Archives for November 2007

• John Updike on wonky dinosaurs. (via Ed.)
• Daniel Engber to Jonah Lehrer: “Proust was not a neuroscientist.” Engber’s article closes with a call for entries for a list of the “all-time worst literary allusions in the history of peer-reviewed science.” The first submission:

“Great writers, from Dante to Joyce, often weave various meanings into their writings.”–Guigo et al. 2006. Unweaving the meanings of messenger RNA sequences. Molecular Cell 23: 150-151.

I’m up early again working on a piece, so I checked our world map of recent visitors and saw that in the past few hours we’ve been viewed in Australia, Botswana, China, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Grenada, India, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, and Sweden. Not to mention Cincinnati, Cleveland, Iowa City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Nashville, Philadelphia, Portland, Providence, Raleigh, Richmond, San Diego, San Antonio, Santa Monica, Seattle, and Tulsa.
Good morning, everybody!

Lately I’ve been dipping in and out of Louisa May Alcott’s first novel, Moods. The novel was published in 1864 (four years before the publication of Little Women made Alcott famous), and it’s one of a handful of books that she wrote for an adult audience.
The plot deals with a love triangle, and it seems to be commonly accepted that Alcott modeled the novel’s tomboy heroine after herself, and the two men she’s torn between after Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. I don’t why the idea of this love triangle tickles me so, but it does. Infinitely. I only regret there was no sequel in which the heroine, now a contented old married lady, is jarred from her knitting by a knock on the door from Merman Helville, a man of quiet but manly disposition who after decades of sea-voyaging has come home to claim his bride.
The edition I’m reading is a nice one; put out by Rutgers University Press, it contains substantial revisions to the novel made by Alcott years after its initial publication (it was republished in 1882) as well as an early review of Moods written by Henry James. If you’re a writer, I invite you to pause here to imagine what it would be like to have Henry James critique your first novel: To borrow from the language of Moods, an agitated spirit might fill your breast.
I adore Alcott — she’s a great hero of mine, has been since I was a kid (oh Jo!) — so I feel a tinge of disloyalty in finding James’ review wickedly funny. In this excerpt James first supplies some plot synopsis, then takes issue with a type of romantic lead he finds all too common in the work of “lady novelists” (note: the Warwick character is the one based on Thoreau):

The heroine of “Moods” is a fitful, wayward, and withal most amiable young person, named Sylvia. We regret to say that Miss Alcott takes her up in her childhood. We are utterly weary of stories about precocious little girls. In the first place, they are in themselves disagreeable and unprofitable objects of study; and in the second, they are always the precursors of a not less unprofitable middle-aged lover. We admit that, even to the middle-aged, Sylvia must have been a most engaging little person. One of her means of fascination is to disguise herself as a boy and work in the garden with a hoe and wheelbarrow; under which circumstances she is clandestinely watched by one of the heroes, who then and there falls in love with her.

[Read more…]

“Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
José Ortega y Gasset, “In Search of Goethe from Within”

I find it all but impossible to believe that nearly two decades have gone by since I met Maria Schneider. I had the good luck to hear Maria’s music when she was just getting started as a bandleader, and the good sense to recognize that it bore the stamp of something more than mere talent. From then on I followed her work closely, and when I started contributing profiles to The Wall Street Journal a few years later, she was at the top of my short list of people about whom I wanted to write. So far as I know, “At 33, a Composer of Note,” which was published in the Journal on October 7, 1994, was the first time anyone wrote at length about Maria outside of the jazz press, a fact of which I have long been sinfully proud, never more so than when she won her first Grammy two years ago. It’s nice to be ahead of the crowd–and even nicer when it finally catches up with you.

Last week I went to the Jazz Standard to hear Maria’s band play selections from Sky Blue, their latest CD. As I listened, I marveled for the umpteenth time that such richly colored, meticulously wrought sounds had sprung from the mind of so improbable a creature. Maria is a giggly, irrepressibly enthusiastic strawberry blonde who is…well, let’s just call her the kind of person to whom stuff happens. Whenever she returns from the road, she always has hair-raising adventures to report, some of which will pop up in her music sooner or later. Few instrumental composers of importance (and Maria is a very important composer) have drawn so directly on the remembered experiences that she transforms by an impenetrable act of mental alchemy into the pastel clouds of sound that are her compositions. I love to watch bits and pieces of her life find their way onto manuscript paper: hang gliding, childhood car rides, the dance music of Latin America, the sound of birds singing in Central Park.

Maria is a thoughtful, introspective woman who has known her share of sorrow and been toughened by it. Yet I can’t think of another artist who is less guarded, especially when she clambers onto a bandstand and starts telling an audience about the next piece on the program. Like my late friend Nancy LaMott, Maria is a blurter, and anything can happen when she gets in front of a microphone. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve listened to one of her helter-skelter monologues and asked myself how it was possible that so zany a person could have brought pieces like “Hang Gliding,” “Buleria, Soleá y Rumba,” and “Cerulean Skies” into the world. Nothing is as mysterious as creativity, even when you know the creator. Especially when you know the creator.

I left my Wall Street Journal profile of Maria out of the Teachout Reader because it was too short to stand on its own, and also because I’d already spun part of it into the liner notes I wrote for Coming About, her second album. It occurs to me that you might be interested in reading the original piece, which hasn’t been reprinted since it appeared in the Journal in 1994. (Alas, Visiones, the much-loved Greenwich Village nightclub referred to in the piece, closed its doors years ago.) Better pieces have been written about Maria Schneider since then, but this one had the virtue of being first.

* * *

According to the history books, the big-band era came to a screeching halt in December 1946, when eight of the country’s top bandleaders (among them Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Harry James) folded their tents and retired to the land where the good songs go. Forty-eight years later, big bands are the dinosaurs of the music business–unwieldy, expensive and, some think, headed inexorably for extinction. But try telling that to the 17 musicians who gather every Monday night at Visiones, a Greenwich Village nightclub, to play the music of Maria Schneider, a slight, strawberry-blond woman who, at the age of 33, is regarded by a rapidly growing number of insiders as one of the most promising young jazz composers in the world.

Schneider, who hails from Windom, Minn. (pop. 4,288), doesn’t look like a composer or act like a musician. “People are always asking me if I sing with the band,” she complains laughingly. In fact, she doesn’t even play with the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra. All she does is lead it–waving her arms in a T-square junior-high band director’s beat straight out of Conducting 101–and write the music it performs.

It’s hard for a musician who specializes exclusively in composition to make much of an impression on the chops-conscious virtuosos of the jazz world. But Schneider knows it can be done, because she worked closely with one of the few people who has done it: Gil Evans, the master composer who arranged Miles Davis’s classic albums “Sketches of Spain,” “Miles Ahead” and “Porgy and Bess.” Schneider was Evans’s musical assistant during the last three years of his life. “Gil was relaxed, calm, incredibly sweet, gentle, spiritual,” she recalls. Before meeting Evans, she studied with valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, who wrote brilliant arrangements for the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra.

Working with Evans and Brookmeyer inspired Schneider to develop a stunningly original sound of her own. She can write old-fashioned flagwaver-with-a-shout-chorus charts whenever she pleases, but prefers to turn out harmonically complex originals with subtly blended instrumental colors that suggest Evans without ever borrowing from him. Though her music has a fresh, childlike quality that mirrors her friendly small-town demeanor, Schneider also has a sure-footed grasp of formal structure–one of Brookmeyer’s obsessions–that is rare in a jazz composer. “I think my music has a strong element of fantasy in it,” she says, adding that the inspirations for her compositions are as likely as not to be visual: dreams, paintings (“Some Circles” is named for a canvas by Kandinsky), even ballets (a self-described “New York City Ballet freak,” Schneider would love to write a score for Jerome Robbins).

With the great days of the road bands long past, the only way for a jazz composer like Schneider to get his or her work played regularly is to put together a group. She did so in 1989, initially in collaboration with trombonist John Fedchock, who played with and wrote for Woody Herman’s last band. (Schneider is now sole leader of the group.)

“You can’t imagine how expensive it is to start a band,” she says. “In New York, just to rehearse costs around $150 to hire a studio and rent sound equipment. Then you have to get the music together. The Xeroxing, the time spent copying the parts–it adds up fast. There aren’t that many clubs, either, and they can’t pay that much because they aren’t doing that well. We’re so lucky to have Visiones.”

Since there aren’t enough jobs available to keep a big band together full time, Schneider does what Jones and Lewis did before her: She pays 17 players $20 a night to get together on Mondays (in most big cities, Monday is musicians’ night off) and perform her music. The personnel, though basically constant, necessarily fluctuates from week to week. The musicians occasionally send substitutes in order to make more lucrative gigs, but when the first-string team is in place and the moon is in phase, the band can blow the roof off Visiones without even raising a sweat. Not that Schneider minds seeing unfamiliar faces on Monday night: “I used to really panic when strange people were sight reading on the bandstand, but I don’t anymore. A lot of times, just one new player can spark a whole new enthusiasm in the band.”

Unlike many jazz composers, Schneider refuses to write commercial music in order to eke out a living: “I did do two jingles when I first came to New York, but it was disastrous–I did nothing but cry the entire time I wrote them.” At first, she worked as a music copyist for other composers and arrangers; she now underwrites her band by accepting composing projects from the state-subsidized TV and radio orchestras of Europe, where her reputation is high. But in the U.S., Schneider was for many years known only to jazz lovers lucky enough to stumble into Visiones on a Monday night.

In order to spread the word about her band, Schneider recorded nine of her best charts, paying for the studio time out of her own pocket, and shopped the master tape around to various record companies. Enja Records liked what it heard and turned the tape into her first CD, “Evanescence,” released earlier this year to uniformly enthusiastic reviews.

“I still have people telling me that I need to make my music a little more commercial to make money,” Schneider says. “But I think that if you stick to the thing you really love and work really hard at it, you can create your own market–your music will be unique, and people will come to hear you. And if they don’t, I’d still rather copy music or flip burgers for a living. I could live with that. I couldn’t live with writing commercial music that I don’t feel from my heart.”

* * *

To purchase Sky Blue, go here.

“Biography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?”
Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

A reader writes:

I greatly enjoyed your Mencken book and am looking forward to the Armstrong bio. I have enjoyed some writing about him in the past, but never felt I read anything definitive–so please write that book!

To which the only possible response is…yikes! I don’t think there can be such a thing as a definitive biography of a great man. Louis Armstrong is simply too large, both as an artist and as a man, to be summed up for all time between the covers of a single book. Even if such a thing were possible, the resulting book would be unreadably long. That’s why the subtitle of The Skeptic was “A Life of H.L. Mencken,” not “The Life of H.L. Mencken.” As I said in the preface, “I have made no attempt to be exhaustive, so as to avoid being exhausting.”
So what am I trying to do? The answer can be found in this excerpt from the preface to my book, of which the first seven chapters (there are twelve) are now complete. If you want to know why I decided to write yet another book about Satchmo, the answer is here.
* * *
Louis Armstrong was one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, and much has been written about his life and work, some of it penetrating and perceptive. Yet this is, surprisingly, the first fully sourced biography of Armstrong to be written by an author who is also a trained musician–though it is not a “scholarly” biography in the ordinary sense of the word. I see this book less as a work of original scholarship than an act of synthesis, a narrative biography based on the research of those academic scholars and other investigators who in recent years have unearthed a wealth of hitherto unknown information about Armstrong, especially regarding his early years….
I have also been privileged to draw on archival material unavailable to previous biographers, including 650 reels of tape recordings privately made by Armstrong during the last quarter-century of his life and subsequently deposited by Lucille, his fourth and last wife, in the Louis Armstrong Archives at Queens College/CUNY. These recordings, as will become evident, are of considerable significance, and I have made extensive use of them, just as I have drawn heavily on Armstrong’s own writings, both published and unpublished. He was one of a handful of jazz musicians, and the only major one, to leave behind a substantial body of prose writing (including two full-length autobiographies, dozens of magazine articles, and hundreds of letters) in which his thoughts are presented in wholly or largely unmediated form, and it is in his own words that he comes across most clearly.
I have sought to make every page of this book comprehensible to the general reader. At the same time, I hope it will be of interest to specialists, especially those who know more about Armstrong’s music than his life. It goes without saying–or should–that his music was the most important thing about him, but his personal story, in addition to shedding light on the wellsprings of his art, is significant in its own right, and is no less deserving of a historically aware interpretation….
Armstrong was a child of his time, not ours, and some of the things he did and said as an adult are scarcely intelligible to those who know little about the long-lost world of his youth. Even in his own time he was widely misunderstood, often by people who should have known better (and who in some cases came to know better). For this reason I have tried to place him and his achievements in the widest possible perspective. He was, of course, the central figure in twentieth-century jazz, but he was also a key figure in the modern movement in art, as well as an emblematic figure in the history of American culture and, in the opinion of all who knew him, a great man. “I know of no man for whom I had more admiration and respect,” Bing Crosby wrote to Lucille after Armstrong died. The ultimate purpose of this book is to explain to a new generation of listeners why those words still ring true.