This just in from the Grammy Awards:

Category 49

Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album

Concert in the Garden

Maria Schneider Orchestra

Our heartfelt congratulations!

My life is a congeries of implausibly cool things, some large and some small, and one of the coolest of them is the fact that I meet the most interesting people. On Thursday, for example, I got to share a studio at WNYC-FM with Dan Hicks, whose music I’ve loved for thirty years. I’m pleased to report that he is–as I expected and hoped–the very soul of unflappability.

If you weren’t listening live to yesterday’s Soundcheck, on which I talked about Pat Metheny, go here to download the archived version. It’s not that I said anything stupefyingly brilliant in the first half of the show (though I had great fun as usual batting the conversational ball back and forth with host John Schaefer). No, the news of the day was that Hicks had everybody in the control room rolling on the floor as he chatted amiably about his new Hot Licks album, Selected Shorts. I plan to buy a copy the next time I get within five blocks of a record store. (O.K., ten.)

You’ll also hear Hicks trot out a brand-new word, equivalate:

I was more acoustic…but I was able to play right along in rock contexts, and it was talked about in Rolling Stone right away, which I liked–which I equivalate to maybe pop.

That’s an excellent word. Don’t go looking for it in the dictionary–yet–but I certainly plan to work it into my pieces as often as possible from now on.

How lucky am I? So way.

I had a lovely week at the theater, and today’s drama column, in which I review The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and the Storm Theatre’s revival of The Shoemaker’s Holiday, is proof thereof.

Putnam County is soooo da bomb:

Sometimes you can tell how good a show is going to be as soon as it starts. “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” was like that. The lights went down, the five-piece orchestra struck up, and an anxious-looking teenager walked on stage and sang, “At the 25th annual Putnam County Spelling Bee/My parents keep on telling me/Just being here is winning/Although/I know it isn’t so.” Pow! All at once Second Stage Theatre was filled with the warm, knowing laughter of a roomful of people who knew they were about to have their socks charmed off.

Let me pause for a moment so you can go right out and buy tickets, because William Finn, the writer-composer of “Falsettos” and “A New Brain,” and Rachel Sheinkin, author of the funniest musical-comedy book to come along in years, have blown the bull’s-eye off the target. “Putnam County” (as I’ll call it for short) is that rarity of rarities, a super-smart show that is also a bonafide crowd-pleaser. Directed by James Lapine, Stephen Sondheim’s longtime collaborator, it’s the best new musical I’ve covered, “Avenue Q” included, since I started writing this column. In fact, it’s the best show in town, and if it doesn’t move to Broadway sooner rather than later (it runs off Broadway through March 6), I’ll cook and eat my unabridged dictionary….

I had almost as much fun at The Shoemaker’s Holiday:

Thomas Dekker’s “The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” first performed in 1600, hasn’t received a major New York production since 1937, when Orson Welles staged it for his Mercury Theatre. Now it’s being presented by the Storm Theatre, a tiny troupe of which I’d never heard until its press release popped up in my mailbox a couple of weeks ago (the company performs in a black-box theater a block from Broadway). The only reason I bothered to go was because I’d never seen Dekker’s most popular play on stage.

Well, guess what? It’s a peach. Peter Dobbins, artistic director of the Storm Theatre, strikes a perfect balance between bawdiness and deep feeling, something that Welles’ heavily cut, coarsely comic staging failed by all accounts to do. Dekker’s prithee-put-a-sock-in-it-old-codswallop dialogue is played to the hilt, especially by Hugh Brandon Kelly, the shoemaker-turned-sheriff (I’d kill for a big bass voice like that), and shameless scene-stealing is the order of the day (Amanda Cronk makes the funniest faces imaginable). Yet the serious parts are given full value, too….

No link. Do the newsstand thing, or the online edition thing.

P.S. Since my review went to press, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee has extended its off-Broadway run to March 20. Don’t wait for it to move to Broadway–go now.

“Deep in his heart he hankers to be an artist of some sort, but he is only an actor. To be an actor was his adolescent dream and has been his means of livelihood for fifty years or more; but although he has no complaints about that (indeed it would be ungrateful of him to make any) he knows that an actor is usually no more than an assortment of odds and ends which barely add up to a whole man. An actor is an interpreter of other men’s words, often a soul which wishes to reveal itself to the world but dare not, a craftsman, a bag of tricks, a vanity bag, a cool observer of mankind, a child, and at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerise a group of innocents.”

Alec Guinness, Blessings in Disguise

When most people imagine an ideal vacation, they head toward the equator in their minds. I dream in the opposite direction, magnetically attracted toward the nearest pole, to places like the Scottish Highlands and Denali National Park. Perhaps this, in addition to hockey love and frequent youthful border crossings, explains my lifelong Canada crush. Or perhaps mutual adoration set in after my star turn in a 1970s television spot for the CBC kiddie show The Friendly Giant (I was discovered in a Toronto park, mastered my line “I like Jerome the Giraffe” like a pro, and received one pre-Loonie Canadian dollar for my trouble.) I don’t know–as with most crushes, I’m less interested in understanding it than enjoying it. And I don’t think it has a thing to do with my getting a lot of enjoyment lately out of the newish CBC arts site. A few highlights:

– An appreciation/lamentation of Arrested Development–appreciating the show, lamenting the non-viewers who are dealing it a slow but certain death–here. Notable quote:

Maybe Arrested Development is the last great sitcom we’ll get for free.

– A snappy overview of recent movies about weddings, here. NQ:

As the movie wedding approaches, the bride is destined to be relieved of that thing called “agency,” and she’s grateful for it. At the end of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Nia Vardalos, looking like a cloud vomited on her, thanks her family for their intolerance and intrusion. For a while pre-nuptially, she was actually in the process of toughening up and learning to stand up to her bossy family, but weddings demand the softening of women. Even the excellent The Philadelphia Story required Katherine Hepburn to slough off her haughty Hepburnness so Cary Grant could steal her away from the uptight idiot she only thought she liked. The transformation from calloused cellar sweeper to Cinderella princess is easy; just stick a toe into a glittery, loan-financed slipper. In modern wedding movies, love and marriage turns Type A career women–Roberts in Runaway Bride; Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner–into…what?

– An anti-book-club rant, here. I’ve never been in a book club, so the author’s pretty much singing to the choir here. In my experience, enough years of grad school tend to undermine the appeal. I myself am far more inclined to form a television club.

– This nuanced piece about the problems, aesthetic and ethical, inherent in making a film about genocide. This subject has been on my mind in a half-processed way lately, simply because I want to go see Hotel Rwanda but have failed to try to talk a friend into it. Nobody in my circle is apparently inclined to go. That doesn’t mean they won’t–but it does mean that to get them to, I have to do something akin to talking it up. Hmnh. Given the subject matter, I haven’t found any way of doing this that won’t surely sound bizarre or even ghoulish.

NQ:

Of course, such unimaginable moments have occurred, and are occurring, but do they lose their power when they become cinematic tropes, reducing horror to a plot point or a hero’s redemption? The danger of moviemaking is that it somehow levels genocide, and evil becomes as significant, or insignificant, as the predictable beats of a thriller or an epic weepie.

Speaking of neologisms (which Terry was here) and of Lance Mannion (which I was here), I like Lance’s neologism “Almodovarianally” in that same post, though to my ear something about that word wants to be stretched out even longer–to, say, “Almodovarianesqueishly.”

It’s like we used to say in high school: “You can beat a dead gift horse against the current, but you can’t make him drink spilt milk.”

And that, I think, is a sufficiently ridiculous note on which to close shop for the weekend. Have a good one.

One last reminder: I’ll be on WNYC-FM’s Soundcheck this afternoon, talking about the Pat Metheny Group’s new CD, The Way Up, an hour-long jazz composition by Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays that’s just been released by Nonesuch. I’ll also be talking about other attempts by jazz composers to grapple with the problem of large-scale form.

In addition, Dan Hicks–yes, that Dan Hicks–will be stopping by the studio to talk about his new album, Selected Shorts. I’ve been a Hot Licks fan ever since high school (in fact, I’m listening to Where’s the Money? as I write these words), and I’m soooo looking forward to meeting His Coolness.

Soundcheck airs live in New York at two p.m. on 93.9 FM. To find out more about today’s show, to tune in online via streaming audio, or to listen after the fact by accessing the Soundcheck archive, go here. I’ll be heard at the top of the hour.

Give a listen.

When Nancy LaMott died in 1995, her friends and colleagues, myself among them, swore they’d never let her be forgotten. It was a promise more easily made than kept. I wrote a long essay about her for Commentary (the one collected in the Teachout Reader), and Jonathan Schwartz continued to play her records on his various radio shows, but once Nancy’s albums disappeared into limbo, there wasn’t a whole lot more we could do to keep her memory green. Though she was well known in the tight little world of New York cabaret, she had only just begun to make an impression outside it, and within a couple of years of her death it had faded almost beyond recognition. I tried on occasion to interest newspaper and magazine editors in a piece about her, but the answer was always the same: why would anyone care about a half-forgotten cabaret singer whose records were out of print?

So when Midder Music announced that it would be releasing Live at Tavern on the Green, Nancy’s first live album, and reissuing her other recordings, I knew the time had come for me to try to keep my promise. I wasn’t optimistic. She’d been dead for nine years, and though the circumstances of her death were intrinsically interesting, even romantic, I had no reason to suppose that very many people would now be interested in reading about her. Still, I was determined to give it a shot, and Eric Gibson, my editor at The Wall Street Journal, agreed to give me enough space to tell the tale as best I could. I sat down first thing Monday morning, wrote “An Encore for Nancy LaMott,” sent it off to Eric, and held my breath.

The piece ran in Wednesday’s Journal, and no sooner did people start reading the paper than Live at Tavern on the Green started climbing up the amazon.com music chart. On Tuesday night it had been hovering around #300. Twenty-four hours later it had settled at #8, right behind Green Day’s American Idiot, Tina Turner’s All the Best, and U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and just ahead of Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me. I’m amazed, and not a little humbled. Grateful, too, for it wouldn’t have happened had Eric not been willing to trust my judgment and lend me a prime chunk of real estate in the Journal so that I could write a few heartfelt words about an old friend who was also a great artist.

I don’t know what the future holds in store for Live at Tavern on the Green. My hope, of course, is that the ripples from my piece will continue to spread. But even if this is as good as it gets, I’ll always have the satisfaction of knowing that hundreds of thousands of people read about Nancy LaMott yesterday, and that what I wrote moved some of them to buy one or more of her albums. That’s good enough for me.

If you didn’t see my piece in Wednesday’s Journal, here’s part of what I wrote:

Everything was going Nancy LaMott’s way in 1995. She was appearing regularly at Manhattan’s fanciest nightspots, from the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel on down. Her heartfelt, irresistibly appealing versions of such standards as “How Deep Is the Ocean” and “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” had started to catch the media’s ear. She made her Carnegie Hall debut and recorded her first album with an orchestra, “Listen to My Heart.” She even sang at the White House. Then the clock ran out. Nancy died of uterine cancer that December, leaving behind a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of bookings she didn’t live to fulfill, six records that quickly went out of print and a grieving husband whom she married in her hospital room, an hour and a half before she died. She was just 43 years old.

It’s a tale almost too sad to tell–but now, at long last, it has something like a happy ending. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Midder Music, Nancy’s record label, has brought out “Live at Tavern on the Green,” her first CD to be released since 1997, and reissued her earlier albums, which became caught up in a legal dispute shortly after her death and have since been unavailable….

I won’t pretend to be objective about Nancy–we were too close for that–but I was hardly the only critic to know her for what she was. John Simon, one of the toughest customers in New York, said that “she fully fathoms what a song is about, and then, rather than merely singing it, lives it.” Stephen Holden put it a different way in her New York Times obituary: “She brought to everything she sang a clean, clear sense of line, impeccable enunciation and a deep understanding of how a good song could convey a lifetime’s experience.” All this is on “Live at Tavern on the Green,” along with a special quality I tried to put in words when I wrote in the New York Daily News that she sounded “sincere and sensuous at the same time, as if the girl next door had snuck out at two a.m. to make a little whoopee with her steady boyfriend.”

I’ve often tried to imagine what might have happened to Nancy had she lived even a little longer. A few months after her death, the listening public discovered Diana Krall’s equally appealing way with a standard, and she began her fast climb to well-deserved fame. Would Nancy have caught the same wave of nostalgia for the romantic ballads of yesteryear, and become a full-fledged star? I think so, and with the release of “Live at Tavern on the Green” and the reissue of her other albums (my favorite of which is “Come Rain or Come Shine: The Songs of Johnny Mercer”), she has a second, posthumous chance to reach all the people who might have fallen in love with her singing a decade ago if they’d only known about it.

At the end of Nancy’s shows, she would leave the bandstand for a moment, then come straight back, grin at the audience and tell them, “Relax, this is cabaret–there’s always an encore.” She trots out that surefire line at the end of “Live at Tavern on the Green,” and it tugged at my heart to hear her speak those well-remembered words again. Now, nine years later, Nancy LaMott has finally come back for an encore. It’s about time.

If you haven’t yet climbed aboard the bandwagon, go here, order one of Nancy’s CDs, and find out what those of us lucky enough to have known and loved her have been missing all these years.