Archives for April 2006

“I do not agree with Samuel Butler’s remark, ‘I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.’ I would amend this saying: nobody ever wrote well who at some time or other did not take pains with his style. In fact, until writing has by thought and practice become unselfconscious, it cannot achieve style–and by style I mean a natural easy expression which is not anonymous.”

Neville Cardus, Autobiography

I wrote four thousand more words of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong on Thursday, which puts me within spitting distance of finishing yet another chapter. I think that’s just about enough for one week, don’t you? I’m going to try to get the fourth chapter locked up today, after which I’ll put the book aside for a couple of weeks and think about other things.

Here’s one more little taste before I go:

“Gut Bucket Blues,” the third Hot Five recording, made the biggest splash, for obvious reasons. It starts out with a twangy single-string banjo solo over which Armstrong unexpectedly speaks a few cheery words of encouragement in the same gravelly voice first heard on record a year before in “Everybody Loves My Baby”: “Aw, play that thing, Mr. St. Cyr, lawd! You know you can do it–everybody from New Or-leans can really do that thing. Hey, hey!” He puts his cornet to his lips and starts to blow, and the rest of the band comes tumbling in behind him. They play two collectively improvised blues choruses, after which the other musicians solo, with Armstrong good-naturedly introducing each one in turn: “Ah, whip that thing, Miss Lil! Whip it, kid! Aw, pick that piano, yeah…Ah, blow it, Kid Ory, blow it, kid…Blow that thing, Mr. Johnny Dodds! Ah, toot that clarinet, boy.” Then Armstrong takes center stage with a simple, penetrating solo that returns again and again to a flatted third–the same “blue” note around which King Oliver built the first chorus of his “Dipper Mouth Blues” solo. The other horn players come back for a final ensemble chorus, to which Armstrong appends a two-bar break prefaced by one of his patented upward rips.

That’s all there is to “Gut Bucket Blues,” and according to Johnny St. Cyr it didn’t take much longer to come up with the number than it did to play it. Elmer Fearn, the producer of the session, asked for a blues, and St. Cyr offered to start it off with a unaccompanied banjo solo: “So we made a short rehearsal and cut the number. When Mr. Fern [sic] asked, ‘What shall we name it?,’ Louis thought for a while and then said, ‘Call it The Gut Bucket.’ Louis could not explain the meaning of the name. He said it just came to him. But I will explain it. In the fish markets in New Orleans the fish cleaners keep a large bucket under the table where they clean the fish, and as they do this they rake the guts in this bucket. Thence The Gut Bucket, which makes it a low down blues.”

In 1966 Armstrong would tell a reporter that “all songs display my life somewhat, and you got to be thinking and feeling about something as you watch them notes and phrase that music–got to see the life of the song.” The same thing, it seems, was already true in 1925: his music even then was a self-portrait, a reflection of his vast experience of the world. He might well have said, with Montaigne, that “I have no more made my book than my book has made me: ’tis a book consubstantial with the author, of a peculiar design, a parcel of my life.”

That’s all, folks. See you Monday!

I’m in a foul mood in this morning’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I hold forth on Lisa Kron’s Well and David Marshall Grant’s Pen:

No theatrical season can call itself complete without a new play about a weird mother. This week there are two, and not surprisingly, they bear certain family resemblances. Both have monosyllabic titles, both contain elements of fantasy, both are graced with splendid performances by the actresses who play the ladies in question–and neither is any good, though one is a good deal more ambitious than the other….

It’s a bit more than a joke to say that a performance artist is a standup comic who got a grant. Not only is Ms. Kron’s onstage manner exceedingly nightclubby, right down to the ingratiating smirks she fires off at the audience every half-minute or so, but the program reveals that she got quite a few grants in support of the writing and production of “Well.” Alas, nobody bothered to teach her how to transform a monologue into a play….

Except for Jayne Houdyshell’s performance, I didn’t like anything about “Well.” (I didn’t laugh once.) Still, I freely admit that as awful as it is, it’s more interesting than David Marshall Grant’s “Pen,” the latest in Playwrights Horizons’ fast-growing string of excessively similar plays about family life. Here we get such staples of kitchen-sink dramaturgy as the vinegar-tongued, self-pitying mother (J. Smith-Cameron) whom multiple sclerosis has put in a wheelchair, the whiny ex-husband (Reed Birney) who just happens to be a shrink, the angry young teenage son (Dan McCabe) whose shoplifting of Christmas presents is a cry for help…but must I go on? The only thing missing is a working stove…

No link, so if you want to inspect the rest of the carnage, buy a copy of today’s Journal and read the whole thing, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with on-the-spot access to the complete text of my review, along with plenty of extra art-related coverage.

“Old age is very strange. It has a kind of aloofness. It’s lost so much, that you can hardly look upon the old as quite human any more. But sometimes you have a feeling that they’ve acquired a sort of new sense that tells them things that we can never know.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Narrow Corner

On Wednesday I entered that state of grace that occasionally comes to biographers so deeply immersed in their material that for a brief time they are capable of simultaneously holding everything they know about a subject in their head, ready for instantaneous access at any point. Between morning and evening I piled three thousand brightly polished words of the fourth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. As of this hour, I’ve finished writing roughly a third of the book.

Here’s a taste of what I wrote today:

What is most striking about Armstrong’s solos on “Shanghai Shuffle” and “Copenhagen,” and the many others that he contributed to Fletcher Henderson’s recordings throughout 1924 and 1925, is that they are solos, brief but expressively potent monologues in which he steps into the spotlight and speaks his musical piece, more often than not accompanied by the rhythm section alone. He had been raised, after all, in a very different kind of tradition, one in which it was taken for granted that the individual artist, however gifted, would willingly subordinate himself to the needs of the omnipresent ensemble. In New Orleans solo playing was the exception, not the rule, and even after moving to Chicago Joe Oliver would continue to stress collective improvisation over individual solos, his own included. In Albert Nicholas’ words, he “didn’t want to hear any one person, [he] wanted to hear the whole band. He wanted everyone to blend together.” Armstrong, like Sidney Bechet, knew that tradition intimately, but by 1924 both men were moving in a different direction, having concluded, consciously or not, that it could no longer accommodate their need for personal expression. The more Armstrong grew as a player, the harder he found it to stay within the narrow bounds of the time-honored New Orleans style. He still loved Papa Joe–he always would–but he wanted to be heard.

I hope I have sense enough to lay off for a day and take it easy, though it’s tempting to keep on forging ahead. In the immortal words of Crash Davis, “A player on a streak has to respect the streak.” On the other hand, I forgot to go to the gym on Wednesday. In fact, I almost forgot to eat. (Could it possibly have snowed in Manhattan today, or was that just something I imagined while in the throes of composition?)

What I really ought to do tomorrow is walk across Central Park to the Frick Collection and pay a visit to Goya’s Last Works, which I still haven’t gotten around to seeing (it’s up through May 14). Maybe I will. Or maybe I’ll succumb to the temptation to put in a little more work on Hotter Than That. Somewhere in my mind it’s November of 1925, and Louis Armstrong has just caught the morning train from New York to Chicago. In less than two weeks he’ll be going into a recording studio with his wife Lil to record “My Heart,” “Yes! I’m in the Barrel,” and “Gut Bucket Blues,” the first three sides by the Hot Five….

Enough already! I’m going to get some sleep, and tomorrow morning I’ll go to the gym. The rest can wait.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 9)

– Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)

– Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter and implicit sexual content, reviewed here)

– The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes July 2, reviewed here)

– Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Defiance (drama, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, extended through June 4)

– I Love You Because (musical, R, sexual content, reviewed here)

– Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)

– The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here, closes Sunday and moves to Broadway April 18)

– A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop (one-woman show, PG, some adult subject matter, reviewed here)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:

– Abigail’s Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Saturday)

– Bernarda Alba (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

“‘It’s funny, I’ve never met a meaner crook, or a man who had less idea of decency, and yet he honestly believes in God. And hell, too. But it never strikes him that he may go there. Other people are going to suffer for their sins and serve ’em damn well right. But he’s a stout fellow, he’s all right, and when he does the dirty on a friend it isn’t of any importance; it’s what anyone would do under the circumstances, and God isn’t going to hold that up against him. At first I thought he was just a hypocrite. But he isn’t. That’s the odd thing about it.’

“‘It shouldn’t make you angry. The contrast between a man’s professions and his actions is one of the most diverting spectacles that life offers.'”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Narrow Corner

Interesting: Armond White likens Nicole Holofcener’s movies to Whit Stillman’s, approvingly:

Although Nicole Holofcener’s specialty has been showing middle-class white women at loose ends (Walking and Talking, Lovely and Amazing), she has become the small-scale wonder of indie movies not for flattery but because her heroines are seen intimately, concisely and without judgment.

I love both of those movies, but I never thought of them as cousins to Metropolitan et al. There’s something to that. Unfortunately, White doesn’t find Holofcener’s latest, Friends with Money, as penetrating, and he goes so far as to saddle it with what counts in some circles as an ultimate put-down:

So far, Holofcener had avoided the sensibility of a New Yorker short story writer. Now, her biggest film yet is hobbled by vaguely snobbish class desires….

That’s too bad, but I’ll still see anything with Catherine Keener in it. All the more so here since Holofcener has a history of casting Keener in spirited unsympathetic roles, which are truly the actress’s forte. At this point, does anyone remember anything else from Being John Malkovich? I mean besides “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.”