About Last Night

One of my most loyal readers (who was kind enough to introduce me at the Mencken Lecture in Baltimore last week) has been after me to do this again, so…

Go here and click on “Wolverine Blues,” and if you have a RealAudio player you will be rewarded with three minutes of pure pleasure, courtesy of Jelly Roll Morton, Johnny Dodds, Baby Dodds, and the folks at www.redhotjazz.com.

Consider it my present to all of you for toughing out a long week with me.

1.

The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.

“But listen here, there ain’t anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain’t built that way.”

Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

A report on current events: I’m still riding the crazy-busy wave, and still staying afloat. I went to bed at three and got up at seven to write my review of Shakespeare in Hollywood
for Friday’s Wall Street Journal (watch this space for details). Then I hailed a cab that dropped me off in Harlem, where I ate red beans and rice (Louis Armstrong’s favorite dish) with Leonard Garment and Loren Schoenberg, masterminds of the Jazz Museum in Harlem, which at present consists mainly of a frugally decorated office and a lot of good ideas. It will be interesting to see where they go from here.

Following up theory with practice, I returned to my own office, signed off on the Journal piece, then went to the Jazz Standard to hear Bud Shank’s quartet. As I listened to Shank cleave the air with his flame-thrower tone and remembered that he was born in 1926, I asked myself, How does he do it? Of course it’s possible to play alto saxophone like that when you’re that old (I heard Benny Carter play as well–though with less stamina–when he was a decade older), but it’s a long, long way from possible to probable. And did that faze Shank? Not in the slightest. He stood up in front of a world-class rhythm section that was lobbing musical hand grenades into the crowd and soloed like a man half his age, if that.

After performing Gerry Mulligan’s “Idol Gossip,” Shank announced a medley dedicated to another “fallen warrior,” Bill Evans. That set me to thinking. Yes, the titans of prewar jazz are gone now, and the surviving giants of the Forties and Fifties are dropping like flies, but it’s still possible to go to a New York nightclub and hear a man who played alto sax with Stan Kenton in 1950, left an indelible mark on the West Coast jazz scene–and then got even better. Back in the Fifties, Shank’s playing was smart, elegant, and sweetly lyrical. Now it’s ferocious. Midway through “Idol Gossip,” he sauntered away from center stage, planted himself in the bend of Bill Mays‘ piano, and tore off a half-dozen choruses without benefit of amplification, soaring effortlessly over Joe LaBarbera’s drums. Microphones? He don’t need no stinking microphones! So forget the good old days–they’re right now.

(If I’ve piqued your curiosity, go here to purchase Silver Storm, a 2000 sextet date also featuring Mays and LaBarbera.)

Anyway, that’s what I did yesterday, and now I’m back home again, running on fumes and adrenalin in order to give you something to read today. I have two more items to write, then I’m taking the phone off the hook and going to bed for as long as my brain permits. Tomorrow is–thank God–another day, with no appointments, no deadlines, nothing to contend with but (A) a birthday party in Brooklyn and (B) a hurricane.

Assuming that I haven’t been washed into the Hudson River by Friday, I’ll be having lunch that day with one of the celebrated bloggers who graces “Sites to See” (guess who?), then going to the press preview of Bill Irwin’s Harlequin Studies
at the Signature Theatre, about which more on Monday. The fun never stops around here….

While in Washington last Friday, I dropped by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden to see “Gyroscope,” a large-scale, long-running exhibition drawn from that museum’s permanent collection. I don’t plan to write about it in detail, mainly because I don’t need to (Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, did it here, better than I possibly could), but I did want to tell you about an educational experience I had while walking through the show.

As those of you who know me personally are all too aware, I have reached that unhappy age when I am sorely in need of bifocals. Alas, I’m too stubborn/vain/lazy to go to the trouble of getting a pair, so I continue to do without. I noticed for the first time at the Hirshhorn on Friday that I can no longer read the wall labels at museums without taking off my glasses. At first I found this to be irritating, but before long I realized that it was liberating.

Confession time: I have another little problem, which is that my eyes reflexively go to the labels in a group show, very often before I’ve taken in the works of art they identify. I can’t help myself–I’m a slave to the printed word. Only I can’t do it anymore. To read the labels, I now have to pull off my glasses and move in close, which takes away all the fun. As a result, I looked at “Gyroscope” the right way, meaning what first and who second, and not infrequently, I didn’t even bother to find out who. (In addition to a reasonably generous helping of good stuff, “Gyroscope” contains more than its fair share of crappy art.) Dr. Albert Barnes, who deliberately hung the paintings in the Barnes Collection without labels in order to force visitors to think harder about the art they were there to see, would have been proud of me.

Needless to say, I had no trouble identifying many of the artists whose work was on display (no points for spotting a Kenneth Noland at a hundred yards), but even in the galleries where there was no possible doubt about what I was seeing, I learned a lesson from consistently looking at the paintings first. Take the gallery devoted to what I suppose might be called Pop Art and Its Predecessors. The big stuff, the jumbo canvases by Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Indiana, caught my eye first, but as soon as I glanced at the two medium-sized Stuart Davises (one of which was the amazing Rapt at Rappaport’s) facing each other on opposite walls, I knew who the real master was.

I’ve just admitted to a naïve-sounding disability which I’m sure will make some of you smile. I came late to the visual arts, and I still fall on my face with humbling regularity. I’m no connoisseur, just a guy who likes to look at paintings, though I trust my eye and my taste. On the other hand, I don’t trust them far enough to be absolutely sure I’m always seeing paintings, not reputations, which is one of the minor reasons why I think I’ll put off getting that first pair of bifocals for a little while longer.

“The difference between a critic and a reviewer is, I forget.”

Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison

Kindly note the time stamp. Contrary to the suspicions of certain of my loyal readers, I do sleep from time to time, but Tuesday was yet another crazy-busy day, climaxed by a cultural double-header–I went to see Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation in Chelsea and the Bad Plus at the Village Vanguard, with sushi in between–from which I literally just returned. So instead of serving up a made dish, I’ll scratch down my first impressions of both events, followed by an item I wrote this morning and the latest almanac entry, in the hopes that the immediacy will excuse the haste.

About Lost in Translation I don’t have much to add to what most of the critics have been saying, which is that it is a thoughtful, elegant, amazingly self-assured piece of work. I’m as suspicious of bandwagons as the next guy, but anyone capable of writing and directing a film like this is the real deal, regardless of her last name.

Two observations:

(1) I love the way Coppola catches the strangeness of surfaces in Tokyo–the subtly disorienting quality of a city that looks Western at first glance, but isn’t.

(2) Bill Murray really is as good as everybody says, partly because he looks so nakedly middle-aged. The lines in his face are like the rings in a tree stump–you can read his age off them. (In another half-dozen years he’ll be a dead ringer for W.H. Auden.) I kept trying to figure out who he reminded me of, and all at once two names popped into my head: Jeff Bridges and Robert Mitchum, both of whom reek of that same barely penetrable disillusion. In fact, Murray’s performance is just inches away from film noir–I can almost imagine him playing Philip Marlowe, or Bridges’ part in The Fabulous Baker Boys.

As for the Bad Plus, about whom I held forth in this space just the other day, I can only say that there isn’t another jazz piano trio in the world that sounds nearly as fresh. Not that their music is “jazz” in any strict sense of the word, since it draws no less deeply from the wells of contemporary pop and 20th-century classical music. Ethan Iverson, in particular, has liberated himself completely from the impressionism-derived harmonies and blues clich

My editor and designer at Yale University Press are cooking up a dust jacket for A Terry Teachout Reader, the volume of my selected essays coming out next spring. First, it was going to be an all-typography jacket, which was perfectly fine by me, so of course that wouldn’t do. Then they wanted to put my photo on the front cover, which I nixed without hesitation. Then they asked me what I’d like to do. Since all the essays included in the book are about American artists (we actually planned at one point to call it All American: A Terry Teachout Reader), the thought occurred to me that it might be fun to put one of my favorite works of American art on the cover. To this end, I suggested four pieces that seemed to me variously evocative of American art and culture in the modern and post-modern eras.

The first, logically enough, is my celebrated John Marin etching, Downtown. The El, a semi-cubist portrayal of downtown Manhattan circa 1921.

The second, Fairfield Porter’s 1971 color lithograph Broadway (not part of my collection, alas), is a more contemporary variation on a similar theme.

Finally, two of Stuart Davis’ jazz-flavored paintings struck me as eminently suitable. The Whitney Museum’s Owh! in San Pao contains snippets of text that I thought highly suitable to a book about American art. And Ready-to-Wear, which belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago, seemed to me particularly appropriate because of the color scheme, in which red, white, and blue predominate.

I sent all four links off to Yale last week, but haven’t heard back yet. What do you think?