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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for December 9, 2013

TT: What I’m up to this week

December 9, 2013 by Terry Teachout

I’m off to Chicago this morning, there to break bread with Our Girl and see three shows, Remy Bumppo’s revival of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, Writers Theatre’s revival of Conor McPherson’s Port Authority, and Chicago Shakespeare’s updated Merry Wives of Windsor.

In the nonce, I’d like to tell you about my two latest undertakings:

Alec%2BWilder%2BOctet%2Bcirca%2B1940%2Bwilderoctet%2Bcvr.jpg• Hep Records, a Scottish label that specializes in reissues commercial recordings and airchecks of performances by great jazz and pop musicians of the Thirties and Forties, has just released a two-disc set called Music for Lost Souls and Wounded Birds that is devoted in large part to the complete recordings of the Alec Wilder Octet. Alastair Robertson, the producer, asked me to write the liner notes:

Alec Wilder spent his life looking for cracks to fall through. Though he wrote two songs, “I’ll Be Around” and “While We’re Young,” that became standards, most of his “popular” music was too delicate and introspective to please a mass audience. He also composed works for several of America’s finest instrumentalists, but these “classical” pieces were too strongly colored by jazz and popular music to win critical acceptance. Today he is mainly remembered for his book American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950–which has nothing to say about his own songs. All this suggests a man more than half in love with failure, and Wilder’s self-destructive behavior was no secret to those who knew him. Especially when drunk, he liked nothing better than to burn bridges, and had he been less charming when sober, he would surely have lost every friend he ever made.

Outside of his songs, Wilder’s most enduring achievement is–or should have been–the music of the Alec Wilder Octet, whose thirty 78 sides, recorded between 1938 and 1947, constituted one of the earliest sustained attempts to fuse jazz with classical music. But while the octet’s recordings attracted attention in the Thirties and Forties, they are now poorly remembered, in part because they were never reissued in their entirety prior to the release of this album….

The ensemble that recorded the octets, which seems never to have performed in public, consisted of a crack group of studio musicians led by Mitch Miller. The four sides cut at the first session sold well enough for Brunswick (and, later, Columbia) to bring the group back to the studio for five more sessions. Their fey titles, hauntingly nostalgic tunes, off-center harmonies, and piquant scoring delighted musicians and other sharp-eared listeners….

Music for Lost Souls and Wounded Birds will not be available in this country until next year, but you can order it directly from Hep. To do so, or to read more about the album, go here.

• Project Shaw, which presents concert-style semi-staged readings of the plays of George Bernard Shaw each month, is putting on The Devil’s Disciple next Monday night. David Staller, who probably knows more about Shaw than anybody in America, is the director. Project Shaw’s performances are never reviewed, but they’re quite extraordinarily good, so much so that I agreed to introduce Pygmalion last November. (Here’s what I said.)
I had so much fun that I accepted David’s invitation to serve as the narrator of The Devil’s Disciple. This will be the first time in thirty-five years that I’ve appeared on stage in a theatrical performance. Please come and cheer me on–or do the other thing, if you feel so inclined!

The show is at Symphony Space, 95th and Broadway, and starts at seven p.m. To order tickets or for more information, go here.

* * *

“Her Old Man Was Suspicious,” recorded in 1941 by the Alec Wilder Octet:

TT: Just because

December 9, 2013 by Terry Teachout

Booker T. and the MGs play “Red Beans and Rice” in Oslo in 1967:

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

TT: Almanac

December 9, 2013 by Terry Teachout

“Striving for the unreachable is really quite splendid.”
Rudolf Serkin (quoted in Stephen Lehmann and Marion Faber, Rudolf Serkin: A Life)

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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