Archives for August 10, 2009

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which comes out on December 2, just got a thumbs-up review–with a big red star–in the latest issue of Publishers Weekly:

It may seem odd to speak of someone of Louis Armstrong’s stature as needing recuperation, but his popularity has long been held against him by jazz purists and other music critics. Teachout brings a fresh perspective that, while candid about the ways “Pops” could hold himself back artistically, celebrates his ambition and capacity for renewal. The other knock against Armstrong is that if white Americans loved him so much, he must have been an “Uncle Tom,” a notion Teachout neatly demolishes. While Armstrong was keenly aware of the social realities of his time, his relentless work ethic was fueled by an equally intense optimism. (His patience, however, was not infinite; he publicly criticized President Eisenhower as having “no guts” for failing to enforce desegregation–one of the few celebrities who could be so outspoken without suffering substantial backlash.) Teachout’s portrait reminds us why we fell in love with Armstrong’s music in the first place….

Read the whole thing here.

I zipped through New York over the weekend, sticking around just long enough to collect, open, and answer a month’s worth of accumulated snail mail. Today Mrs. T and I head north to the Berkshires, where we’ll be launching a three-week New England summer-theater tour by seeing Shakespeare & Company’s Twelfth Night and Barrington Stage Company’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Needless to say, I wish we were taking a month-long trip to nowhere instead, but even when I’m worn out–which I am–I still enjoy spending my nights on the aisle.
I doubt I’ll be doing a whole lot of blogging this week, but I did roll over the top-five and “Out of the Past” modules of the right-hand column, so you might want to take a look at all the latest picks.
In addition, I’d like to draw your attention to Live 2.0, a new site launched by Jim McCarthy, the founder of Goldstar Events, a California-based company that sells half-price tickets to live performances in major cities throughout America. Live 2.0 is a blog-like Web-based magazine in which Jim and his contributors write about various aspects of the vexing problem of attracting young people to live performances. I met Jim two years ago when I wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal about Goldstar, and I was intrigued by his hard-headed approach to audience development. We kept in touch thereafter, and Jim interviewed me for Live 2.0 when I was on the West Coast a couple of months ago, partly about The Letter and partly about the challenges currently facing the classical-music business. You can read the interview by going here.
Regular readers of this blog and my “Sightings” column for the Journal will already be familiar with the line of argument advanced in my Live 2.0 interview, which is closely related to what I had to say in last Saturday’s column about the future of jazz in America. Even so, you may find it interesting to read about how The Letter was specifically designed to encourage media-savvy under-40 types to take an interest in opera.
I especially like this exchange:

If you could give one piece of advice to everyone in the opera business, what would it be?
Put a sign in every office that reads as follows: MOST PEOPLE THINK THEY DON’T LIKE OPERA. YOU WON’T CHANGE THEIR MINDS BY TELLING THEM THEY SHOULD.

I still think that’s good advice.

“He recognized that common, much litigated type of human disagreement in which each party to it insists on reducing his opponent’s position or contention to its bare essentials–yes or no; did he, or did he not, still beat his wife?–while asserting the right to state his own position or contention with every circumstantial distinction preserved. High indignation and conflicting strong senses of righteousness resulted.”
James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor