Archives for October 20, 2003

How nice for me that Terry has been back with such a vengeance. Various events here have been compromising my blogging ability, from my Microsoft Word program inexplicably going on strike, to my recent acquisition of a family of insomniac yetis as upstairs neighbors, to the usual trials inflicted by the cat who deigns to share with me this space that can only be called hers. You know how really bad parents use the tv as a handy device for hypnotizing their kids when they can’t be bothered to pay attention, and end up raising vidiots? Well, through a similar process my cat is halfway to becoming a drug addict; I’ve been leaning a little too heavily on a cache of potent catnip given to me last week by a well-meaning friend. The cat’s starting to remind me a little of the young Zonker Harris. He always seemed to be a pretty happy guy though, right?

Anyway, I’m surrendering my computer to the more technically adept Monday morning and having the system software reinstalled. I hope to have it back by evening, with only the slightest interruption in posting. It’s possible it will take longer, though, in which case I’ll try to squirrel things away for later in the week. By the way, I have discovered one useful thing thanks to the Word Processor That Would Prefer Not To: Mac Stickies are a perfectly adequate, maybe even ideal, blogging composition tool–basic and efficient.

With any luck, I’ll catch you later.

For those of you just tuning in:

(1) I’m back. I posted lots and lots and lots of stuff on Friday and throughout the weekend. Scroll down and regale yourself.

(2) OGIC is surrendering her computer to the gearheads for repair any minute now, but hopes to be back in business tonight (see immediately below).

(3) The very next thing I do is start answering blogmail.

All is explained in infinitely greater detail in the next few dozen postings. Now go wallow.

P.S. Since originally posting this note, I whittled a stack of 154 unanswered pieces of blogmail down to 62. Hold on, I’m coming!

From 2 Blowhards:

At lunch with a couple of arts buddies, we found ourselves trying to come up with fairly-recent performance forms that you don’t see (or see much) anymore. We came up with three that were very popular during our kid-hoods but that are all but invisible today:

* Ventriloquists–they were once a standard feature on variety shows.

* Impersonators–hard to remember, but people who did impressions of celebrities were once very popular: “Here’s … Jack Paar! [applause] And here’s … Dwight Eisenhower! [applause]” Remember buying LP’s by impersonators? Who was that guy who did the whole Kennedy family, for instance?

* Comedy teams–Martin and Lewis, Hope and Crosby, the Ritz Brothers, etc.

This caught my eye not only because I recently wrote about The Ed Sullivan Show, a veritable time capsule of such old-fashioned comedy, but because I happened to see Kevin Pollak, a standup comedian turned actor (he’s in A Few Good Men, among many other films) who’s doing standup again, at the Improv in Washington, D.C. not long ago. Pollak does impersonations (he’s modestly famous for his William Shatner), and he did a bunch of them at the Improv to brilliant effect. Not surprisingly, his Jack Nicholson is wildly funny, but it was his Robert De Niro that all but stopped the show–partly, I think, because he doesn’t say anything when he’s doing it. Usually, the best impersonations are three-layer cakes in which you duplicate the voice, simulate the face, and caricature the personality. Instead, Pollak just stood there and looked like De Niro (whom he doesn’t look a bit like), and my mouth fell open with amazement and delight.

I’m old enough, by the way, to remember the greatest of all impersonators, David Frye, who did Richard Nixon with such weird exactitude that it made you positively uncomfortable. And I should mention that one of my friends, a classical composer, does impersonations of other classical composers–a highly specialized niche, to be sure, but they’re really funny. (His Ned Rorem is almost too good to be true.)

(For the record, it was Vaughn Meader who did the Kennedys, and the album was called The First Family. And I like ventriloquists, too.)

To a reader who asked: no, Our Girl in Chicago is not Bookslut.

(I am, however, Fred Astaire.)

A reader writes:

I agree that the Mosaic Mulligan Concert Jazz Band collection is absolutely magnificent….Here’s an idea for future research: Bob Brookmeyer is one of the unacknowledged giants of American 20th century music. I hadn’t realized that he pretty much ran the CJB, and of course there were his innovative arrangements for the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band, and much great music since then.

And I in turn I couldn’t agree more. Brookmeyer isn’t quite unsung–I profiled him a few years ago in the New York Times–but he’s definitely undersung, and I was delighted that Bill Kirchner gave him full credit for his behind-the-scenes role with the Mulligan Concert Jazz Band in the liner notes for Mosaic’s CJB set, a link to which you’ll find in the “Teachout’s Top Five” box of the right-hand column. In addition to being a no-nonsense, utterly distinctive valve-trombone soloist (and a damned fine pianist, too, amazingly enough), Brookmeyer is gradually coming to be recognized as one of the most individual and significant of all jazz composers, as well as one of the very few to have grappled successfully with the challenge of large-scale form.

For those who don’t know Brookmeyer’s music, here are links to a few of his best albums:

New Works: Celebration (Challenge), recorded in 1997, features Brookmeyer’s Europe-based New Art Orchestra in a performance of his four-movement suite Celebration, a fully realized, highly impressive large-scale work for big band.

Holiday: Bob Brookmeyer Plays Piano (Challenge), recorded in 2000, is proof that all men are not created equal–some can play valve trombone and piano with equal skill and individuality. Life is unfair.

Live at the North Sea Jazz Festival (Challenge), recorded in 1979, is a wonderful collection of duets teaming Brookmeyer with Jim Hall, the best of all possible jazz guitarists.

Live at Sandy’s Jazz Revival, Vol. 1 (DCC Compact Classics), recorded in 1978, is the first half of a long-unavailable two-disc album in which Brookmeyer was teamed with Jack Wilkins on guitar, Michael Moore on bass, and Joe LaBarbera on drums–one of the finest small groups he ever led. (Whatever happened to Volume Two, by the way?)

Brookmeyer also recorded extensively as a sideman with Gerry Mulligan (start with the Mosaic set, then look for At Storyville, a live album by the Mulligan Quartet) and Stan Getz (I especially like Stan Getz-Bob Brookmeyer).

That’ll get you started, though you should also take a look at Brookmeyer’s Web site, which contains a wide-ranging selection of his famously outspoken comments on everything under the sun. I’ve never known a more candid man, or a more extravagantly gifted one. May he live to be at least a hundred.

“A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.”

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

Jaime O’Neill, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday, appreciatively reviews a new collection of Alfred Kazin’s criticism. Right off the bat O’Neill coins a neat new term for that increasingly rare bird, the lucid literary critic (and a corresponding term for his opposite number):

When I was a kid, there was a smart-ass remark we used to make to people who were blocking our view: “You make a better door than a window.” I kept thinking of that phrase as I read “Alfred Kazin’s America.” Far too many literary critics make a better door than a window. Not Alfred Kazin.

In case you were wondering what kind of aperture Harold Bloom is, he has a brief cameo in the review as a representative door.

To be perfectly honest with you, last week at this time I didn’t know who Shirley Hazzard was. But on Monday a friend mentioned her new book, The Great Fire, and that opened the floodgates. On Wednesday came word of Hazzard’s National Book Award nomination. (Did you know the NBA nominee pages list upcoming events for each author? Now you know.) Then Friday the Wall Street Journal Weekend section ran a review in which Jamie James said the novel “reads like the last masterpiece of a vanished age of civility, even of a certain understanding of civilization” and referred to the “Penelope-like vigil” of the many readers who loved Hazzard’s last novel, published 22 years ago, Transit of Venus.

22 years? I felt much better knowing that her reputation was sealed when I was–well, let’s just say when I was young enough to be excused for the oversight.

Over the weekend I read two more thunder-struck reviews by notable writers: one by the novelist Howard Norman in The Washington Post, and another by Thomas Mallon in The Atlantic.

I’m now more than sold on reading The Great Fire. But I want to start at the beginning, with Transit of Venus, which Mallon calls “a swirling asteroid belt of connected stories” and “a novel stuffed with description so intellectually active as to be sometimes exhausting, as if metaphysical verse were presenting itself to the reader as prose.” The book is in hand, and the first lines do not disappoint:

By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation.

It was simply that the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning. Purple silence petrified the limbs of trees and stood crops upright in the fields like hair on end.

Onward.