Archives for 2013

I wish you all the joy that you can wish.
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

The National Book Foundation announced the 2013 National Book Award finalists this morning. As I recently predicted, Duke didn’t make the cut, but that’s fine with me. The list of books that were shortlisted today for the nonfiction award is more than enticing enough as is, and I’m proud to have been one of the ten semi-finalists.
To my five colleagues who are now in contention for the big prize, I wish you all the very best of luck.

Marc Myers recently talked to me about Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington for JazzWax, his widely read music blog:

JW: You write that Ellington borrowed extensively from other musicians. Do you view him then as a great original composer or a brilliant recycler who leveraged scraps to create bigger, more dramatic works?
TT: He was both. The Ellington who cobbled together “Sophisticated Lady” out of a pair of melodic fragments supplied by Lawrence Brown and Otto Hardwick was, to use your apt phrase, a “brilliant recycler.” But the Ellington who wrote masterpieces like “Ko-Ko” from scratch, on the other hand, was a truly great original composer–and you mustn’t forget that most of his music was completely original….

To read the first installment of our two-part conversation, go here.

Gary Karr plays the first movement of Serge Koussevitzky’s Bass Concerto, accompanied by Carl Seale and the Valley Symphony Orchestra:

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

Duke Ellington and Count Basie play “One O’Clock Jump”:

“It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.”
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

From 2003:

A faithful film adaptation of a novel of any considerable literary complexity can never be more than a species of illustration–a commentary at best, a comic book at worst. To watch it inevitably becomes a kind of game in which the viewer scores the film according to how many surface details the director gets right. Do the actors look the way they “ought” to? Are the sets convincing? Does the dialogue sound familiar? It’s a good game, but it has nothing to do with art….

Read the whole thing here.

Duke Ellington plays Billy Strayhorn’s “Lotus Blossom” in Copenhagen in 1967: