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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Down there on a visit

March 2, 2015 by Terry Teachout

10805567_10153015097042193_865244930675666077_nMrs. T and I left for Florida on December 28 and returned to Manhattan yesterday afternoon. We took an Amtrak sleeper car both ways, and the overnight trip home was as crowded and uncomfortable as its predecessor. Now that I’ve experienced two twenty-four-hour-long journeys in a Viewliner Standard Roomette that was theoretically built for two, I’m less than eager to do it all over again any time soon. Closets were made for storing clothes, not human beings, even those whom apartment life in New York City has long since accustomed to unnaturally close quarters.

Still, our voyage was tolerable and not without its modest pleasures. Since Amtrak’s Silver Meteor, incredibly and archaically enough, has no wi-fi service, I spent much of my enforced leisure time on board reading Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (about which more another day) and most of the rest of it looking out the window of our compartment as America passed me by, unrolling itself in a tranquilizingly continuous stream of uneventful eventfulness. That’s the best part of train travel, and for me it never palls.

Early Morning, Stony Point. NYDuke Ellington was another devoted train traveler, and I wrote about why he liked it so much in Duke:

In addition to setting him apart from his sidemen—he slept not in a berth but a roomette—it provided him with “mental isolation…Folks can’t rush you until you get off.” For a touring bandleader whose occupation forced him to compose on the road, such privacy was a must. Ruth Ellington remembered seeing her brother “in a [railroad] siding somewhere in Texas, the heat at 110, the sweat pouring off him on to a piece of manuscript paper on his knee, catching up on something he wanted to finish.” Moreover, he loved the ever-changing sounds of train travel, above all the train whistles: “Especially in the South. There the firemen play blues on the engine whistle—big, smeary things like a goddam woman singing in the night.”

It was natural for such homely sounds to find their way into his work, most famously in “Daybreak Express,” a jazz counterpart of Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 231 that the Ellington band recorded in 1933, ten years after the Swiss composer produced his own exercise in musical onomatopoeia. Like Pacific 231, “Daybreak Express” is an orchestral tour de force that reproduces the sounds of high-speed train travel with uncanny, almost eerie accuracy. Barney Bigard marveled at the way in which Ellington was able to “take an ordinary situation and put it into some music…We’d all be up at night gambling and we’d hear the whistle blow as we went over a crossing. Duke would hear all the same things. The only difference was, we were playing poker and he was writing music about that whistling.” He would do so on many other occasions. Two years later, for instance, he wrote Reminiscing in Tempo, whose rock-steady rhythmic patterns, he explained, were “all caught up in the rhythm and motion of the train dashing through the South.”

I wish I could say that Amtrak had done as well by me, but I didn’t write anything like a miniature masterpiece during either of our long train trips. I did, however, knock out a dozen-odd columns and essays while we were in Florida, several of them about the plays and musicals that I saw there, the seeing of which was the point of the exercise. I also saw several gorgeous sunsets, all of them on Sanibel Island, and rejoiced, as I always do, in the company of my beloved and indispensable Mrs. T. We are never more continuously together than when we are in Florida, and we never fail to enjoy our togetherness.

11001919_10153161503247193_6373186944984743091_nI flew back to New York two times to review shows and tried to do so twice more, stymied in both cases by the horrific winter weather that has been pulverizing so much of the country this year. I wasn’t sorry to escape most of it, and I already feel nostalgic for the warmth of Florida, as well as the treasured friends that we’ve made there in recent years. It somehow seems fitting that it started to snow—hard—less than an hour after we got back to our Manhattan apartment.

On the other hand, our stay in Florida was in certain ways unusually stressful, for Mrs. T experienced some health problems late in January that forced her to spend a few days in a Sarasota hospital. It’s no fun recuperating in anonymous hotel rooms, even in Florida, for which reason we’re gladder than usual to be home again, free of the nagging burden of sleeping in strange beds and living out of suitcases.

All that said, we’ll both miss the Sunshine State, and it pleases me greatly to know, as I announced in this space three weeks ago, that I’ll be going back there in May of 2016 when Palm Beach Dramaworks mounts Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play. It happens that I’ve never been in Florida when it’s hot, and I suspect that it will be interesting (to put it delicately) to see what I make of the much-altered climate.

In any case, Mrs. T and I are done with Florida for the time being, and I’ve already jumped back onto the conveyor belt of my everyday life: I’m seeing four shows on and off Broadway this week, and I’ll be pulling on my winter coat to see all four of them. That’s my life, and I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t love it—but I can’t deny that a not-so-small part of me remains down south, sitting by the Gulf of Mexico, listening to the surf crash endlessly on the beach, and thinking about nothing in particular. That’s my life, too.

* * *

Daybreak Express, a 1953 film by D.A. Pennebaker about train travel in New York. The musical score is Duke Ellington’s composition of the same name, recorded by his band in 1934:

Just because: the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra in 1954

March 2, 2015 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAA very rare kinescope of the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra playing “Midnight Sleighride” on TV in 1954. The piece is a jazz arrangement by Bill Finegan of the “Troika” from Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé:

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

Almanac: Philip K. Dick on reality

March 2, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

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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