Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“The monomaniac is unlikely to succeed. Most leave only their bleached bones in the roadless desert. But the rest of us, with multiple interests instead of one single mission, are certain to fail and to have no impact at all.”
Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander
Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.
I wrote a long blog posting about $64,000 Jazz in 2013, for it was, unlikely as it may sound, one of the record albums that would do the most to shape my adult musical tastes. Here’s part of what I wrote back then.
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The first of the big-money game shows, The $64,000 Question was so widely viewed that it actually displaced I Love Lucy as America’s most popular TV series, the first and only show ever to do so. The Rev. Alvin L. Kershaw, an Episcopal minister, won $32,000 in 1955 (the equivalent of $278,810 today) answering questions about jazz. Columbia thereupon released $64,000 Jazz, an anthology of performances by twelve of the label’s top-selling jazz artists. What the show’s unsuspecting viewers didn’t know was that it was rigged, a fact whose disclosure helped to trigger the nationwide scandal that was later portrayed by Robert Redford in Quiz Show. (It’s not known whether Rev. Kershaw, who died in 2001, was one of the crooked contestants.) Not surprisingly, $64,000 Jazz went out of print shortly after the program was cancelled, and eventually it became something of a collector’s item.
Needless to say, I knew none of this in 1968, the year in which I found Columbia CL 777 buried among my father’s old records. What interested me about $64,000 Jazz was the music it contained. I’d only just started listening to jazz, and that summer I borrowed a plywood string bass from the band room of my junior high school and taught myself how to play it. I spent countless hours plucking along with those records, $64,000 Jazz among them, and though I had no way of knowing it then, the course of a large part of my future life was thereby set in stone.
$64,000 Jazz was the first of my father’s albums to which I listened closely and attentively. It was an exceedingly suitable record for a budding young jazz buff to have discovered, for its twelve tracks, all of them selected and annotated by the legendary record producer George Avakian, included now-classic performances by the illustrious likes of Louis Armstrong, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Eddie Condon, Duke Ellington, Erroll Garner, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Harry James, J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding, and Sarah Vaughan. Listening to these performances, which were cut between 1938 and 1955, introduced me to jazz in all its kaleidoscopic diversity, and persuaded me right from the start of my musical career that I wanted to play not just one kind of jazz, but every kind.
When I started playing piano a couple of years later, I taught myself how to pick out the introduction to Erroll Garner’s version of “Laura,” which I learned from $64,000 Jazz. “Laura,” as it happens, was my father’s favorite song. It would always please him to hear me play it, just as it pleases me that my best friend bears the name of the tune that he loved so much….
Forty-five years after the fact, it’s strange to think how powerful and permanent an effect $64,000 Jazz had on me. Not only have I written books about two of the musicians whose music I first heard on $64,000 Jazz, but I actually got to know George Avakian before his death in 2017. Eddie Condon’s version of “I’m Comin’ Virginia” was one of the records that I chose to play at Dick Sudhalter’s memorial service. And when I had to choose a late-Thirties composition by Duke Ellington to discuss in detail in Duke, I picked I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart.The $64,000 Question, however, is all but forgotten today, a footnote to the history of Eisenhower-era pop culture. Though the phrase “the $64,000 question” remains part of the American language, it’s now a stone-dead metaphor, one that I’ve never heard used by anyone much under the age of fifty. As for me, I never saw the show, which went off the air two years after I was born, and to watch a kinescope of The $64,000 Question on YouTube today is to marvel at how anyone could ever have supposed that it was anything other than comprehensively fraudulent.
Even so, I will always be grateful to its makers for having opened the ears of a small-town boy to the sound of jazz—a boy who grew up to play bass in the nightclubs of Kansas City and write the biographies of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Such are the ways of the law of unintended consequences, a law of life that I have now lived long enough to appreciate in all its inscrutable, probability-beggaring splendor.
(To be continued)
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Erroll Garner’s 1951 recording of David Raksin’s “Laura,” with John Simmons on bass and Shadow Wilson on drums:
A 1956 episode of The $64,000 Question, originally telecast by CBS in 1956:
The trailer for Robert Redford’s 1994 film Quiz Show, a fictionalized portrayal of the TV quiz-show scandals:
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To read about album #1, go here.
To read about album #2, go here.
To read about album #3, go here.
To read about album #4, go here.
To read about album #5, go here.
To read about album #6, go here.
To read about album #7, go here.
“For Socialism did indeed die with the guns of August of 1914 when the Socialist masses rejected proletarian solidarity and enthusiastically embraced nationalism and fratricidal war instead. It was not the end of Marxism as a theology: theologies do outlive faith. But it was the end of Socialism as a dream—at least for an entire generation, if not forever. Since then power has won in every conflict between the promise of Socialism and the reality of power; since then, above all, nationalism has won in every conflict between the promise of Socialism and the passion of nationalism.”
Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander
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For most of us, art dealers and gallery owners are the missing links of art history. Unless you’re a collector or a well-informed historian, you probably haven’t heard of any of them. The only dealers ever to have been widely known by name in this country were Joseph Duveen, the man who sold Europe’s Old Master paintings to America’s gilded-age financiers, and Leo Castelli, who was largely responsible for spreading the word about the Pop artists and other luminaries of the ’60s and ’70s. Yet they’re the essential middlemen who help get art out of the studios and into the hands of collectors—the first step on the long road to posterity.
Consider the case of Edith Halpert, the founder of New York’s Downtown Gallery, which opened in Greenwich Village in 1926 and soon became one of the most influential galleries specializing in modern American art. Not only did she support and figure prominently in the careers of such important painters of the time as Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Jacob Lawrence, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler and Max Weber, but she was also instrumental in bringing American folk art to the attention of major collectors like Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (they shared a special liking for traditional weathervanes).Thousands of paintings and other works originally sold by Halpert now hang in such public collections as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Washington’s Phillips Collection….
Now New York’s Jewish Museum is seeking to bring this seminal figure back into the modern-art conversation by presenting “Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art,” the first exhibition to be devoted to her career. On display through February 9, it contains 100 works that were either sold by Halpert or went into her personal collection, which was auctioned off in 1973. Organized by Rebecca Shaykin, who has also written a first-rate monograph, “Edith Halpert, the Downtown Gallery, and the Rise of American Art,” that doubles as the catalogue, it’s a compact, elegant show that is both comprehensively informative and a delight to visit….
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Read the whole thing here.Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the order in which I first heard them.
Hence I got my first copy of Isaac Stern’s 1959 album of works for violin and orchestra by Béla Bartók and Alban Berg not from Amazon or iTunes but from Keith Collins Piano Company, a store in Smalltown, U.S.A., that sold records on the side but whose main business was furnishing the musically inclined children of Smalltown with pianos, organs, guitars, clarinets, trumpets, and other instruments. It was there that my parents bought me a Scherl & Roth student-model violin, my first musical instrument, purchased on the installment plan. By contrast, Collins Piano had only a couple of bins devoted to classical records, but since there was no other place in town that sold such recherché fare—Smalltown had no record stores at all—I contented myself with whatever was in stock, occasionally screwing up the nerve to place a special order for a specific album.
I can’t imagine how a record of concerted works by Berg and Bartók made its circuitous way into the classical bin at Collins Piano. Granted, Isaac Stern and Leonard Bernstein, the album’s conductor, were as famous in 1969 as it was then possible for American classical musicians to be. But Berg and Bartók wrote modern music, meaning that it didn’t sound at all like Mozart, Beethoven, or Tchaikovsky, much less Dolly Parton or Glenn Miller, and if I hadn’t saved up my allowance to purchase that particular album, which had all too clearly been gathering dust for a long time, I’ve no idea who else in Smalltown would have done so.
I brought it home, put on Bartók’s First Rhapsody, and was instantaneously thrilled to the marrow by its strange but potent blend of soaring lyricism and harsh, slashing dissonances. Never before had I heard such a piece, and I resolved on the spot to seek out more music by Bartók and learn who he was and why he composed that way. I didn’t know it at the time, but a door in my unformed artistic consciousness had just swung wide open, never to close again.
By then I was studying the violin myself, so I ordered the sheet music from Collins Piano. The finger-twisting double stops in the first movement defeated me, but I kept on sawing away at them, and in due course I got to where I could stagger all the way through the piece. I have a feeling that the results sounded rather more like Jack Benny than Isaac Stern, but I did manage to play the First Rhapsody just well enough to imagine myself performing it in front of an audience some time in the distant future. That never happened, alas, but I still love the piece, and I expect that this will always be my favorite recorded version.
(To be continued)
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The first movement of Béla Bartók’s First Violin Rhapsody, performed by György Pauk, Iván Fischer, and the NHK Symphony Orchestra of Tokyo at a 2000 concert:
Carnegie Hall Salutes Jack Benny, a TV program originally telecast by CBS on September 12, 1961. Also featured in addition to the comedian are Isaac Stern, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Roberta Peters, Van Cliburn, and the Benny Goodman Sextet (with Red Norvo on vibraharp). The performances, filmed during a Carnegie Hall concert, include a comedy version of the first movement of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto played by Jack Benny and Stern. Benny performed this piece at benefit concerts for symphony orchestras throughout America:
Jack Benny talks about Isaac Stern on The Dick Cavett Show. This episode was originally telecast by ABC on February 21, 1973:
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To read about album #1, go here.
To read about album #2, go here.
To read about album #3, go here.
To read about album #4, go here.
To read about album #5, go here.
To read about album #6, go here.
Gene Kelly and Sugar Ray Robinson dance a duet in the opening sequence of “Dancing: A Man’s Game,” an episode of Omnibus hosted by Alistair Cooke and originally telecast by NBC on December 21, 1958:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“You are a senior executive of a big company and you know the first rule: authority and responsibility must be congruent and commensurate to each other. If you don’t want authority and shouldn’t have it, don’t talk about responsibility. And if you don’t want responsibility and shouldn’t have it, don’t talk about authority.”
Alfred P. Sloan (quoted in Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander)Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums every weekday in the order in which I first heard them.
It scarcely seems possible, but I’ve been listening to this album, which introduced me to the music of Mozart, for fifty years. I bought it when I was thirteen, the same age as Arthur Rubinstein when he made his Berlin debut playing Mozart’s A Major Piano Concerto with an orchestra led by Joseph Joachim, his patron and Brahms’ intimate friend, in 1900. “He who can play Mozart so successfully is a chosen one among the elect,” one of the critics wrote, a sentence which the youngster got by heart and remembered for the rest of his long life.
Rubinstein adored Mozart’s music, but he rarely played it in public. Even so, he had a special affection for the divine simplicity of this particular piece, which he recorded three different times, in 1931, 1946, and 1962. This is the last of them, and while it is no longer my favorite recording—I’ve come to find his Mozart playing a bit on the pale side—I still love it, undoubtedly for sentimental reasons, which is just fine by me.
To discover Mozart is by definition a key moment in every musician’s life, he being the master of masters. So far as I know, the only artist of note who had a bad word to say about him was Noël Coward, who claimed that his operas sounded like “piddling on flannel.” Though it’s a funny line, my own feelings are more aptly summed up by Aaron Copland, himself a great composer, in a 1956 essay that I can do no better than quote in extenso:
It would be futile to try to single out any one work as my favorite, but the slow movement of this concerto is as good a pick as any. Each bar is suffused with a desperate, heart-tearing melancholy, yet Mozart never exaggerates his unappeasable sorrow: he is content merely to show it to you, in much the same way that Cézanne shows you the garden at Les Lauves, his country home, leaving the rest to your imagination.Paul Valéry once wrote: “The definition of beauty is easy: it is that which makes us despair.” On reading that phrase, I immediately thought of Mozart. Admittedly, despair is an unusual word to couple with the Viennese master’s music. And yet, isn’t it true that any incommensurable thing sets up within us a kind of despair? There is no way to seize the Mozart music. This is true even for a fellow-composer, any composer—who, bring a composer, rightfully feels a special sense of kinship, even a happy familiarity, with the hero of Salzburg. After all, we can pore over him, dissect him, marvel or carp at him. But in the end there remains something that will not be seized. That is why, each time a Mozart work begins—I am thinking of the finest examples now—we composers listen with a certain awe and wonder, not unmixed with despair. The wonder we share with everyone; the despaire comes from the realization that only this one man at this one moment in musical history could have created works that seem so effortless and so close to perfection.
(To be continued)
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Maurizio Pollini plays Mozart’s A Major Piano Concerto, K. 488, accompanied by Karl Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic. This performance was filmed in 1976:
Arthur Rubinstein plays the piano and talks about music in The Love of Life, an Oscar-winning 1969 documentary:
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To read about album #1, go here.
To read about album #2, go here.
To read about album #3, go here.
To read about album #4, go here.
To read about album #5, go here.