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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 2008

TT: Come again some other day

June 16, 2008 by Terry Teachout

I spend a fair amount of each summer watching outdoor shows. The weather being what it is, you’d think I’d have gotten rained out at least a half-dozen times by now, but until this past weekend it had only happened once, in New York last year, and since I live a block away from Central Park, where the Public Theater gives its Shakespeare in the Park performances, I was able to catch the same show the next night.
My luck finally ran out on Saturday. I picked up a Zipcar at noon and drove to the suburbs of Baltimore to see Chesapeake Shakespeare Company perform The Tempest. The weather was beautiful when I hit the road, but no sooner did I reach the Ellicott City exit than a real-life tempest, complete with lightning, rolled over the horizon. I checked into my hotel and called the company publicist, who confirmed what I already knew: no show tonight. Alas, I had to leave for to New York at six-thirty the following morning in order to catch a midday train, so Chesapeake Shakespeare will have to wait until next year.
51T3B8b9WVL._SS500_.jpgSo what do you do in the suburbs of Baltimore on a rainy Saturday night? Not a hell of a lot, as far as I can tell. I spent an hour looking for a decent restaurant, but every place that looked promising was booked solid. Instead I ended up downing a nondescript sandwich and returning to my equally nondescript hotel room, where I surfed the Web, caught up on my e-mail, and passed a couple of pleasant hours polishing Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong. George Avakian, who knew Armstrong and produced several of his best-known recordings, has been kind enough to spend the past couple of weeks reading the manuscript and sending me his comments, so I devoted part of my unplanned night off to making various changes based on his astute suggestions.
I’m pleased to say that George didn’t have any suggestions to make about the following passage:

Avakian was eager to record Armstrong for Columbia. The only stumbling block was that Joe Glaser, the trumpeter’s manager, who had no interest in presenting him as anything other than a popular entertainer, was content to stick with Decca, his old label. How to change Glaser’s mind? It was Jim Conkling, the president of Columbia, who came up with the solution: Avakian’s Louis Armstrong Story reissues had been selling well, but the trumpeter, who had recorded all of the original OKeh 78 sides on which they were based for flat one-time cash payments, wasn’t making a dime off them. Why not offer him a one-percent royalty on Columbia’s OKeh reissues in return for signing an exclusive contract? That was the kind of talk the money-conscious Glaser understood. In short order the deal was done, and on July 12, 1954, Armstrong and the All Stars began taping Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy, the best album they ever made.
The project was Avakian’s idea. “For years I had planned that one day, when possible, I would make a series of albums with Pops,” he said later. “He was an artist who should have been represented in unified packages, complete with explanatory notes.” The music of the “Father of the Blues” (as Handy had long billed himself) was a logical starting point for the series, and Armstrong, who had been identified with Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” ever since he recorded it with Bessie Smith in 1925, was more than agreeable. “You choose the tunes,” he said. “You know me, you know what I like.” Avakian picked eleven of Handy’s best-known songs and sent the music to Armstrong, who worked the tunes up on the road. A few weeks later he called the producer at home. “I’m laying over in Chicago next month for a few days,” he said. “Line up the studio and I’ll be ready.” Avakian immediately booked three afternoon sessions in a Chicago studio. “Louie came in with no music beyond the sheet music I’d given him and a few sketches that Billy Kyle had made,” he recalled. “‘We can work out these longer performances any way you want,’ he said, ‘but why don’t you choose the order of the solos? I don’t want to do these things the way we’d do them in a club. It’ll be fresh for us that way.'”
That was what Avakian wanted to hear. Except for the “New Orleans Function” session, at which Milt Gabler had allowed the All Stars to play more or less the way they did on stage, virtually all of Armstrong’s studio recordings for Decca had conformed rigidly to the three-minute, three-chorus mold of his old 78s. Avakian, by contrast, proposed to bring him into the age of the long-playing record. Not only was Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy to be a thematically unified, meticulously sequenced single-composer album, but most of the songs on it ran well past the three-minute mark, including an album-opening version of “St. Louis Blues” that played for nearly nine minutes. It was, in short, a concept album avant la lettre, recorded seven months before Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle “invented” the genre with In the Wee Small Hours.
Armstrong responded enthusiastically but not passively to his producer’s musical suggestions. Rehearsal tapes made at the sessions and released in 1996 show that he played a dominant role in structuring and polishing the arrangements heard on the album. But it was Avakian who gave to Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy its shape and conceptual unity, and it says much about Armstrong’s receptivity that he was not merely willing to accept the younger man’s tactful guidance, but capable of acknowledging the quality of the results. “I can’t remember when I felt this good about making a record,” he told Avakian after the album was edited and ready for release. He was right to feel that way. From the first bar of “St. Louis Blues” onward, it is evident that Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy represents something new in Armstrong’s recorded oeuvre. Not since the studio-only Hot Fives and Sevens had he made a record that did more than merely document the way he played in public–that was, instead, an art object in its own right….

I also caught up with Ricky Riccardi’s The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, one of the most original and significant jazz blogs to come along since I first started keeping up with the blogosphere seven years ago. Riccardi is a musician, scholar, and Armstrong enthusiast who is writing a book about the All Stars, the six-piece combo that Armstrong led from 1947 until his death in 1971. He knows as much about Armstrong as anyone in the world, myself included, and in 2007 he generously decided to share the fruits of his labors by starting a blog on which he posts at irregular but fairly frequent intervals about his hero’s records.
Judging by what he’s written to date, Ricky’s book will be a major contribution to the Armstrong literature, and I’ve made extensive use of his postings in writing Rhythm Man. Among countless other things, it was The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong that first drew my attention to this kinescope of the All Stars performing “On the Sunny Side of the Street” on CBS in 1958. It’s my favorite film of Armstrong in performance:

Here’s a typical example of Ricky at work, an excerpt from his posting about the 1933 big-band recording of Harold Arlen’s “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues,” to my mind one of Armstrong’s half-dozen finest recordings:

After the vocal, the band swings out for awhile, Armstrong clearly enjoying their playing, growling out a “Yeah” when they begin. Teddy Wilson sounds especially good here, as does the entire band, propelled by Bill Oldham’s big-toned bass (when he switched to tuba for the April 1933 sessions, it was a step backward). It’s a long showcase for the band but fortunately, there’s 90 seconds of record left and Pops makes the most of it, opening with one of his all-time greatest entrances: a single held D (listen for one of the saxes goof up and hit a quick note under it). Perhaps the Armstrong of 1928 would have played something flashy and jaw-dropping in this two-bar break, but the Armstrong of 1933 had already matured greatly and he knew he could convey just as much drama and feeling with a perfectly placed held note. I mean, really, how do you make one held note swing? It’s all in the placement, my friends. Armstrong hits it a shade after the beat and the whole thing swings.

This is what I wrote in Rhythm Man about the same recording:

“I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues,” one of Armstrong’s immortal masterpieces, is as worthy of comparison with “West End Blues” as it is different from that riot of virtuosity. Here it is the trumpet solo that seizes our attention, for Armstrong, in a departure from his customary practice on ballads, dispenses almost completely with Arlen’s melody, substituting instead a series of rhythmically free phrases that lead upward to a high B flat. Four times he falls off from that shining note–and then comes the fifth fall, at the bottom of which he changes course and swoops gracefully upward to a full-throated high D whose vibrance was perfectly caught by Victor’s recording engineer. It is a show-stopping stroke, yet there is no trace of overstatement about it: if anything Armstrong seems to have broken through to a realm of abstract lyricism that transcends ordinary human emotion. Only then does he condescend to ease back into the vicinity of the tune, returning the bedazzled listener to the everyday world.

And that’s what I did on a rainy Saturday night in suburban Baltimore.
What about you, OGIC and CAAF? Have you anything to declare?

TT: Almanac

June 16, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“What passes for criticism too often amounts to riding a fashionable or idiopathic hobbyhorse external to the work at hand, a spectacle reminiscent of the watchmaker whose favorite tool is a coal shovel. In their priggish zeal, such critics appear not to be having a very good time, nor bothering to share pleasure with readers. They are literary wet blankets, humorless apparatchiks of theory.”
Patrick Kurp, Anecdotal Evidence (May 27, 2008)

CAAF: “I can’t enumerate all the ways in which this is bad.”

June 13, 2008 by cfrye

So, yesterday in the midst of a tiresome afternoon — it’s hot (anyone else noticed that?), I have a sinus infection, the doctor prescribed what turned out to be $115 worth of antibiotics when I am pretty confident what I have falls in the “under $15” category of illness and it took roughly 5,000 phone calls to sort it all out — I remembered that Jincy Willett’s new book, The Writing Class, came out this week.
I love Willett’s book of short stories, Jenny and the Jaws of Life, without reservation, and I’ve been dying to read this new novel since Gwenda started raving about it in email a couple months ago. And it seemed like a great bit of luck that it’s finally, finally out and available and I could croak over to the bookstore and get a copy to cheer up a lousy day.
So far it’s marvelous — very, very funny and sly in bits, and then sometimes very, very funny in a broad sort of way in others. I think the humor would appeal to just about anyone, but if you’ve ever been in a writing class, or in a position to review a broad spectrum of other people’s writing (e.g., slush pile reader), you may be particularly partial to the comedy.
Here’s one of the broader bits. After the first night’s class, Amy Gallup, the class instructor, has brought home the manuscript of one of her student’s, Dr. Richard Surtees, to read (he being the sort of student who arrives at class with 20 copies of his novel all printed out):

According to his secretary’s yellow Post-it, Amy was privileged to hold roughly half of something called Code Black: A Medical Thriller. Having watched both parents and her first husband waste away in hospitals, Amy was never thrilled by anything medical, but she always tried, when confronted with this genre in class, to put her feelings aside. As she reminded her students, they were each entitled to objective critical response, not a catalog of their critics’ tastes.
A quick glance-through told her that Surtees had cast his protagonist in that heroic mold so commonly used by doctors who want to write fiction. Unlike other professionals, physicians rarely viewed themselves with anything approaching ironic detachment–which was probably good for their patients, but not so hot for their readers. Surtees’s hero was a world-class neurosurgeon, a black belt in Karate, a distinguished amateur cellist who had studied with Pablo Casals (You have a great gift,” the old man had admonished him severely, “and you toss it away to save a few insignificant lives!”), and Merlin the Magnificent in the sack.
The plot of Code Black was apparently going to be one of those convoluted deals involving a lot of esoteric medical words and government acronyms (in an ominous footnote, Surtees promised a twenty-page glossary), and would revolve around a worldwide bioterrorist threat amplified by a perfidious liberal cabal hell-bent on imposing socialized medicine on a gullible public.
“‘What do we do now,’ Senator?” snarled Black, almost spitting in his disgust. “Why, we send each plague-ridden citizen of Manhattan to his primary healthcare provider!”

Visit here for Gwenda’s recent Q & A with Willett.

CAAF: Morning coffee

June 13, 2008 by cfrye

• Profiled in The Guardian, Lorrie Moore talks about the benefits of having a husband who doesn’t pay too much attention to what his wife writes:

Moore says that her ex-husband, who she was with for 14 years, wasn’t that fussed. “That was one of the positive things about him. It was easy to be a writer around him. Like, right now, I’m seeing somebody else and that’s not easy, because he’s scouring the work for signs of him. But my husband never really did that. It’s good to have someone who is mildly interested and mildly proud, and also slightly uninterested. When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute.” She smiles. “Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.”

It’s a good profile — not so much because it’s revealing, although I suppose it is, but because it will make you want to go re-read all your Lorrie Moore.
• Genius strikes! The Big LOLbowski. (Via Bookdwarf.)

TT: Down for the Count

June 13, 2008 by Terry Teachout

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I report on my recent visit to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, where I saw two shows, The Count of Monte Cristo and Romeo and Juliet. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
header_painting.jpgNo sooner did Broadway close up shop for the season just past than I hopped a plane, rented a car and drove to ASF’s unlikely home, a handsome cultural park plopped down in the middle of suburban Montgomery that you reach by driving past a Waffle House and turning left just before you get to the Best Buy. That’s how the locals steer you to the Carolyn Blount Theatre and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, which are located at opposite ends of a 250-acre plot of golf-course-green grass.
I was in town long enough to take in two of the company’s three current offerings, and I freely admit that I wasn’t there to see “The Count of Monte Cristo.” To be sure, Alexandre Dumas’ once-popular 19th-century tale of derring-do among the rich and venal has also had a long stage life, but no matter whether you take it in as a novel, a play or a movie, “The Count of Monte Cristo” remains a melodramatic period piece that, like “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” is now mainly enjoyed by children of all ages. Little did I know that Charles Morey’s 1998 stage version is an impeccably solid piece of theatrical work, and ASF is performing it so vividly that I ended up finding the whole thing thrilling from swash to buckle….
Mr. Morey, the artistic director of Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Theatre Company, has squeezed Dumas’ 1,400-page blockbuster into a shapely two-act play that rattles along at a near-cinematic rate of speed. His staging is notable for the complete absence of the self-parodic touches that you’d expect from a present-day production of a 19th-century costume drama. No eyes are winked, no mustaches twirled: Mr. Morey’s cast plays it as straight as a stick, inviting us to experience “The Count of Monte Cristo” not as an exercise in postmodern sniggering but a heartfelt cautionary tale of how even the most heroic of souls can be shriveled beyond redemption by the desire for vengeance….
ASF is also offering a piping-hot modern-dress version of “Romeo and Juliet” jointly staged by Geoffrey Sherman (the company’s artistic director) and Diana Van Fossen that is set in South Florida. Elizabeth Novak’s “Miami Vice”-style costumes run to skin-tight jeans and stiletto heels, and the youthful cast wields daggers and Palm Pilots with identical aplomb. Such updated stagings are less common in the Deep South than elsewhere on the summer-festival circuit, and I heard a fair number of older folks expressing a certain amount of befuddlement at intermission. The youngsters in the audience, by contrast, had no trouble whatsoever getting the point, which is that Shakespeare is (A) exciting and (B) sexy….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

June 13, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.”
Agatha Christie (quoted in Life, May 14, 1956)

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

June 12, 2008 by cfrye

• Maud Newton’s extraordinary essay, “Conversations You Have at Twenty,” can now be read online at Narrative Magazine. The essay took second prize in the magazine’s Love Story Contest and will be published next year as part of the Cross My Heart, Hope You Die anthology.
• Sarah Weinman interviews Kathryn Harrison about her new book, While They Slept, which Sarah describes as “a fascinating hybrid of journalism, narrative, and memoir.”

TT: So you want to see a show?

June 12, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.


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


BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

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

• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)

• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)

• Cry-Baby (musical, PG-13, mildly naughty and very cynical, reviewed here)

• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, closes July 13, reviewed here)

• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, closes Aug. 31, reviewed here)

THE%20LION%20IN%20WINTER.jpg
IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:

• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)

IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Julius Caesar/Antony and Cleopatra (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, performed in alternating repertory through July 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• Sunday in the Park with George (musical, PG-13, too complicated for children, closes June 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Port Authority (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes June 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN BOSTON:

• She Loves Me (musical, G, a bit too complicated for young children, reviewed here)

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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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