Terry Teachout

The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (23)

November 14, 2019 by Terry Teachout

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.” I’m writing about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.

23. Bill Evans, Return Engagement (Verve)

Bobby Short wasn’t the only musician to whom I was introduced by Rex Reed. Unlikely as it may sound, he shares that distinction with, of all people, Bill Evans.

It happens that Reed reviewed Alone, Evans’ 1970 solo album, in the first issue of Stereo Review that I ever read. I knew nothing about either man, but even so, what Reed wrote about Evans still made a big impression on me, big enough that I remember it to this day:

I don’t know what there is left to say about Bill Evans that hasn’t already been well said elsewhere. I (and many others) consider him to be the greatest jazz pianist in the world today. He has weathered decades, changes in the world’s musical tastes, and tragic personal problems. He has the strength of a warrior and the soul of a poet. He remains one of the simple but intellectual masters of modern piano interpretation. On every one of Bill’s albums in my collection (I’ve lost count of the number) I think I can feel his heart.

I wanted to run right out and buy a copy of Alone after reading that effusive paragraph, but such a thing wasn’t yet possible in Smalltown, U.S.A., in 1970, so I filed Reed’s review away in the back of my mind, went about my business, and—not surprisingly—forgot all about Evans. Then, four years later, Verve put out a two-disc greatest-hits collection of his recordings called Return Engagement that contained, among other things, a couple of tracks from Alone. I was by that time a regular mail-order customer of Chicago’s Rose Records, so I ordered a copy, more out of curiosity than anything else.

As soon as Return Engagement arrived, I put on the first track, Evans’ 1963 recording of Alex North’s “Love Theme from Spartacus.” To say that I was stunned by what came floating out of my speakers is an understatement. Even though the middle part of “Love Theme from Spartacus” is a kind of jazz waltz, the opening and closing sections sounded nothing like any kind of jazz I’d ever heard. At times they hinted at Debussy or Ravel, but there was nothing derivative about them: they were, rather, the musical equivalent of a cloudy night sky filled with fireflies and brightly shining stars. I was so bowled over that it didn’t hit me at first that what I was hearing was one pianist playing three separate tracks, two of them overdubbed. All I heard was the music, and as I listened to it, I thought: This is the way I’d like to play piano.

In later years I taught myself how to do a passable imitation of Evans playing “Here’s That Rainy Day” on an off night. I also got to know Gene Lees, who wrote the liner notes for Conversations With Myself, the album for which “Love Theme from Spartacus” was recorded. Gene, who was in the studio when Conversations With Myself was taped, was one of Evans’ closest friends, and knew well how gifted—and desperately, uncontrollably self-destructive—he was. Some of what Gene told me about Evans went into the first thing I ever wrote about him, a review of How My Heart Sings, Peter Pettinger’s 1998 biography:

Many jazz musicians resemble their music. Who could have looked more worldly-wise than Duke Ellington, or wittier than Paul Desmond? But sometimes a musician embodies a contradiction, and then you can read it off his face, just as you can see a fault line snaking through a tranquil landscape. Such was the case with Bill Evans. His shining tone and cloudy pastel harmonies transformed such innocuous pop songs as “Young and Foolish” and “The Boy Next Door” into fleeting visions of infinite grace. Yet the bespectacled, cadaverous ruin who sat hunched over the keyboard like a broken gooseneck lamp seemed at first glance incapable of such Debussyan subtlety; something, one felt sure, must have gone terribly wrong for a man who played like that to have looked like that.

I never met Evans, and I’m glad I didn’t. I think he would have been far too painfully sad a person to want to know. But I’ve spent much of the past half-century listening closely to his music, including “Love Theme from Spartacus,” time enough and more to know that it is, at least for me, inexhaustibly beautiful—and that it’s still the way I’d like to play piano, if I could.

(To be continued)

* * *

Bill Evans plays Alex North’s “Love Theme from Spartacus” on Conversations With Myself, released in 1963:

The Bill Evans Trio plays “My Foolish Heart” on the BBC in 1965. Chuck Israels is the bassist, Larry Bunker the drummer:

Bill Evans is interviewed by Chris Albertson in 1970:

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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.

To read about album #8, go here.

To read about album #9, go here.

To read about album #10, go here.

To read about album #11, go here.

To read about album #12, go here.

To read about album #13, go here.

To read about album #14, go here.

To read about album #15, go here.

To read about album #16, go here.

To read about album #17, go here.

To read about album #18, go here.

To read about album #19, go here.

To read about album #20, go here.

.To read about album #21, go here.

.To read about album #22, go here.

So you want to see a show?

November 14, 2019 by Terry Teachout

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

* * *

ON BROADWAY:

• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Hadestown (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

* * *

OFF BROADWAY:

• Cyrano (musical, G/PG-13, closes Dec. 22, reviewed here)

• Seared (comedy, PG-13, closes Dec. 15, reviewed here)

* * *

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND OFF BROADWAY:

• Molly Sweeney (drama, PG-13, closes Saturday, reviewed here)

• Soft Power (musical, PG-13, closes Sunday, reviewed here)

Almanac: Eric Hoffer on freedom and equality

November 14, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.”

Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (22)

November 13, 2019 by Terry Teachout

22. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Will the Circle Be Unbroken (United Artists)

In 1972, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a sort-of-country-rock group hitherto best known for their mild-mannered cover version of “Mr. Bojangles,” released a triple album of traditional country and “old-timey” songs called Will the Circle Be Unbroken on which they joined forces with a group of first-string country and bluegrass musicians, among them Roy Acuff, Mother Maybelle Carter, Vassar Clements, Jimmy Martin, Earl and Randy Scruggs, Merle Travis, and Doc and Merle Watson. Nobody had ever tried anything quite like that before, and the results were a colossal and enduring hit, a kind of prequel to the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack.

I took no note of Will the Circle Be Unbroken when it came out because I didn’t listen to country music. The kind of country that you heard on the radio in 1972 in Smalltown, U.S.A., was mostly the kind for which I had no use whatsoever and still don’t, the insipid “Nashville Sound” 101-Strings ballads that even now can send me running from the room with hands clamped on ears unless they’re sung by the ennobling likes of George Jones.

It was Greg Tanner who changed my mind about the other kind of country music. He was a couple of years older than me, and we met when I entered high school and started playing in the school orchestra. He was a chunky, funny guy with the thickest hick accent I’d ever heard, which he used to conceal the fact that he was both intelligent and sensitive, something he didn’t care for anybody to know. He was also a pretty decent violinist and a very good fiddler who used to play bluegrass and country music for fun during our rehearsal breaks. I was fascinated by the unfamiliar tunes that he tossed off, and in due course we became friends and teamed up with two of his other friends, Ken Harbin and Chuck Hanna, to start a four-piece country-and-bluegrass band that we called Sour Mash.

Greg, Ken, Chuck, and I spent the next couple of years gigging around Smalltown and its environs. Chuck had his own circle of intimates and mostly kept to himself, but Greg, Ken and I were soon spending most of our weekends hanging out together, something I’d never done with male friends of my own age. I wrote about those weekends many years later in a memoir of my small-town childhood and youth:

The three of us did more than just play music and go cruising. We ate meals together. We went camping together. We spent time with each other’s families. We drove out to a deserted bean field one hot summer afternoon and shot bottle rockets at each other. Losing an eye or a finger would have been a stiff price to pay for a good time, but I probably would have paid it without complaining, for I knew the value of my friendship with Greg and Ken. They did their best to teach me how to be a regular guy, taking me by the hand and leading me through the nighttime world of truck stops and chicken-fried steak. I could do little for them in return except play bass and serve as a full-time butt for their practical jokes, but that seemed to be enough. I spent hours watching them shoot pool and drink beer in a seedy dump on Highway 61. One night I overheard Greg talking about me to a fellow at the bar who was wondering why I tagged along. “Hell, yes, he’s strange,” Greg said, “but who gives a shit? He can play the goddamn bass, can’t he? What do you want? A quarterback?”

The friendship was more important to me than the music we made, but the music mattered, too, far more than I understood at first. I learned how to play it from Will the Circle Be Unbroken, which contains such down-home standards as “I Saw the Light,” “Lonesome Fiddle Blues,” “Lost Highway,” “Nine-Pound Hammer,” “Orange Blossom Special,” and “Wreck on the Highway,” all of which insinuated their way into my smartest-boy-in-town blood and became part of my musical DNA. Before long I’d fallen in love with the rootsy, life-is-like-this simplicity of old-time, stone-hard country music. I love it as much now as I did back then—probably even more, since I’ve lived long enough to have felt the soul-wracking hurt that it so often portrays so honestly and well.

In time the four of us graduated from high school, went off to make our separate ways in the world, and mostly lost track of one another save for increasingly infrequent yet always heartfelt reunions. Greg and Chuck are dead now, but Ken, who lives in Kentucky, still stays in touch with me via e-mail, and once in a while we share our unfaded memories of the days when we played music and pinball together and learned how much it means to be a friend.

(To be continued)

* * *

“Avalanche,” from the original Will the Circle Be Unbroken album, played by Vassar Clements and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band:

“Tennessee Stud,” from the original Will the Circle Be Unbroken album, played by Doc Watson and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band:

“Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” performed live in 1990 on Austin City Limits by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and a group of guest artists, including Del McCoury:

* * *

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.

To read about album #8, go here.

To read about album #9, go here.

To read about album #10, go here.

To read about album #11, go here.

To read about album #12, go here.

To read about album #13, go here.

To read about album #14, go here.

To read about album #15, go here.

To read about album #16, go here.

To read about album #17, go here.

To read about album #18, go here.

To read about album #19, go here.

To read about album #20, go here.

.To read about album #21, go here.

Is Tina just another jukebox musical?

November 13, 2019 by Terry Teachout

The forty-first episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

Most of this podcast is devoted to a lengthy review with Tracy Letts. Here’s American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings:

This week, the critics discuss Tina, the new Tina Turner musical on Broadway, and its place in the canon of recent jukebox musicals. They also dive into the mailbag to answer some intriguing questions from listeners covering show running times, our physical relationships to the theatre as a space, and the astonishing lack of accessibility in Broadway houses.

To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you’ve missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.

Snapshot: “How to Behave in Britain”

November 13, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“A Welcome to Britain” (later retitled “How to Behave in Britain”), a World War II training film “presented by the War Office to U.S. Troops arriving in the United Kingdom” and shown to U.S. troops in 1943. The film, which was co-directed by Anthony Asquith and Burgess Meredith, is narrated by Meredith and also features Beatrice Lillie and Bob Hope:

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

Almanac: Bill Bryson on nostalgia

November 13, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“On another continent, 4,000 miles away, I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.”

Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (21)

November 12, 2019 by Terry Teachout

21. Bobby Short Loves Cole Porter (Atlantic)

My father didn’t care for musicals. He owned no original-cast albums, not even South Pacific, and except for The Wizard of Oz, we never watched any movie musicals on TV. As a result, I managed to graduate from high school without knowing much of anything about musicals as a theatrical genre, which is somewhat unusual for a drama critic.

To be sure, I’d appeared in three Smalltown Little Theater musical-comedy productions, once as a singer and twice as an instrumentalist, but the shows on which I worked were Oliver!, Fiddler on the Roof, and The Fantasticks, all of which I loved doing but none of which caused me to fall in love with musicals for their own sake. My high-school drama club only did plays, and the sole musical that I saw mounted professionally prior to going to college was 1776, whose road-show production I caught in St. Louis on a high-school field trip. For me, George Gershwin was the composer of Rhapsody in Blue and Cole Porter was nobody at all—until I discovered cabaret.

My Aunt Suzy, a voluntary spinster who divorced her alcoholic husband and thereafter doted on her nieces and nephews, loved to give all of us such presents as she could afford. The best gift she ever gave me was a subscription to Stereo Review, a now-defunct audio magazine with a first-rate record-review section whose critics, among them Chris Albertson, Noel Coppage, Richard Freed, David Hall, Bernard Jacobson, George Jellinek, Igor Kipnis, Irving Kolodin, Paul Kresh, Rex Reed, Peter Reilly, Steve Simels, Eric Salzman, Lester Trimble, and Joel Vance, were men of astonishingly eclectic tastes. It was in Stereo Review’s wide-ranging pages that I first read about Captain Beefheart, William Bolcom, Pierre Boulez, Company, Bill Evans, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Percy Grainger, the Grateful Dead, the Guarneri Quartet, Josef Hofmann, Hot Tuna, Jethro Tull, Scott Joplin, Leo Kottke, Joni Mitchell, the Mothers of Invention, Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, Linda Ronstadt, Dmitri Shostakovich, Bessie Smith, George Szell, James Taylor, Johnny Winter—and Bobby Short, who until his death in 2005 was the most beloved of all New York cabaret singers.

Rex Reed, who is, amazingly, still around, wrote a piece about Short for the February 1972 issue occasioned by the release of Bobby Short Loves Cole Porter, a double album containing twenty-two of Porter’s best songs. I read it with the closest possible attention. It started out like this:

One of the measures of one kind of sophistication in New York these days is the number of late-hour visits you pay each week to the elegant Café Carlyle. It is there that the singer-pianist nightbird called Bobby Short has his grand-piano perch, from which he plays and sings all the songs worth hearing more than once, sipping champagne the while into the small hours. Everybody who is (or wants to be) anybody comes to hear Bobby harvest his organically grown crop of Tin Pan Alley history, just as if the heavily polluted contemporary musical disaster area didn’t exist.

I didn’t yet know what the phrase “cabaret music” meant, but every other word of that review rang a bell with me, since I was just barely old enough to have started to imagine what it might feel like to be—forgive me—sophisticated.

I had recently discovered a Chicago store called Rose Records that sold albums of all kinds by mail, so I sent off a check at once and, a week or two later, received in the mail a package containing Bobby Short Loves Cole Porter, which was everything Reed said it was and more. I’d never heard anything quite like the first track, “Rap Tap on Wood,” and I spent the next hour riveted by my first hearings of such Porter classics as “At Long Last Love,” “I’ve Got You on My Mind,” “Just One of Those Things,” and “Why Shouldn’t I?” Thanks to Stereo Review, I had miraculously discovered the ne plus ultra of sophistication, a singer-pianist whose arch, amused tenor was the ideal instrument for bringing Porter’s arch, amused songs to life.

It wasn’t until I went off to school in Kansas City and started seeing performances by Broadway road-show companies, however, that I discovered that the songs I had learned from Short, Mabel Mercer, and the other singers whose albums I obtained from Rose Records came from Broadway musicals and thus had theatrical contexts of which I had hitherto been innocent. In time I came to love musicals and to spend many hours seeing them in the theater, though it wasn’t until years later that writing about them, first for the Washington Post and then for The Wall Street Journal, became an important part of my professional life.

Long before then, though, I had brought off a bonafide miracle: I went on a week-long college field trip to Manhattan. My fellow students and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, three Broadway shows, and a performance by the Metropolitan Opera, and I went to the Café Carlyle all by myself on my night off to hear Bobby Short, an adventure that I described at length a quarter-century later in a memoir of my childhood and youth:

I booked a table for one and turned up half an hour before show time, blissfully ignorant of the fact that the Café Carlyle is an elegant watering hole intended for well-to-do New Yorkers, not teenage boys in ill-fitting black suits.
Not being much of a drinker, I decided to consume my minimum by having a late supper at my tiny table. I tore into my shrimp cocktail with gusto, unaware that anything was wrong until I put down my fork, looked around, and saw that no one else in the room was eating. I might well have died of embarrassment had it not been for the fact that Bobby Short, formerly of Danville, Illinois, spotted me for an out-of-towner the moment he walked through the door and came straight to my table to say hello, an act of kindness for which I am still grateful. I talked about it for weeks, though I knew only three or four people who knew who Bobby Short was, which took most of the starch out of the story after the first few tellings.

I never went back to hear Short at the Carlyle again—some memories are too perfect to be tampered with—but I still listen to his records, Bobby Short Loves Cole Porter in particular, with a mixture of pleasure and nostalgia that remains to this day as heady as a glass of very, very dry champagne.

(To be continued)

* * *

Bobby Short sings Cole Porter’s “Rap Tap on Wood,” accompanied by Beverly Peer on bass and Dick Sheridan on drums: