Archives for February 2004

A reader writes:

Brick and mortar record stores don’t strike me as an extinct species. Tower records, let it be known, is crap. They have a wide selection, but not deep: their buyers are uninformed even in independent pop music, which is extraordinarily popular (“underground” and “below the radar” would be misnomers). Not to mention their prices cannot even vaguely compete with Amazon, even with added shipping charges. However, on the west coast there are three Amoeba (two in SF, one in LA) independent record stores that have maybe ten or twenty times the selection of a typical Tower. Their prices are comparable, if not cheaper than Amazon, they sell used, new, import, vinyl, and a huge volume of

I sure hope this
is true.

Says …something slant:

Blogs for me are trial balloons, even the ones that pretend to be something else, and snark is part of the fun if also sometimes part of the trial. More selfishly, I’m attempting to gird myself for a writing workshop of the kind I’ve actively avoided for several years, and I am wondering, yet again, what compels me to sign up for these things. There’s submitting to the voluntary trauma of watching strangers pluck the veins from your writing or, worse, react not at all. And then there are the all too easily mocked bits that emerge when a group struggles to find something, anything to say about what you’re doing “on the page”….

Read the whole thing here.

Hilton Kramer on the Charles Demuth exhibition up through Mar. 6 at Zabriskie Gallery:

The American painter Charles Demuth (1883-1935) was an artist who took a certain pride–aesthetic pride–in his carefully cultivated limitations. He didn’t hesitate to boast about them, as we know from the wonderful comparison he once made between his own talent and that of his more robust contemporary, John Marin. “John Marin and I drew our inspiration from the same source, French modernism,” Demuth said. “He brought his up in buckets and spilt much along the way. I dipped mine out with a teaspoon but I never spilt a drop.”

The humor, the exactitude, the unembarrassed self-knowledge–everything about that remark reminds me of another self-confessed American aesthete, the poet Wallace Stevens. Artists and writers of this persuasion–Henry James and Marianne Moore belong in the same company–cannot be expected to command the attention of a large public. Their work tends to be a little too special for mainstream taste, and the acclaim they enjoy tends to be posthumous. Yet their achievements are among the finest in American art and literature.

Demuth’s place in this constellation of talents would be more widely recognized if we saw his work more often, but exhibitions of his pictures have been a rarity lately–which is why the exhibition that Thomas S. Holman and Virginia Zabriskie have organized at the Zabriskie Gallery is an event to be cherished. Though it’s a long way from being the full-scale retrospective that’s needed, the show’s 31 items–mostly watercolors and drawings dating from 1907 to 1933–are more than sufficient to remind us of Demuth’s virtues….

Read the whole thing here. Then go see the show, and look for me.

The Library of America, which will be publishing a three-volume collection of the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer later this year, has launched an all-Singer, all-the-time Web site in honor of the centenary of his birth. Take a look.

“My grand philosophical conclusion at the end of the day is that humanity does not divide into the rich and the poor, the privileged and the unprivileged, the clever and the stupid, the lucky and the unlucky or even into the happy and the unhappy. It divides into the nasty and the nice. Nasty people are humourless, bitter, self-pitying, resentful and mean. They are also, of course, invariably miserable. Saints may worry about them and even try to turn their sour natures, but those who do not aspire to saintliness are best advised to avoid them whenever possible, and give their aggression a good run for its money whenever it becomes unavoidable.”

Auberon Waugh, Will This Do?

Joseph Volpe, the Metropolitan Opera‘s
general manager, is retiring in 2006. John Rockwell reflects on the implications of his departure in the New York Times:

Ever the hard-nosed administrator, he can crack the whip at recalcitrant singers and settle with the unions and placate his board and terrorize his underlings and prevent the centrifugal force of a thousand egos from spinning the Met out of control. His pleasure in his position is always evident and endearing. But can he plan repertory and oversee casting and productions with the requisite, insightful sophistication and taste?

For a long time such questions lurked half-whispered backstage. The Met was selling tickets, its huge endowment was swelled by the bubble of the late 1990’s, and [James] Levine was more of a presence than he is now. But in recent years, like so many American opera companies, the Met has fallen on relatively hard times. Relative, because the endowment, currently at $285 million, provides a comfy cushion. Deficits have run $10 million each of the last two fiscal years (although Mr. Volpe is hoping to balance the budget this year). Attendance has been down sharply, as have annual donations (with the implosion of Alberto Vilar’s pledges, to the Met and others, only part of the problem)….

Mr. Volpe is a tough guy, even (say many) a bully. So logic might dictate a smoother, tonier, more soft-spoken manager, more in line with patrician Met tradition. And maybe one with greater sophistication about the musical and dramatic side of opera.

What needs to be done? To figure out a way to fill the Met’s vast, 3,900-seat theater with artistically respectable fare; even the most conservative audiences eventually grow tired of routinely cast Franco Zeffirelli productions of “La Boh

In light of all the lukewarm things now being said in print about Norah Jones’ second album, I thought it might be worth revisiting what I wrote about her first album a year and a half ago in The Wall Street Journal.

Not everybody in the jazz business agreed with me (I got an e-mail, for instance, from a very distinguished jazz guitarist who really liked her music and begged to differ with me). For the most part, though, I was struck by the positive reaction to this piece among musicians.

Anyway, here it is, for what it’s worth.

* * *

At 22, Norah Jones, a slender, fresh-faced singer-pianist with a raspy bedroom voice, is the talk of the music business. Her debut CD, “Come Away With Me,” is a collection of soft-rock ballads sung in an intimate style that is a quirky mixture of country and blues. It’s selling hand over fist to thirtysomethings who are too old for hip-hop–nearly a million copies since January–at a time when record sales are in an industry-wide tailspin. But while reporters are losing their heads over Jones, I have yet to meet a jazz musician who speaks well of her album. I was chatting the other day with a jazz singer I know, a very nice woman who never has a nasty word to say about anybody, and I asked her about “Come Away With Me.” She shook her head and cautiously replied, “Well, there’s nothing really wrong with it, I guess. But…it’s not jazz.”

What difference does that make? Jazz, after all, isn’t the only kind of good music in the world. To be sure, I’m not all that impressed by Jones, who strikes me as appealing but not quite grown up, sort of like what you’d get if a character on a teen-angst TV drama were to take up blues singing as a hobby. Still, the world is full of pretty young soft-rock balladeers, so why should anyone care that this one has struck pay dirt? Or, as a puzzled newspaper editor recently asked me, “What is it about Norah Jones that’s putting jazz people’s noses out of joint?”

The answer is simple: She records for Blue Note.

Blue Note is one of the last remaining big-time labels that is, or was, totally committed to jazz. Founded in 1939, it has recorded such legendary artists as Sidney Bechet, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, and Horace Silver. If you were to make a list of the 100 most significant jazz albums of the 20th century, you’d find that at least 10 of them, if not more, were released on Blue Note. Moreover, the label’s current roster includes the eminently noteworthy likes of Patricia Barber, Bill Charlap, Joe Lovano, Greg Osby, and Cassandra Wilson–heavy hitters all.

So what’s Jones doing in such fast company? Making money, that’s what. As a rule, jazz albums don’t sell, but this rule has lately been broken by a string of good-looking female vocalists, including Wilson, Diana Krall and Jane Monheit. Every label wants one. Blue Note now has two–only one of them doesn’t sing jazz. Granted, Cassandra Wilson is by no means a standard-issue Ella Fitzgerald-type singer (her latest CD contains such pop songs as “The Weight” and “Wichita Lineman”), but I don’t know anybody who thinks she is anything other than a jazz musician. Not so Norah Jones. Her agreeable, innocuous music bears no resemblance whatsoever to any known form of jazz, however eclectic or cross-pollinated. She is a pop singer, period.

Because of this, many jazz musicians see red when journalists describe her as a “jazz singer,” just as it drives them crazy that the bland mewlings of soprano saxophonist Kenny G, the Thomas Kinkade of music, are known as “smooth jazz.” To them, the word jazz stands for a musical idiom of the highest sophistication, arguably America’s foremost contribution to the modern movement in art, and they don’t want it devalued by misappropriation. Never mind that Jones doesn’t call herself a jazz singer, or that Blue Note isn’t promoting her as one. The fact remains that she records for a prestigious jazz label, and when bona fide jazz musicians open up the New York Times Magazine and find an article called “The New Old Thing: Norah Jones Takes Jazz Singing Back to Its Future,” they see another door slamming in their faces.

A well-connected record producer who has no use for Jones’ music recently assured me with a straight face that the profits from “Come Away With Me” will allow Blue Note to underwrite the development of more challenging artists. Indeed, such things have been known to happen–but all slopes are slippery, especially when they’re lined with cash. Yes, Blue Note is still a serious jazz label, but how long will it stay that way now that it’s getting a taste of serious money? Will Bruce Lundvall, the president of Blue Note, start dropping less profitable artists from his roster and looking for more Norah Joneses instead? I hope not, but you’d be surprised how fast good taste can go out the window when big bucks come flooding in the front door.

I’m not one of those snobby purists who turn up their fastidious noses at such user-friendly artists as Diana Krall and John Pizzarelli. I like it when smart musicians reach out to a popular audience, as long as they do so without pandering.

Unfortunately, there is a huge gap between what Krall is doing when she sings Burt Bacharach’s “The Look of Love” and what Norah Jones is doing when she sings Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart.” Both are popular, but the first is jazz and the second isn’t. To pretend otherwise is to run the risk of defining jazz down–and, eventually, out.