Archives for 2009

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which comes out in December, is about to go to the printer. This means that I still have a few more days in which to make changes in the text–though not large or frivolous ones. The Unwritten Law of Last-Minute Fixes is that they should only be made to correct actual factual errors, so I’ve been rereading Pops with a gimlet eye to see if anything slipped past me.

On Friday I made three one-word fixes:

• In the prologue, I made a change in this sentence:

Armstrong was deserted by his father before he was born, raised by a part-time prostitute, and sentenced at the age of eleven to the Colored Waif’s Home, an orphanage-like reform school, for firing a pistol on New Year’s Eve.

I changed before to when.

Elsewhere in the book, I quote Armstrong as saying that his father “left us the day we were born.” I don’t know how this inconsistency escaped the attention of the half-dozen people who’ve read the manuscript of Pops, but I finally spotted it last week and fixed it at once.

• In the second chapter, I made a change in this sentence:

Born in 1885, Oliver [Joe “King” Oliver, Armstrong’s mentor] was a dark-skinned butler turned musician who got his start playing in brass bands.

I changed butler to yardman.

The various Oliver-related sources that I consulted disagreed on this point, but late last week I tracked down a definitive primary source, a 1959 oral-history interview with Oliver’s wife that was cited in an end note to Bruce Boyd Raeburn’s New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History, published earlier this year. According to Stella Oliver, her husband worked as a “yard boy,” not as a butler. I shouted with joy when I ran across that note while re-reading Raeburn’s book.

• In the ninth chapter, I made a change in this sentence:

After the publication of Jazzmen, which Armstrong called “absolutely perfect” in a letter to one of the book’s contributors, the revival of interest in New Orleans jazz took wing.

I changed after to with because of the next sentence in Pops: “It came too late to help Oliver, but [Jelly Roll] Morton, who had been unceremoniously dropped from Victor’s roster of artists in 1930, was now invited back to record ‘High Society,’ ‘I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say,’ and ‘Oh, Didn’t He Ramble’ with an all-star band whose members included Sidney Bechet and Zutty Singleton.”

Once again, it was New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History that set me straight. Raeburn quoted a remark made by Frederic Ramsey, one of the co-authors of Jazzmen, at a 1982 symposium about Jelly Roll Morton:

We had a book that was about to come out in October, that was the one called Jazzmen, and so we whipped up this deal by going to RCA Victor, and on the strength of a book coming out we could have Jelly Roll Morton’s New Orleans Jazzmen make a sessions [sic] or two.

The first of the two recording sessions took place on September 14, 1939, shortly before Jazzmen was published. Until I re-read Raeburn’s book, I hadn’t realized that Morton’s Victor sessions were arranged prior to the publication of Jazzmen, so I changed after to with in the interests of chronological clarity and exactitude.

Small stuff? Sure–but the Armstrong literature, including every previous biography, is so full of errors, some small and others dismayingly large, that I felt obliged to try and get everything right. Needless to say, I’m sure that I’ve made some blunders of my own, but I managed to correct so many other long-standing mistakes in the course of researching, writing, and editing Pops that I feel confident in saying that it will be the most factually accurate account of Louis Armstrong’s life ever to have seen print.

In saying this, I know I’m leading with my chin. Jazz scholars will soon be circling Pops like buzzards, looking for fresh carrion. Just the other day I got an e-mail from an Armstrong researcher in Germany who had somehow obtained a set of uncorrected page proofs of Pops. He told me that the book was “fantastic” but added that I’d gotten the title of one of Armstrong’s best-known albums wrong. I promptly fired off an e-mail to Larry Cooper, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s copy chief in Boston, asking him to make the fix on the double. Larry wrote back the next day to reassure me that I’d already caught the error myself and fixed it in galleys a couple of months ago. Rarely have I felt such relief!

Forgive my obsessiveness, but now that The Letter is out of the way and Pops has received its first pre-publication review, I’ve traded one set of jitters for another. When you’re writing about a great man, you can’t help but feel as though he’s looking over your shoulder. Insofar as I can, I want to do justice to Louis Armstrong–and that means, among countless other things, getting the small stuff right.

A friend sent me this snapshot of an exhibit in Barcelona’s Chocolate Museum. I think Satchmo might have appreciated it!

“Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.”
Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet

Direct from the Berkshires to The Wall Street Journal, today’s drama column is devoted to Shakespeare & Company’s Twelfth Night and Barrington Stage’s A Streetcar Named Desire, both of which are excellent. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Did William Shakespeare invent screwball comedy? Not exactly, but “Twelfth Night,” among the dizziest and most farce-like of his romantic comedies, bears a definite family resemblance to the damn-the-torpedoes craziness of such classic examples of the genre as “Bringing Up Baby” and “The Lady Eve.” Nor does Jonathan Croy’s staging for Shakespeare & Company seek to paper over the similarities. Instead, Mr. Croy and his cast revel in them, hurtling through “Twelfth Night” with knockabout abandon and flinging laughter in all directions. No matter how rough a day you may have had at the office, a visit to Lenox to see this production will send you home with an ear-to-ear smile on your face.
While this is the first time that Mr. Croy has directed a mainstage play for Shakespeare & Company, he starred in the company’s brilliant versions of Tom Stoppard’s “Rough Crossing” (2007) and Charles Morey’s “The Ladies Man” (2008), and his “Twelfth Night” crackles with the lunatic energy of those full-tilt farces. I don’t know when I’ve seen anything funnier than his staging of the swordfight between Viola (Merritt Janson) and the fatuous Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Ryan Winkles), a piece of slapstick so precisely calculated and perfectly realized that it comes close to stopping the show. Almost as ludicrous is the near-demented lust with which the exquisite Countess Olivia (Elizabeth Raetz) chases the hapless Viola (who is disguised as a boy) all over the stage, eventually nailing her with an eye-popping kiss that clearly causes its recipient to reconsider the strength of her commitment to heterosexuality.
At the same time, much of the strength of this production lies in the transparent simplicity of its presentation. The open Elizabethan-style stage of the Founders’ Theatre is decorated with nothing more than six pennants and a catwalk. The costumes are colorful and traditional. No tricky directorial concepts are sprayed over the text–Mr. Croy is content to let Shakespeare be Shakespeare–and the actors respond by giving of their best, with results that are not merely funny but also emotionally true….
Now that I’ve seen two productions of “A Streetcar Named Desire” directed by women, I’ve come to the belated conclusion that the play makes perfect dramatic sense–when a woman is at the helm. Julianne Boyd, who directed Barrington Stage Company’s new revival of Tennessee Williams’ best-known play, has taken the same straightforward approach that Bonnie J. Monte brought to the version that she mounted for the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey last season, with equally rewarding results. Blanche DuBois, not Stanley Kowalski, is the star of Ms. Boyd’s show, and Marin Mazzie, like Laila Robins before her, gives us a Blanche you can believe in, a middle-aged woman who knows that she’s still sexy but can’t accept the earthy consequences of her fleshly longings. Christopher Innvar is no less believable as Stanley, playing him not as Superman in a bowling shirt but as the kind of traveling-salesman type you could imagine meeting in a bar…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

“The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one’s office for a job.”
Tennessee Williams (quoted in Kenneth Tynan, Profiles)

Les Paul and Mary Ford appear on CBS’ Omnibus on October 23, 1953, to explain multitrack recording. The host is Alistair Cooke:

Paul’s New York Times obit is here.

Massachusetts in a nutshell: two towns, two shows, two days. Today I write and file Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama column, eat breakfast, check out of my home away from home in Lenox, then drive back to Connecticut and Mrs. T.
I’m still too tired from my opera-related adventures to do much more than stick to the schedule, but on Wednesday I managed to work in a side trip to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, where I saw Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence. I like Georgia O’Keeffe well enough and love Arthur Dove passionately, and nothing I saw at the Clark caused me to modify either of those opinions. (O’Keeffe’s paintings are too pretty for my taste.) Most of the Doves on display at the Clark are a bit less than his best, but “Fog Horns” is a masterpiece of synesthesia, and I fiercely coveted a triptych of tiny gouaches dating from the early Forties.
I also took a brisk stroll through the Clark’s permanent collection, which I find pleasing but not especially exciting, though it contains one show-stopper, Turner’s “Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water.” This is a painting worth seeing as often as possible, and since I generally make it up to Williamstown once a year, that’s about how often I see it. The older I get, the more intensely Turner delights me, which undoubtedly says more about me than it does about him.
I also got my first look at “Sleigh Ride,” a well-known painting by Winslow Homer that for some reason had previously escaped my attention. I can’t think why–it has an arrestingly modern quality of the kind that rarely fails to catch my eye. All I can tell you is that it leaped off the wall at me yesterday morning, and that I’m still thinking about it as I write these words.
Would that I had more to report about my two-day stay in Massachusetts, but you’ll have to look at tomorrow’s drama column to see what I thought of Twelfth Night and A Streetcar Named Desire, and beyond that I didn’t contrive to cram in any additional art-related experiences. Man cannot live by beauty alone. Sometimes he needs to sleep late.

“Lord Acton stopped on a half truth; and that, the less important half. Power corrupts all right. If you have enough of it, it may, in the end, absolutely corrupt you; but you only need the least little bit, a modicum of power, the power of a staff officer, to do a good job corrupting other people.”
James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor