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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for January 10, 2011

TT: Landmark

January 10, 2011 by ldemanski

I’ve spent the past week on Florida’s Sanibel Island working on Black Beauty: A Life of Duke Ellington. Yesterday morning I finished writing the second chapter, in which I describe the first eighteen years of Ellington’s life. Here are the last two paragraphs. I hope you like them!
* * *
Young%20Duke.jpegThe patterns of Duke Ellington’s life and personality were now firmly set, and they looked quite a bit like the complicated shape of life on U Street, the neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where he grew up. The hours he had spent rubbing shoulders with ragtime pianists, Pullman porters, petty thieves, and card sharps in Frank Holliday’s poolroom had introduced him to a way of living far removed from the middle-class world into which he had been born. To the end of his life he recalled with undiminished relish the lessons he learned there: “Interns used to come in, who could cure colds. And handwriting experts who would enjoy copying somebody’s signature on a check, go out and cash it, and bring back the money to show the cats in the poolroom what artists they were. They didn’t need the money. They did it for the kicks. There were also a couple of pickpockets around, so smooth that when they went to New York they were not allowed in the subway. At heart, they were all great artists.”
Yet Ellington would never turn his back on the other lessons in life that he had learned from J.E., Daisy, and their genteel neighbors. He regarded them as equally valid, just as he learned as much from listening to “the schooled musicians who had been to the conservatory” as he did from the untrained pianists whose homemade methods he emulated: “Everybody seemed to get something out of the other’s playing–the ear cats loved what the schooled guys did, and the schooled guys, with fascination, would try what the ear cats were doing.” It did not occur to him that his own elegant carriage was inconsistent with his racial identity, any more than that the authenticity of his music might somehow be compromised by its urbanity. That, he knew, bespoke a constrictingly narrow notion of “blackness.” Throughout his life he delighted in pointing out that Harlem “has always had more churches than cabarets,” and the composer of Black, Brown and Beige needed no one to remind him that black people came in all shades. “Once I asked him what he considered a typical Negro piece among his compositions,” a white friend recalled. “He paused a moment before he came up with ‘In a Sentimental Mood.’ I protested a bit and said I thought that was a very sophisticated white kind of song and people were usually surprised when they learned it was by him. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s because you don’t know what it’s like to be a Negro.'”
Never did he harbor the slightest doubt of his own knowledge of what it was like to be a Negro, or his ability to turn that knowledge into music that gave voice to his people’s anguish–and aspiration.

TT: Just because

January 10, 2011 by ldemanski

Miles Davis and the Gil Evans Orchestra play Dave Brubeck’s “The Duke”:

TT: Almanac

January 10, 2011 by ldemanski

“Warming up before a concert is like doing breathing exercises before dying.”
Gregor Piatigorsky (quoted in Leon Fleisher and Anne Midgette, My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music)

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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