About Last Night

“One never takes lessons to heart. It’s just a thing people talk about–learning by experience and all that.”

Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

I reviewed Bill Charlap’s new CD, Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein, in today’s Washington Post:

Not since Ahmad Jamal’s legendary trio of the 1950s has there been a jazz combo that blended uptown and downtown so seamlessly as does the Bill Charlap Trio. It’s equally at home in smoky nightclubs and I-kiss-your-hand-madam cabarets. You don’t have to know anything about jazz to enjoy its polished, elegant renditions of show tunes, but if you do, you’ll marvel at the savoir-faire with which the group saunters through Charlap’s quietly intricate arrangements.

If any part of that description piques your interest, then by all means give a spin to “Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein.” I wouldn’t be even slightly surprised if this near-flawless collection of 12 songs written by the man who brought you “West Side Story” turns Bill Charlap into the Diana Krall of jazz instrumentalists, a sophisticated artist whose albums are bought and loved by ordinary folks who don’t know the Village Vanguard from the Village People. “Somewhere” is that good — and that accessible….

Read the whole thing here.

“Perhaps you will blame me for having spent so much of my time in Music Halls, so frivolously, when I should have been sticking to my books, burning the midnight oil and compassing the larger latitude. But I am impenitent. I am inclined to think, indeed I have always thought, that a young man who desires to know all that in all ages in all lands has been thought by the best minds, and wishes to make a synthesis of all these thoughts for the future benefit of mankind, is laying up for himself a very miserable old age.”

Max Beerbohm, “Music Halls of My Youth”

At long last, Verve has reissued Roger Kellaway Cello Quartet, for thirty years one of the most eagerly sought-after recordings on the used-LP market. This is its first appearance on CD, and I’ll be reviewing it for the Washington Post next month. Since you probably haven’t heard of Kellaway or the Cello Quartet–most people haven’t–I thought I’d reprint this profile of Kellaway that I wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 1995. The original title was “Jazz’s Most-Admired Unknown.”

* * *

Roger Kellaway is the greatest unknown pianist in jazz.

“Unknown” is, of course, a relative concept. Among musicians, Kellaway is not only known but extravagantly admired. “I love Roger Kellaway,” says the hard-to-please Oscar Peterson. “He knows the tradition and he’s not afraid.” And he gets plenty of work for an unknown, not only as a pianist but as a composer and songwriter. He’s played with everybody from Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins to Bobby Darin and Joni Mitchell; he’s written music for Yo-Yo Ma, New York City Ballet and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; his film-score credits include “Paper Lion” and “A Star Is Born.” Chances are that you’ve heard one of his compositions, the closing theme for the sitcom “All in the Family,” several dozen times.

Kellaway is, in short, the quintessential musician’s musician, a fact of which he is uncomfortably aware. While he doesn’t mind having the respect of his peers, he also wouldn’t mind a bit of celebrity to go along with it: “I don’t want to be everybody’s little secret. There’s nobody else in the world who does what I do, or does it the way I do it. I want more people to know that.”

Part of Roger Kellaway’s problem is that he’s a born eclectic. Though he can swing as hard as anyone, he has an unnerving habit of doing it in 7/4 time, or playing in two different keys at once, or throwing in a few top-of-the-keyboard tone clusters just to keep the rhythm section on its toes. These exotic techniques, which somehow sound as familiar as a 12-bar blues when Kellaway employs them, are the natural consequence of his omnivorous musical curiosity. In conversation, he’s as likely to bring up Benjamin Britten and Anton Webern (“He’s to 20th-century classical music what Thelonious Monk is to jazz”) as Duke Ellington and Art Tatum. “The idea that anything can go with anything is very appealing to me,” he says, “and classical music has taught me that the options are infinite. If I’m writing a piece and get stuck sonically, I put on a record by Charles Ives or Edgard Varese. These people just blow your head wide open.”

For all his determined eclecticism, Kellaway is anything but faceless. Whatever the context, his airy, sparkling playing is instantly recognizable. (If you’re listening to an unfamiliar jazz record on which the piano player abruptly drops a bright treble splat into the middle of a solo, it’s by Roger Kellaway.) But his refusal to stick with one style sits poorly with the button-down types who run the record business. “The majority of people simply aren’t interested in artists who have eclectic tastes,” he says with a resigned shrug. “Let’s say our lives are a wheel. Well, I’ve decided to take more spokes of that wheel, that’s all. But music-business types are suspicious of musicians like me. I confuse them. They can’t pigeonhole me.”

Kellaway’s closest brush with fame came in 1971 when he put together the Cello Quartet, a drummerless combo consisting solely of “instruments made of wood”: piano, cello, marimba and bass. “The cymbals and drums in a regular drum set fill up the air between the other instruments,” he explains. “Take them away, clear the air, and you get chamber music.” He persuaded Herb Alpert’s A&M Records, one of the hottest labels of the ’70s, to cut two albums featuring the group, “Cello Quartet” and “Come to the Meadow.” The rich, outdoorsy colors of the Cello Quartet set musicians’ heads spinning, but the listening public failed to sit up and take notice. Both albums sold modestly, went out of print, became cult classics and now fetch jaw-dropping prices on the used-LP market.

Though Kellaway went on to other things, he never lost his love for the sound of the instrument around which the Cello Quartet was built: “The cello just always killed me. It’s so wonderfully expressive, so perfect for playing melodies. I think it resonates with the body to a greater degree than perhaps any other musical instrument.” Not surprisingly, the thought of reviving the group remained at the back of his mind. Last year, he found another major label willing to give it a try: Angel Records, which was recently repositioned as the crossover line of EMI Classics. Kellaway added a pair of percussionists to the original lineup (“I wanted to add more ethnicity to the mix”) and recorded “Windows,” a gorgeous album that sums up his kaleidoscopic style as completely as any one album can.

“Imprisoned in every fat man,” Cyril Connolly famously said, “a thin one is wildly signaling to be let out.” Corollary: Imprisoned in every musician’s musician, a pop icon is dreaming of performing in stadiums packed with screaming fans. “I remember being on stage with Joni Mitchell and playing for 10,000 people,” Kellaway says. “I loved it. I remember saying to myself, `I can do this. This is comfortable.’ There could be a million people out there and it wouldn’t faze me. I don’t get frightened, I don’t hold back. I’m not afraid to show you who I am.”

To this end, Kellaway is putting together still another group, one that may be his least likely musical venture yet: a straight-ahead, no-frills jazz piano trio. “I want to do the trio format,” he says, “because it’s something I love to do. Except for Monty Alexander, nobody’s out there right now just laying it down and making your hair stand on end, and I still know how to do that. So I thought, `Why the hell not?’ And as long as we’re going to do it, let’s do it. Let’s play festivals, let’s play for big crowds. I want to really try and make some noise.” A quizzical look flashes across his lean, bespectacled face. “Maybe I’m not afraid to make a splash anymore.”

* * *

Needless to say, he didn’t make a splash, and Windows is long out of print, but now you can find out what I was talking about back in 1995 by listening to Roger Kellaway Cello Quartet. So do.

“Choreography, finally, becomes a profession. In making ballets, you cannot sit and wait for the Muse. Union time hardly allows it, anyhow. You must be able to be inventive at any time. You can’t be like the cook who can cook only two dishes: you must be able to cook them all.”

George Balanchine, Balanchine’s Complete Stories
of the Great Ballets

Book or no book, I remain the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, in which capacity I went to see Twentieth Century, which opened last night, and wrote about it for this morning’s paper. It’s very uneven, and Alec Baldwin is the opposite of funny, but I did have some good things to report. Here are two:

A passenger train is a perfect setting for a comedy but difficult and expensive to put on stage, so I’ll start by assuring you that John Lee Beatty, the designer of this Roundabout Theatre Company production, has done a good job of evoking the streamlined art-deco interior of the old Twentieth Century Limited. Mr. Beatty’s set slides from side to side in order to reveal more of the train’s interior (as well as suggesting its forward motion), and while it won’t make you fall down dead with astonishment, it’s quite sufficiently nifty.

Anne Heche, on the other hand, is a whole lot more than nifty–she’s dynamite on a stick. Dolled up to the max in William Ivey Long’s slinky period costumes, she looks like a blonde clothespin in a black pantsuit, flinging her miraculously flexible arms and legs around the stage as if they were made of some space-age equivalent of rubber and tossing off her lines in the kind of hoity-toity finishing-school accent you learn from a Hollywood diction coach. She’s doing Katharine Hepburn, of course, but her Kate the Great is more a manic caricature than a slavish imitation, and so unabashedly gleeful that only a sourpuss would do anything other than giggle. Walter Bobbie, the director, has given her plenty of tricky moves, and she makes the absolute most of them, revealing an unsuspected gift for physical comedy. I won’t say Ms. Heche is worth the price of the ticket all by herself, but she sure did make me laugh….

No link, so if you want to read the rest of the story, go buy a Journal. A dollar is a dollar.

In other news, I’m still working on the Balanchine book, it’s still due on April 1, it’s still going well, and I may post another snippet of it tonight. Watch this space for details.

A thousand apologies for the deafening silence from my corner lately. I rolled back into Chicago two days ago, but I’m swamped. Until next week, you’ll hear a few peeps out of me but not a whole hell of a lot more, I’m afraid. Thanks to the readers who sent birthday wishes; the day was very nice, and what do you know, spring did arrive more or less on time.

While I scramble to meet more deadlines than I care to count, here are a couple of links:

– Nathalie is great on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I loved the movie too. I don’t have much to add to her observations, except to say that while Jim Carrey is a good sad sack, Kate Winslet’s performance is the ingredient the movie couldn’t have done without. I always liked Being John Malkovich, which is similarly fascinated with the inside of consciousness. But after seeing the sweeter, more loosely conceived Eternal Sunshine, I suspect the earlier movie may now seem almost unwatchably sour, as well as overly invested in the machinery of its fantastical premise.

– Charles Schulz is getting the auteur treatment with Fantagraphics’ forthcoming 25-volume Complete Peanuts. I spent some of the weekend going through last year’s very cool Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, an ever-so-slightly selfish Christmas gift to my dad. Book designer Chip Kidd (best known for his Jurassic Park cover art) put this volume together. In the Sun article, he compares “Peanuts” to Bauhaus:

“Schulz did for the comic strip what the Bauhaus did for architecture,” he says. “I know that sounds really eggheady, but what I mean is this: Visually he pared everything down to its simplest forms. Charlie Brown is a circle with two dots and a squiggle and a line, and all of a sudden it’s a person. It’s minimal, but Schulz is so in control of the minimalism that the characters almost work like typography-it’s like you’re reading them. There’s your form. And then for your content: He predated Woody Allen’s neuroses by a good 20 years. On the comics page!”

Also revealed: Schulz hated the name “Peanuts,” but deferred to the wishes of the United Feature Syndicate as one of the terms of his contract.

Back to the salt mines!

I thought you might enjoy knowing what a week in the life of a freelance writer, i.e., me, is like:

(1) My Balanchine book is due April 1. I have a chapter and a half left to write.

(2) Between now and then, I also have to write and file two Wall Street Journal drama reviews, my Washington Post column, and three other pieces.

(3) On April 2, I hop on a plane, ready or not, and fly south to see (what else?) some ballet in Raleigh, N.C.

In short, I hear that train a-comin’, it’s rollin’ round the bend… but all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. I think. I hope. Gulp.

Needless to say, I’m not likely to be posting a whole hell of a lot during the next week and a half, but I do promise to make some sort of daily appearance in this space, however exiguous. A few of my colleagues linked to yesterday’s excerpt from the Balanchine book, suggesting approval thereof, so I imagine I’ll do the same thing once or twice more. To those of you who want to know what happened to Tanny Le Clercq, the book comes out in November. And to those of you who have already gotten your hands on early copies of A Terry Teachout Reader, I say…tell your friends!