Archives for November 2009

On Saturday I saw five copies of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong at the Barnes & Noble on Eighty-Second Street and Broadway in Manhattan. It was the first time that I’d seen Pops in a brick-and-mortar bookstore. A little later in the day I heard from my friend Ariel Davis, who saw Pops in a store on the Upper East Side, snapped a picture of the display, and e-mailed it to me.

I published my first book in 1989, and I’ve been around the track several more times since then, so I can’t honestly say that it thrilled me to the marrow to see yet another book of mine on sale. What pleased me most was the excitement of Ariel, who moved from Alabama to New York a couple of years ago and subsequently worked as one of my research assistants on Pops. “I’m beside myself seeing my name in print!” she tweeted.

While anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m the least blasé of people, I suppose it’s inevitable that such experiences should sooner or later cease to be exciting to the professional writer. Dostoevsky said it: “Man gets used to everything–the beast!” It’s been a long time since I got a charge out of seeing my name in print. Even so, I have yet to reach the level of detachment attained by Paul Hindemith when he decided that he was too busy to attend the world premiere of his Symphonia Serena in Dallas in 1947. “Why should I go to hear my own works?” he said to a friend.

Geoffrey Skelton, Hindemith’s biographer, tells the rest of the story:

In the end he did consent to go, though only because he had a certain musical problem on his mind and thought that he could best work it out in the train, where he would be undisturbed. Carl Miller, who gave me the clearest account of this episode which is one of the favourite and most widely recalled ones at Yale, said that his students were amazed when he came into the classroom, grinning from ear to ear. “Why aren’t you in Dallas?” they asked. “Because I had solved my problem by the time I got to New York,” he said. “So I got out of the train and came back home.”

I admire Hindemith’s sangfroid–sort of–but I don’t share it. To be sure, I’m pretty damn busy myself these days. Not only am I seeing shows most nights between now and the time when I hit the road for the first leg of my book tour, but I’m in the process of deciding on the subject of my next book, and Paul Moravec and I are also talking over various possibilities for our second opera. Yet it never occurred to me for a moment not to stop by Barnes & Noble on Friday, and when my friend told me how excited she was to see Pops on sale in her neighborhood bookstore, I thought at once of the morning in 1977 when my very first piece of professional writing, a concert review, was published by the Kansas City Star. I got up early that day, drove to the nearest honor box, popped in a quarter, pulled out a copy of the Star, and turned as quickly as I could to the page where my six-inch review was printed.

The eighteen-year-old H.L. Mencken did the same thing on February 24, 1899, the morning after he filed his first two stories for the Baltimore Herald. “I was up with the milkman the next morning to search the paper,” he recalled in Newspaper Days, “and when I found both of my pieces, exactly as written, there ran such thrills through my system as a barrel of brandy and 100,000 volts of electricity could not have matched.”

I remember, Ariel. Oh, how I remember.

“In that part of the book of my memory before which little can be read, there is a heading, which says: ‘Incipit Vita Nova: Here begins the new life.'”
Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova (trans. A.S. Kline)

Two thumbs-up reviews in today’s Wall Street Journal: I raved about Goodspeed Musicals’ revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and the off-Broadway transfer of Avenue Q. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Some musicals are funnier than others, but few of the most memorable ones rise or fall on the strength of their jokes. “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” which opened on Broadway in 1962 and has been playing somewhere or other ever since, is an exception. It’s the funniest musical ever written, give or take…well, nothing. The book, by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove, could be performed without the songs and still work–and the songs are by Stephen Sondheim! To see “A Funny Thing,” even in a fair-to-middling production, is to be enraptured, and Goodspeed Musicals’ revival, directed and choreographed with whirlwind flair by Ted Pappas, leaves nothing at all to be desired in the make-’em-laugh department….
Except for “Comedy Tonight,” Mr Sondheim’s songs are rarely heard outside the context of the show, and most critics, myself previously included, typically fail to appreciate the contribution that they make to the total effect of “A Funny Thing.” This time, though, I got it: Mr. Sondheim’s neatly turned rhymes and clean, crisp harmonies, especially in “Free,” play cleverly against the plot, adding a pinch of sweetness that sharpens the savor of the knockabout humor….
If you didn’t catch it the first time around, “Avenue Q” is a parody of “Sesame Street” whose characters, a gaggle of underexperienced, overeducated college grads, move to New York City in search of fame, fortune and entry-level jobs, none of which they find. The show remains both fresh and timely–I know plenty of twentysomethings who are having at least as much trouble getting work as did their older brothers and sisters–and its digs at political correctness are, if anything, even more pointed today.
Most of the “stars” of “Avenue Q” are head-and-torso puppets that are manipulated by the performers in full view of the audience. Anika Larsen, who was playing Kate Monster and Lucy the Slut when “Avenue Q” ended its Broadway run, has made the transfer to New World Stages as well, and she proves to be equally adept as a puppeteer and as a singing actor…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

Like most columnists, I try to keep up with anniversaries, but the centennial of Art Tatum’s birth–October 13–slipped past me. No wonder, since scarcely anyone seems to have taken note of it, whether in print or on stage. Yet Tatum, who died in 1956, is still the most admired pianist in the history of jazz, and it seems likely that he will hang onto that status for decades, even centuries, to come. On the other hand, he isn’t especially well known to the general public, at least not by comparison with Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington.
Why isn’t Tatum a household name? Is it because jazz itself is no longer as popular as it used to be? Or might there be something about his elaborately virtuosic style that has kept him out of the public eye? I’ll be exploring this question in my “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. If you’re curious, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and see what I have to say.
* * *
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.
Art Tatum plays his jazz interpretation of Dvorak’s “Humoresque” on The Faye Emerson Show in 1950:

“A difference in taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.”
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong just got a rave from Shelf Awareness: Daily Enlightenment for the Book Trade, an influential e-mail industry newsletter:

An exhilarating biography of an American original that also charts the way the U.S. and popular entertainment changed from 1921 to 1971….
With wit, authoritative musical knowledge and solid research, Terry Teachout lovingly chronicles Armstrong’s career delivering happiness from his emergence in 1921 as a premier New Orleans jazz musician through his later fame as a popular entertainer…
In public, Armstrong ignored his critics because, as he stated, “showmanship does not mean you’re not serious.” In the privacy of his own home, though, he was more candid. Using Armstrong’s personal writings and hours of tape recordings, Teachout reveals the scathing opinions Pops held of those knocking him and his success.
Audiences may have seen Armstrong as perennially happy and uncomplicated, but Teachout makes us aware of many crises behind the scenes. He discusses the influence of mobsters in jazz clubs and dance halls, the demeaning daily reality of segregation during Armstrong’s early touring years and the in-fighting among leading jazz performers….

Read the whole thing here.
* * *
More bookshelf sightings: as of this morning, you can find Pops at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Massachusetts, and five copies were on the shelves last night at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., where I’ll be speaking in January. Watch this space for details.

A reader writes to say that he saw Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong on sale in Pleasantville, New York–the first bookstore sighting that’s been reported to me. (I’m out in the woods of Connecticut’s “quiet corner” with Mrs. T and haven’t been near a bookstore for the past week.)
If you should see Pops in a bookstore, would you kindly shoot me an e-mail? I’d like to monitor how quickly it starts to turn up across the country.