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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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The man who writes ’em like they used to

August 1, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I pay tribute to Dave Frishberg. Inspired by my recent posting about his GoFundMe campaign, the column focuses on his work as a songwriter. Here’s an excerpt.

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Somewhere along the way, Mr. Frishberg discovered that he had a knack for writing songs. Unlike most people who make that discovery, though, he then put himself through a rigorous course of self-training and turned into something so improbable as to boggle the minds of those who know what it takes: He is now the last of the old-time professional songwriters. He was influenced not by James Taylor or Ani DiFranco but by Frank Loesser, who wrote the scores for “Guys and Dolls” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” “There was dignity in everything Loesser wrote—no cheap lines, no cheap rhymes,” Mr. Frishberg has said. “He made the vernacular classy.” The fact that he embraced the fine art of golden-age songwriting long after the golden age of songwriting was over and done with didn’t faze him: Mr. Frishberg, who calls himself a “retromaniac,” is not only content to live in the past but prefers to do so. For him, nostalgia is not merely a state of mind but a way of life.

I know plenty of aging jazz musicians who don’t much care for the directions in which American popular music has traveled during the past half-century. Some are grumpy about it, others downright choleric. Mr. Frishberg runs more to the former than the latter, but his longing for days gone by is productive, not angry. Instead of cursing the darkness, he prefers to write superlatively well-crafted songs that sound as though he’d sat down in a time machine, set the controls to 1950 or 1961, and come back with a song…

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Read the whole thing here.

Dave Frishberg sings and plays his “Do You Miss New York?”:

Almanac: Winston Churchill on the inescapability of war

August 1, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.”

Winston Churchill, “Mankind Is Confronted by One Supreme Task” (News of the World, November 14, 1937)

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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