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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for November 22, 2017

George Avakian, R.I.P.

November 22, 2017 by Terry Teachout

George Avakian’s contribution to the history of jazz was significant beyond reckoning. He produced the first true jazz album in 1940, while he was still an undergraduate at Yale. He quarried Columbia Records’ back catalogue to create the first major-label series of jazz reissues, starting with King Louis, a album of classic 78 sides by Louis Armstrong, to whom he eventually became personally close. By the Fifties he had emerged as a record producer of supreme importance, working with such artists as Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Tony Bennett, Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Erroll Garner, Benny Goodman, Gerry Mulligan, and Sonny Rollins.

As Avakian’s career wound down, he evolved into an elder statesman of the music he loved, the man to whom you went in order to turn back time and find out what it had been like to work with the greats. I spent many hours interviewing him in preparation for the writing of Pops and Duke and found him to be utterly genial, wonderfully discursive, and the nicest of men with whom to spend time.

George remained so vital for so long that it was hard to grasp that he had been born in 1919, just two years after the Original Dixieland Jazz Band cut the first jazz recordings. The notion that he, too, would someday die was all but unimaginable, and when I learned that he finally left us this morning, I found it hard to believe. Fortunately, his musical legacy is permanent. No non-musician, not even John Hammond, has left a deeper mark on the world of jazz, and none was loved more dearly. I shall always miss him.

* * *

Ricky Riccardi, the great Louis Armstrong scholar, pays heartfelt tribute to Avakian here.

Marc Myers’ obituary is here.

Snapshot: Joe Williams sings “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home”

November 22, 2017 by Terry Teachout

Joe Williams and the Count Basie Orchestra perform “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home” on The Kraft Music Hall. The host is Milton Berle. This episode was originally telecast by NBC on March 18, 1959:

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

Almanac: Henry James on the appeal of fiction

November 22, 2017 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.”

Henry James, “Anthony Trollope”

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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