with what I wrote about them six years ago:

– Sidney Bechet Has Young Ideas (World Pacific, 1957). “The great New Orleans reedman spent much of the 1950s fronting bands made up of second-rate European musicians, but his last album, a quartet set in which he was accompanied by the French bebop pianist Martial Solal (with ur-bop drummer Kenny Clarke sitting in on six tracks), is a thrilling exception. Bechet always rose to a challenge, and Solal’s probing playing kept him on his toes.”

– JoAnne Brackeen, Keyed In (Columbia, 1979). “Ms. Brackeen’s lone flirtation with a major label produced two albums, both of which went out of print with unseemly haste (Columbia’s late-’70s commitment to serious jazz was momentary) and are now unjustly forgotten. This one, a vibrant collection of originals that teams her with the bassist Eddie Gomez and the drummer Jack DeJohnette, ranks among the most impressive piano trio albums of the past quarter-century.”

– Gary Burton Quartet, Easy as Pie and Picture This (ECM, 1980 and 1982). “Mr. Burton rarely works with horn players, but this superlative quartet, which featured Jim Odgren on alto saxophone, is the strongest working group the vibraphonist has led since the Larry Coryell-Steve Swallow-Roy Haynes lineup of the late ’60s. Why ECM hasn’t reissued its two studio albums is a mystery–they’re both gems.”

– Bud Freeman and Two Guitars, Something Tender (United Artists, 1962). “George Barnes and Carl Kress, who worked together from 1961 until Kress’ death in 1965, were the foremost jazz guitar duo of the postwar era. The tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman joined them in the studio for this exquisite trio album, ideally suited for after-hours listening.”

I’m still hoping to see these classic albums on CD–and Come to the Meadow, too. Is anybody listening out there in reissueland?