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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for October 22, 2008

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

October 22, 2008 by cfrye

• James Hynes recommends ten spooky stories for midnight reading. (Via Maudie.)
• John Updike talks to Emily Nussbaum about The Widows of Eastwick, his follow-up to 1984’s Witches of Eastwick. (Via Sarah.)
• Vampire bats, leeches, chiggers and bed bugs are among the bloodsuckers featured in Dark Banquet, a new book by biologist Bill Schutt which, as it happens, I trotted to the bookstore last night to purchase. (Via Jenny.)

TT: A glimpse of history

October 22, 2008 by Terry Teachout

20%2C%20TOWN%20HALL%20CONCERT%2C%201947.jpgOn May 17, 1947, Louis Armstrong gave an all-star concert at New York’s Town Hall that changed his life. He had been leading a touring big band since 1929, but World War II brought the Swing Era to an end, and by 1947 Armstrong knew that he had to find a different way to package himself for postwar audiences. He did so at the Town Hall concert, which teamed him with a small group whose members included Sid Catlett, Bobby Hackett, and Jack Teagarden. As I wrote in A Cluster of Sunlight: The Life of Louis Armstrong:

It was, for one thing, the first time that he had ever given a full-evening concert with a combo, and it appears to have been the first time since 1926 that he had appeared in public as the leader of a small group of his own. Not that he needed a good band to play well. “I work with two bands, the one on stage and the one in my head,” he would later tell Ruby Braff. “If they sound good on stage, O.K., I’ll play with them. If not, I just turn up the volume of the band in my head.” But the band with which he was playing at Town Hall that night sounded very good indeed…
At the time, comparatively little fuss was made over the event, which went unmentioned in the New York Times, Time, and The New Yorker. Only the jazz press took note of the occasion: Down Beat‘s review was headed “Satchmo’s Genius Still Lives,” while The Melody Maker ran a piece by a correspondent who reported that Armstrong’s playing “had all the freshness and vigour of the early Hot Five and Seven days. He never strove for effects, never played to the gallery.” But one person in the audience was listening with the closest possible attention. Joe Glaser, Armstrong’s manager, who was sitting in a box seat, knew at once that his troubles were over. Not only had Armstrong proved himself capable of thrilling a crowd without the support of a big band, but in Jack Teagarden he had found the foil of a lifetime. Like the businessman he was, Glaser struck while the iron was smoking hot. He signed Teagarden to a long-term contract on Monday morning, then gave the members of the big band two months’ notice.

Three months after that, Armstrong opened at Billy Berg’s, a Los Angeles nightclub, leading a six-piece combo whose other members included Sid Catlett and Jack Teagarden. The engagement was a huge success, and for the rest of his life Armstrong toured the world with the band that Glaser later dubbed “the All Stars.”
00193r.jpgRarely have microphones been present at so historically significant a one-night stand as Armstrong’s 1947 Town Hall concert, but Ernie Anderson, the promoter who persuaded Glaser to let him present the concert, took care to record it, and the resulting album leaves no possible doubt that it was as good as everybody remembered. Fortunately, the great jazz photographer Bill Gottlieb was also present, and took a beautiful group shot of Armstrong and his musicians in full cry. A cropped version of the photo was published two months later in Down Beat, but the original vanished into Gottlieb’s files, and it didn’t resurface until he left his personal archive of sixteen hundred prints and negatives to the Library of Congress, which has created an online collection of Gottlieb’s work.
I was lucky enough to be casually acquainted with Gottlieb, who died a couple of years ago, and I knew as soon as I started choosing the illustrations for A Cluster of Sunlight that his Town Hall photograph would have to be included. I’m pleased to say that his son Edward has given me permission to reprint this essential document of the most consequential performance of Louis Armstrong’s life. It isn’t as well known as it ought to be, perhaps because it isn’t all that dramatic, but even so, no Armstrong biography could possibly be complete without it.

TT: Snapshot

October 22, 2008 by Terry Teachout

The George Shearing Quintet plays “Conception”:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

TT: Don’t call us, we’ll call you (maybe)

October 22, 2008 by Terry Teachout

pix1.jpgMrs. T and I are departing this afternoon for a brief, well-deserved holiday at Ecce Bed and Breakfast, the Catskills inn where we honeymooned a year ago. Our deflector shields will be set to maximum until Sunday, when we return to New York with what I expect to be the utmost reluctance. You’ll find the usual almanac entries and theater-related postings in this space, but if you need anything other than that between now and then, ask somebody else.
Later.

TT: Almanac

October 22, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.”
John Berger, About Looking

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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