National Review Online asked me what I was reading this summer. Click here and scroll down to the bottom of the page to find out.

(I might add that I also plan to follow OGIC’s orders
and do the Shirley Hazzard thing as soon as my desk is a little clearer!)

Via Instapundit (who just linked to my Marlon Brando posting, glory be!), this e-mail from one Mark Miller:

I’m a researcher for People magazine and I’m trying to track down anyone who has had a blog entry backfire on him or her either professionally or personally. Any help you can be is totally appreciated.

That’s a great question, which is why I’m passing it on. You can e-mail Miller at markjmill@yahoo.com.

I went to the Blue Note last night to hear Gary Burton, who was playing a one-nighter to mark the release of his marvelous new album, Generations. After I booked a table for two, I learned that Madeleine Peyroux would be opening for him. Normally I flinch at the prospect of an opening act–I’ve heard some pretty grisly ones, especially at the Blue Note–but this time I perked right up.

Peyroux first caught my ear several years ago when Jonathan Schwartz played her version of Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight” on his radio show. It’s a lazy, loping performance, a half-notch slower than Cline’s original recording, with an exotic bayou flavor and a discreetly percolating organ in the background, half country and half soul. What really grabbed my attention, though, was the singing. Peyroux sounded just like Billie Holiday in the mid-Forties–the same salty rasp, the same squeezed-out upward spurts and languorous swoops. She didn’t sound like an imitator, though, partly because the song (and arrangement) were radically different from anything Holiday would ever have dreamed of singing, save in some peculiar parallel universe.

Upon further investigation I discovered that “Walkin’ After Midnight” came from Dreamland, Peyroux’s 1996 debut album, which is uneven but full of interesting things. What really surprised me, though, was that it was her only record. Not only had she released nothing after Dreamland, but she appeared to have dropped off the scope altogether. Needless to say, these things happen, and a quick search of the Web hinted at some possible reasons: Peyroux was just 23 years old when she released Dreamland, and her weight had fluctuated drastically since then, suggesting that she’d been weathering some sort of personal crisis. So I filed her name away in my head and heard no more of her until four months ago, when I read that she’d signed with Rounder Records, the Massachusetts-based country-bluegrass-jazz label whose best-known artist is Alison Krauss. Then, earlier this week, Concord Jazz’s publicist sent me an e-mail telling me that Peyroux would be opening for Gary Burton, and I thought, Good–now I can find out what’s happened to her.

The answer is that she’s lost a lot of weight, and now looks rather like Patricia Barber. She still sounds like Billie Holiday, and when you hear her talk you realize that it’s not an imitation, simply the voice that comes out of her throat. In addition, Peyroux plays acoustic guitar in a down-home finger-picking style reminiscent of Leon Redbone, and her choice of material is no less Redbone-ish, running to a pleasingly off-center combination of standards, contemporary ballads, and obscure old-timey tunes. She seems quite shy (though apparently not incapacitatingly so), but that doesn’t stop her from singing in a restrained yet emotionally direct way that I found powerfully appealing. Peyroux appeared with an instrumental trio that didn’t sound as if it had done a whole lot of rehearsing, but the results were more than agreeable, and when she announced from the bandstand that her “sophomore” album, Careless Love, was coming out in September, I leaned over to my companion for the evening and whispered, “I want to write about her.” I’d bet the rent that she has a story to tell–assuming she feels like telling it–but my main interest is in spreading the word about a fine artist who seems at last to be coming into her own.

Peyroux sang for a bit less than an hour, after which Gary Burton’s Generations, as his new quintet is billed, took the stand. As he launched into “First Impression,” the Steely Dan-like opening track from Generations, it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard any of his working groups in person for at least a quarter-century (though I’ve heard him live in various other settings). That surprised me, because Burton has been one of my favorite jazz musicians for much longer than that. After Red Norvo, he is the great vibraharpist, among the most innovative players in the history of jazz, not just technically but stylistically as well. For reasons I find inexplicable, he rarely gets credit for having been one of the very first fusion players, a well-known fact that nonetheless goes unmentioned in the jazz article in the revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that his influential early albums for RCA went out of print in the Seventies and remained unavailable until fairly recently, when they finally began to turn up on CD. In any case, I’ve been listening to him closely and attentively ever since I first saw the Burton Quartet on TV back in my high-school days, and rarely does a week go by without my tasting his cool, bright, unfailingly joyous blend of jazz, rock, and a pinch of classical music.

Generations also features a sixteen-year-old guitarist named Julian Lage who is touring with Burton this summer (I assume he’ll be going back to school in the fall). Burton, of course, is also one of jazz’s great pedagogues–he’s retiring from the Berklee College of Music this year after a three-decade stint–and jazz fans with long memories will recall that one of the other guitar prodigies to pass through his band was a kid by the name of Pat Metheny. So even though Lage’s highly competent playing on Generations lacked real individuality, I took it for granted that he’d be worth watching anyway, and I was right. The solo he played last night on “Test of Time,” a slowish blues by longtime Burton pianist Makoto Ozone, was memorable–hot, focused, remarkably well-shaped–and as he tossed it off, Burton stood in the bend of the piano, grinning like a proud father whose son had just graduated at the head of the class.

Burton’s own playing was, as always, perfect, which I suspect is why he doesn’t often get the kind of critical attention he deserves. He’s one of the most consistent musicians in jazz, a virtuoso of Tatumesque command, and the shimmering, near-glossy surface of his solos has a way of deflecting careful scrutiny. You’re forever tempted to relax and delight in the sensuous appeal of their glittering tintinnabulation, whereas you have to listen closely to break through to the subtle workings of the musical mind that shapes those cascades of notes.

On Generations, Burton and Lage collaborated with Ozone, James Genus, and Clarence Penn, but the band Burton brought into the Blue Note is a brand-new working group (this was, in fact, its first gig), with Vadim Neselovsky on piano, Luques Curtis on bass, and James Williams on drums. I’d say it still has some shaking down left to do–the ensembles occasionally sounded cluttered, especially on the up-tempo numbers, and Williams’ drumming struck me as rather too busy. Even so, I’m sure that a couple of months on the road will work wonders, and in any case you couldn’t help but be excited by the energy with which the players tore into the tunes, all of which were from Generations. Burton himself was plainly inspired by the new setting, and perhaps also by the knowledge that his teaching days are over. Whatever the reason, he played like a crateful of firecrackers going off.

I was sitting next to the bandstand, entranced as usual by the balletic spectacle of Burton manipulating his four mallets with two hands, and as I watched in happy amazement, I was reminded yet again of why I live in New York. Not only was I seeing Gary Burton’s new group from a distance of five feet, but I also had the unexpected pleasure of hearing a greatly gifted singer in the process of rediscovering herself–in the same club, on the same night. It struck me that what makes New York so special is the endless opportunities it provides for just such juxtapositions. I saw and heard any number of marvelous things (including Gary Burton) back when I lived in Kansas City, but they were almost always dished up separately, and there was no feeling of abundance about the city’s artistic fare, much less surprise. You knew at the beginning of the season who’d be coming to town that year–Count Basie in October, Twyla Tharp in November, a Monet retrospective in January–and you made your plans accordingly. New York, by contrast, is utterly resistant to such careful advance planning: I know in a general sort of way what I’ll be seeing in November or March, but I also know my plans must remain subject to radical revision at the last possible minute. As a result, I’m never, ever bored, least of all last night at the Blue Note.

Perhaps the day will come when I’ll feel the need to retreat to a smaller, quieter city, and if that happens I’m sure I’ll be content to scale back my kid-in-a-candy-store schedule accordingly. Such economy has its own advantages: as I’ve written elsewhere, the residents of medium-sized cities become vested in their artistic activities in a way that rarely happens here. Each individual event means more when you don’t have an unceasing superabundance of great events to choose from. But until that day comes, I plan to keep on hurling myself into the whirlpool, night after night and week after week, reveling in the chaos and surprise of life in New York.

* * *

Madeleine Peyroux will be playing at the Blue Note through Sunday. For information, go here.

“Until I actually faced it, I believed that it would not be difficult to write a short story, but now I recognized the complete loneliness of the trade as I stared at my blank paper. I was no longer dealing with facts. My mind was groping in the lamplight in an effort to draw the illusion of living people out of thin air. It had never occurred to me until that moment that the effort would be fatiguing or unpleasant; it had never occurred to me that it would be worse than manual labor. And when I sat down before the table on a creaking bedroom chair, I did not realize that I should be doing this sort of thing for years. I did not realize that writing would almost always be a disagreeable task, and that nothing which one sets down on paper ever wholly approximates the conception of the mind. As soon as I faced it, I did not want to write. Instead my intelligence presented a number of excuses for stopping before I started. The light was bad, the chair was uncomfortable; I felt tired; I wanted to read a book. I would always be seeking for excuses, ever after, not to write; and I have often wondered why I began at all.”

John P. Marquand, Wickford Point

“The scene in Mrs. Smythe Leigh’s living room, Charles sometimes thought afterwards, was one which must have repeated itself continuously in other places. Mrs. Smythe Leigh’s living room was an intellectual fortress and it stood for the larger world. As Mrs. Smythe Leigh told him later, there was no reason to get in a rut because one lived in Clyde. Clyde was a dear, poky place, full of dear people, but one could always open one’s windows to the world. One could bring something new to Clyde, and this was what she always tried to do…a few reproductions of modern pictures, a bit of Chinese brocade, a few records of Kreisler and Caruso, and the American Mercury and the New Republic and of course Harper’s and the Atlantic, and the New Statesman and L’Illustration. All one had to do was open one’s windows to the outer world–and the surprising thing was the number of congenial spirits who gathered if you did it. Sometimes, frankly, she had thought of giving up the Clyde Players. There was always the inertia, but the old guard, Dr. Bush and Katie Rowell, always rallied around her and would not let her give up. Once you had the smell of grease paint in your nostrils, you could never get away from it, and there was always that joy of getting out of oneself by interpreting character on the stage. Charles was a newcomer, but someday he might be the old guard, too.”

John P. Marquand, Point of No Return

From Something Old, Nothing New:

Roger Rabbit was the first movie to acknowledge the nostalgia element in cartoon fandom. What I mean by that is that cartoons had usually been thought of as “timeless”; the repackaging of Warner Brothers cartoons–for television and in compilation films–usually presented the cartoons as belonging to no particular time or place, endlessly recyclable entertainment aimed mostly at kids. Roger Rabbit, with its ’40s setting, presented classic cartoon characters as belonging specifically to that period, part of a genre that had vanished just like the film noir genre to which Bob Hoskins’ Eddie Valiant belongs. It acknowledged that cartoon fans weren’t necessarily kids, and that what made the old cartoons great were the elements that had been sucked out of them by TV broadcasting (the violence, the political incorrectness)….

I’ve never seen this put better, which is probably another way of saying that it tallies precisely with my own experience.

Prior to the release in 1988 of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I no longer watched animated cartoons save on the rare occasions when I found myself in a hotel room on a Saturday morning with nothing to do. Seeing Roger Rabbit reminded me–forcibly, immediately–of how much I’d loved those old cartoons, and also got me thinking for the first time about why I loved them. Never before had it occurred to me that they might possibly be a serious form of cinematic art, stylistically continuous with the great live-action screen comedies of the classic period of American filmmaking. Until then I’d simply thought of them as charming commodities, even though my memories of One Froggy Evening or Bully for Bugs were at least as vivid and accessible as my memories of, say, His Girl Friday (more so, in fact, since they were a part of my youth in the way that live-action screwball comedy was not). What Roger Rabbit did was put a frame around those memories and make them available for critical reconsideration.

The next step was up to me, and I took it with a vengeance: I started reading such books about non-Disney animation as were then available, and seeking out the uncensored collections of Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons that had only just started to appear on videocassette. So did a lot of other people, which is one reason why the various all-animation cable networks now make a point of telecasting classic cartoons seven days a week. Sixteen years later, I know at least as much about animation as I do about any other branch of filmmaking, and take it every bit as seriously. I even own a cel set-up from The Cat Concerto, which hangs on my kitchen wall right around the corner from my Neil Welliver woodcut.

As for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I recently watched it on DVD, and found it as smart and funny as I did when it was released. It’s more than just a staggeringly well-executed series of special-effects gimmicks driven by nostalgia: it’s aesthetically compelling in its own right. If it hadn’t been so good, I don’t think it would have rekindled my love of cartoons, or anyone else’s. And if you haven’t seen it recently, or at all, I suggest you do so. Of all the films released in 1988, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being the one that’s best remembered in 2038.

I’ve been doing some long-needed repairs on “Sites to See” (knocking off dead blogs, updating links, etc.). I decided that a few sites were in the wrong sections, and moved them to the right ones. In the course of doing all this, it occurred to me that it might be time once again to explain how the blogs and sites listed in “Sites to See” are arranged:

– The first section of “Sites to See” contains blogs that are wholly or mostly about the arts (like “About Last Night”).

– The second section contains non-blog Web sites that supply useful art-related information.

– The third section directs you to the arts-related pages of major newspaper and magazine Web sites (including the on-line archives of certain critics). It also contains a few Web sites maintained by individual writers which are not blogs but nonetheless are art-relevant.

– The fourth section contains blogs not about the arts that Our Girl and/or I visit regularly or semi-regularly.

In case you don’t know, “About Last Night” is hosted by artsjournal.com, the daily digest of English-language news stories and commentary about the arts. To visit artsjournal.com (which you should do each morning without fail), click on the logo in the upper left-hand corner of this page. In addition to “About Last Night,” artsjournal.com hosts several other art and culture blogs, all of which are listed separately in the bottom module of the right-hand column. They’re worth visiting, too.

All of which reminds me: please drop us a line if there’s a blog or Web site not listed in “Sites to See” that you think ought to be there. We promise to take a look, sooner or later.

“The genuine music-lover may accept the
carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of
actual music within, but that is no sign that
he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing
through it. Most musicians, indeed, prefer to
hear operatic music outside the opera house;
that is why one so often hears such lowly
things, say, as ‘The Ride of the Valkyrie’ in
the concert hall. ‘The Ride of the Valkyrie’
has a certain intrinsic value as pure music;
played by a competent orchestra it may give
civilized pleasure. But as it is commonly
performed in an opera house, with a posse of
fat beldames throwing themselves about the
stage, it can only produce the effect of a
dose of ipecacuanha. The sort of person who
actually delights in such spectacles is the
sort of person who delights in gas-pipe
furniture. Such half-wits are in a majority
in every opera house west of the Rhine. They
go to the opera, not to hear music, not even
to hear bad music, but merely to see a more
or less obscene circus. A few, perhaps, have
a further purpose; they desire to assist in
that circus, to show themselves in the
capacity of fashionables, to enchant the
yokelry with their splendor. But the majority
must be content with the more modest aim.
What they get for the outrageous prices they
pay for seats is a chance to feast their eyes
upon glittering members of the superior
demi-monde, and to abase their groveling souls before magnificoes on their own side of
the footlights. They esteem a performance,
not in proportion as true music is on tap,
but in proportion as the display of notorious
characters on the stage is copious, and the
exhibition of wealth in the boxes is lavish.
A soprano who can gargle her way up to F
sharp in alt is more to such simple souls
than a whole drove of Johann Sebastian Bachs;
her one real rival in the entire domain of
art is the contralto who has a pension from a
former grand duke and is reported to be
enceinte by several stockbrokers.”

H.L. Mencken, “Opera,” Prejudices: Second Series